context
string
word
string
claim
string
label
int64
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
back
How many times the word 'back' appears in the text?
3
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
unpleasant
How many times the word 'unpleasant' appears in the text?
1
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
ignorant
How many times the word 'ignorant' appears in the text?
2
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
appeared
How many times the word 'appeared' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
mean
How many times the word 'mean' appears in the text?
3
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
by
How many times the word 'by' appears in the text?
2
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
phillotson--
How many times the word 'phillotson--' appears in the text?
2
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
exclaim
How many times the word 'exclaim' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
conducting
How many times the word 'conducting' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
two
How many times the word 'two' appears in the text?
2
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
hasty
How many times the word 'hasty' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
beauties
How many times the word 'beauties' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
usefulness
How many times the word 'usefulness' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
shriek
How many times the word 'shriek' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
m.
How many times the word 'm.' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
putting
How many times the word 'putting' appears in the text?
2
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
am
How many times the word 'am' appears in the text?
3
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
latin
How many times the word 'latin' appears in the text?
2
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
learner
How many times the word 'learner' appears in the text?
0
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery. "No--not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a girl who has had no advantages." "I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lempri re, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brant me, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery." "You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?" "Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which I should never have got hold of otherwise." "Is your friendship broken off?" "Oh yes. He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken his degree and left Christminster." "You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?" "Yes. We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours, and things of that sort--like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted me to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of woman. I might play that game once too often, he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely. I went down to Sandbourne to his funeral, and was his only mourner. He left me a little money--because I broke his heart, I suppose. That's how men are--so much better than women!" "Good heavens!--what did you do then?" "Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice. "I wouldn't have told you if I had known!" "No, I am not. Tell me all." "Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and lost it. I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found me... I said you didn't know how bad I was!" Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to. His voice trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!" "I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have 'twitched the robe From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'" said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained as I began." "I quite believe you. But some women would not have remained as they began." "Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured--sexless--on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." "Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?" "Yes--long ago. I have never made any secret of it to anybody." "What did he say?" "He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him, whatever I did; and things like that." Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender. "Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly. "I would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!" "I don't know whether I am vexed or not. I know I care very much about you!" "I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met." "You don't care MORE! There, I ought not to say that. Don't answer it!" There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way. Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he. "I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard," he said, to turn the subject. "I am absorbed in theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren't here? I should be saying my evening prayers. I suppose you wouldn't like--" "Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind. I should seem so--such a hypocrite." "I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it. You must remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day." "To be ordained, I think you said?" "Yes." "Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had by this time." "Of course not. I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism. And Mr. Phillotson--" "I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The medi valism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my saddest, rightest mind I always felt, 'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"... "Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!" "Then I won't, dear Jude!" The emotional throat-note had come back, and she turned her face away. "I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I was resentful because I couldn't get there." He spoke gently, and resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears. "It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans, drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing from her. "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons." "Well, I can do without what it confers. I care for something higher." "And I for something broader, truer," she insisted. "At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other." "What would Mr. Phillotson--" "It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!" He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's _prot g e_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten him. "Well, that's just what I am, too," he said. "I am fearful of life, spectre-seeing always." "But you are good and dear!" she murmured. His heart bumped, and he made no reply. "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her. "Let me see--when was I there? In the year eighteen hundred and--" "There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue. Now will you do what I want you to? At this time I read a chapter, and then say prayers, as I told you. Now will you concentrate your attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to me, and leave me to my custom? You are sure you won't join me?" "I'll look at you." "No. Don't tease, Sue!" "Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude," she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever after, turning her back upon him accordingly. A small Bible other than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she took it up, and turned over the leaves. "Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her; "will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made for myself at Christminster?" "Oh yes. How was that made?" "I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on. Then I had the volume rebound. My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name, poor boy--said it was an excellent idea. I know that reading it afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as understandable." "H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege. "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song. "I mean the synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody. You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter headings. Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt. It seems the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and writing down such stuff." Jude looked pained. "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured. "Indeed? Then I won't say any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!" "But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument. "Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. "You are on the side of the people in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!" "Well then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to that!" "But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible. "I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say." "Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity." "Well, perhaps you might take something worse." "Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so!" He thought of Arabella. "I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast. "I shall always care for you!" said Jude. "And I for you. Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to your faulty and tiresome little Sue!" He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too harrowing. Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ... But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her. But his grief at her incredulities returned. They sat on till she fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise. Whenever he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew. About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found that her clothes were dry. Her chair being a far more comfortable one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede. Placing the garments by her and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed himself by starlight in the yard. V When he returned she was dressed as usual. "Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked. "The town is not yet astir." "But you have had no breakfast." "Oh, I don't want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold me dreadfully, I expect!" "I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude. "Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him! He may think what he likes--I shall do just as I choose!" "But you just this moment said--" "Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him! I have thought of what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the training-school, who has asked me to visit her. She has a school near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school again." At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising to go to his work every day before the household was astir. "Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go. You can have a regular breakfast when you get there." They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the station. As they departed along the street a head was thrust out of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn. Sue still seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled; telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she got re-admitted to the training-school. They stood rather miserably together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say more. "I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!" "Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!" "What?" "You mustn't love me. You are to like me--that's all!" Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage window. And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to him she vanished away. Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the cathedral services. The next morning there came a letter from her, which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had reached her friend's house. She told him of her safe arrival and comfortable quarters, and then added:-- What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said to you at parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me ever since. IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't! Now I won't write any more about that. You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her miserable by saying you don't?--Ever, SUE. It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the possession of her. Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive note than it really was intended to bear. After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would write again. But he received no further communication; and in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen miles. He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his missive; but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming the following day, for he felt sure something had happened. His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in unison. A little girl opened the door. "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she said. "And will you please walk up to her?" "Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily. "Only a little--not very." Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told him which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name. He passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet square. "Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. "How is this! You couldn't write?" "No--it wasn't that!" she answered. "I did catch a bad cold--but I could have written. Only I wouldn't!" "Why not?--frightening me like this!" "Yes--that was what I was afraid of! But I had decided not to write to you any more. They won't have me back at the school--that's why I couldn't write. Not the fact, but the reason!" "Well?" "They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of advice--" "What?" She did not answer directly. "I vowed I never would tell you, Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!" "Is it about us?" "Yes." "But do tell me!" "Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my reputation! ... There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!" "Oh, poor Sue!" "I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course, if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!" The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each other with a mutual distress. "I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!" "Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments, since I couldn't help having them?" She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as if afraid she might forgive him. By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the recognized barriers between them. "Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way," he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?" "Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been! But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!" It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were deprecated by her. He went on to something else. "This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in some other, no doubt." "I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively. Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life. The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as a parish priest, should learn. But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious. Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must have written almost immediately he had gone from her: Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and associate, with all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again. I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant SUE. Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the cathedral works when she came. VI Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the crow flies. A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him offhand. About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time. A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was not exactly studying. The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now. What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation
innocent
How many times the word 'innocent' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
crude
How many times the word 'crude' appears in the text?
1
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
fascination
How many times the word 'fascination' appears in the text?
0
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
abstract
How many times the word 'abstract' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
tom
How many times the word 'tom' appears in the text?
0
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
afraid
How many times the word 'afraid' appears in the text?
0
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
formulation
How many times the word 'formulation' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
development
How many times the word 'development' appears in the text?
3
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
requires
How many times the word 'requires' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
cover
How many times the word 'cover' appears in the text?
0
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
desires
How many times the word 'desires' appears in the text?
3
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
form
How many times the word 'form' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
agency
How many times the word 'agency' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
mode
How many times the word 'mode' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
customs
How many times the word 'customs' appears in the text?
1
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
belief
How many times the word 'belief' appears in the text?
1
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
factor
How many times the word 'factor' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
processes
How many times the word 'processes' appears in the text?
1
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
communication
How many times the word 'communication' appears in the text?
1
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
extension
How many times the word 'extension' appears in the text?
2
"Knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. 2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. 3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. 1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. 1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. 2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to
absorbed
How many times the word 'absorbed' appears in the text?
1
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
two
How many times the word 'two' appears in the text?
1
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
plaything
How many times the word 'plaything' appears in the text?
3
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
discipline
How many times the word 'discipline' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
pedlars
How many times the word 'pedlars' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
does
How many times the word 'does' appears in the text?
2
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
thinkers
How many times the word 'thinkers' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
gift
How many times the word 'gift' appears in the text?
1
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
stand
How many times the word 'stand' appears in the text?
3
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
strugglers
How many times the word 'strugglers' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
piqued
How many times the word 'piqued' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
began
How many times the word 'began' appears in the text?
3
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
prejudices
How many times the word 'prejudices' appears in the text?
1
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
rubbed
How many times the word 'rubbed' appears in the text?
2
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
few
How many times the word 'few' appears in the text?
2
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
obvious
How many times the word 'obvious' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
solved
How many times the word 'solved' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
letter
How many times the word 'letter' appears in the text?
2
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
mademoiselle
How many times the word 'mademoiselle' appears in the text?
0
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
golden
How many times the word 'golden' appears in the text?
1
"She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters," said Traddles. "Does she sing at all?" I asked. "Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits," said Traddles. "Nothing scientific." "She doesn't sing to the guitar?" said I. "Oh dear no!" said Traddles. "Paint at all?" "Not at all," said Traddles. I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too. Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till morning. My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote, by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful. She was always cheerful from that time. I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journies to Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays. So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking forward to it. I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called upon her, in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilisation on that subject. But Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general harmony. The only member of our small society, who positively refused to adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was reported at the door. One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train. It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his. I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get them to behave towards her differently. "Because you know, my darling," I remonstrated, "you are not a child." "There!" said Dora. "Now you're going to be cross!" "Cross, my love?" "I am sure they're very kind to me," said Dora, "and I am very happy." "Well! But my dearest life!" said I, "you might be very happy, and yet be treated rationally." Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to sob, saying if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be engaged to her? And why didn't I go away, now, if I couldn't bear her? What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on her, after that! "I am sure I am very affectionate," said Dora; "you oughtn't to be cruel to me, Doady!" "Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for the world!" "Then don't find fault with me," said Dora, making a rosebud of her mouth; "and I'll be good." I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets. Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say: "Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?" My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a kiss. "Would you know how to buy it, my darling?" I would repeat, perhaps, if I were very inflexible. Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph: "Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need _I_ know? Oh, you silly boy!" So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever. Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it. And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything too--but not often. CHAPTER XLII. MISCHIEF. I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules. How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes, I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful love. She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's. Mr. Wickfield was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession. "You see, Master Copperfield," said he, as he forced himself upon my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, "where a person loves, a person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the beloved one." "Of whom are you jealous, now?" said I. "Thanks to you, Master Copperfield," he returned, "of no one in particular just at present--no male person, at least." "Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?" He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed. "Really, Master Copperfield," he said, "--I should say Mister, but I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into--you're so insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don't mind telling you," putting his fish-like hand on mine, "I'm not a lady's man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong." His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning. "What do you mean?" said I. "Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield," he replied, with a dry grin, "I mean, just at present, what I say." "And what do you mean by your look?" I retorted, quietly. "By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?" "Yes," said I. "By your look." He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly: "When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed." "Well?" said I; "suppose you were!" "--And beneath him, too," pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin. "Don't you know the Doctor better," said I, "than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?" He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered: "Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!" My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's twisting. "He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about," said Uriah. "One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble--and I am. But I didn't like that sort of thing--and I don't!" He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while. "She is one of your lovely women, she is," he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; "and ready to be no friend to such as me, _I_ know. She's just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain't one of your lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of 'em." I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success. "Now, I'm not a going to let myself be run down, Copperfield," he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, "and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don't approve of it. I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain't a going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against." "You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that everybody else is doing the like, I think," said I. "Perhaps so, Master Copperfield," he replied. "But I've got a motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can't allow people in my way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!" "I don't understand you," said I. "Don't you, though?" he returned, with one of his jerks. "I'm astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I'll try to be plainer, another time.--Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?" "It looks like him," I replied, as carelessly as I could. Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support. It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening but one, which was a Saturday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was expected to tea. I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself into a fever about it. I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old door. At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet. Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was "too clever." But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face. I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her. Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another. The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete. "I am so glad," said Dora, after tea, "that you like me. I didn't think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is gone." I have omitted to mention it, by-the-bye. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key. Agnes said, she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising character; but Dora corrected that directly. "Oh no!" she said, shaking her curls at me; "it was all praise. He thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it." "My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he knows," said Agnes, with a smile; "it is not worth their having." "But please let me have it," said Dora, in her coaxing way, "if you can!" We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went. "Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady," said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, "I might have been more clever perhaps?" "My love!" said I, "what nonsense!" "Do you think it is nonsense?" returned Dora, without looking at me. "Are you sure it is?" "Of course I am!" "I have forgotten," said Dora, still turning the button round and round, "what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy." "No blood-relation," I replied; "but we were brought up together, like brother and sister." "I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?" said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat. "Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!" "Suppose you had never seen me at all," said Dora, going to another button. "Suppose we had never been born!" said I, gaily. I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once, twice, three times--and went out of the room. They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach-door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach-window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box. The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child! Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I told Agnes it was her doing. "When you were sitting by her," said I, "you seemed to be no less _her_ guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes." "A poor angel," she returned, "but faithful." The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural to me to say: "The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed to-day, that I have begun to hope you are happier at home?" "I am happier in myself," she said; "I am quite cheerful and light-hearted." I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the stars that made it seem so noble. "There has been no change at home," said Agnes, after a few moments. "No fresh reference," said I, "to--I wouldn't distress you, Agnes, but I cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?" "No, none," she answered. "I have thought so much about it." "You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood," she added, after a moment; "the step you dread my taking, I shall never take." Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly. "And when this visit is over," said I,--"for we may not be alone another time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to London again?" "Probably a long time," she replied; "I think it will be best--for papa's sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way." We were now within the little court-yard of the Doctor's cottage. It was growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night. "Do not be troubled," she said, giving me her hand, "by our misfortunes and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God bless you always!" In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor's study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening the door, looked in. The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor's table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's arm. For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and saw what was the matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain me, and I remained. "At any rate," observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, "we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL the town." Saying which, he went
make
How many times the word 'make' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
associates
How many times the word 'associates' appears in the text?
0
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
ended
How many times the word 'ended' appears in the text?
0
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
sheep
How many times the word 'sheep' appears in the text?
0
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
lousteau
How many times the word 'lousteau' appears in the text?
3
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
uncut
How many times the word 'uncut' appears in the text?
1
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
curiously
How many times the word 'curiously' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
war
How many times the word 'war' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
above
How many times the word 'above' appears in the text?
1
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
harpe
How many times the word 'harpe' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
courage
How many times the word 'courage' appears in the text?
1
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
marais
How many times the word 'marais' appears in the text?
1
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
chin
How many times the word 'chin' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
flattering
How many times the word 'flattering' appears in the text?
0
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
into
How many times the word 'into' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
executives
How many times the word 'executives' appears in the text?
0
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
promptest
How many times the word 'promptest' appears in the text?
1
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
hypocrisy
How many times the word 'hypocrisy' appears in the text?
0
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
quarter
How many times the word 'quarter' appears in the text?
2
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
moment
How many times the word 'moment' appears in the text?
3
"Then, be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For, believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags, rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon; when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold, swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief; _Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer things." The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped Lousteau's hand. "I will triumph!" he cried aloud. "Good!" said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on, do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean creature, and must be tempted." "I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien. "Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit." The comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie; his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that he could wield it, so he wished to take it. He was dazzled by the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau, seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks. Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter. Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter. A young man's poverty follows him wherever he goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look. A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace. The room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory. The dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure, staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life. "This is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the house-warming this evening." Etienne Lousteau wore black trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to renovate his hat by an application of the brush. "Let us go," said Lucien. "Not yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have gloves." As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage outside. "There he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau. "Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell. "Brought the money with you?" "Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a young man who eyed Lucien curiously. "_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued. "There are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say, swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet." Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding. "Oh! they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of it." "But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?" Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at Etienne and chuckled. "One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary man," said he. "No, Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis, and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud." "If I had any advice to give the gentleman," remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose. Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now." Barbet's shabby overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it. Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply, making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure, such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in two or three thousand francs. Barbet was the type of bookseller that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn. "Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?" "Eh! my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old bookseller said. Trade is dull." "If you went into his shop, my dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he keeps." "Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs," said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you, for I am not fond of giving my signature." "So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?" "Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will accept your esteem, all the same." "But I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs." "_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the money again," he added. "Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau. "My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency over me----" "Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string. "Have you anything else?" asked Barbet. "Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's ear. "But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the Palais Royal. "Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it. Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on Marseilles, the Levant and our trade." "But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?" "Oh well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review." "Goodness! and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien, remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood. "My dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before. So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair." Lucien's experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as it is called, used to reign in state. PART II The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette. The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public. So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy. There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes. Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII. When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught. The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding. But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring
bespattered
How many times the word 'bespattered' appears in the text?
1
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
reproach
How many times the word 'reproach' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
subject
How many times the word 'subject' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
ready
How many times the word 'ready' appears in the text?
2
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
alarm
How many times the word 'alarm' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
newest
How many times the word 'newest' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
be
How many times the word 'be' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
most
How many times the word 'most' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
incisive
How many times the word 'incisive' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
sheathed
How many times the word 'sheathed' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
answer
How many times the word 'answer' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
sign
How many times the word 'sign' appears in the text?
1
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
walked
How many times the word 'walked' appears in the text?
1
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
place
How many times the word 'place' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
shown
How many times the word 'shown' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
six
How many times the word 'six' appears in the text?
1
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
deputation
How many times the word 'deputation' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
gloves
How many times the word 'gloves' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
dearest
How many times the word 'dearest' appears in the text?
0
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
me
How many times the word 'me' appears in the text?
3
"You'll give us a help, Mr. Pabsby?" said Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby smiled and rubbed his hands, and paused and laid his head on one side. "I hope he will," said Sir Thomas, "if he is of our way cf thinking, otherwise I should be sorry to ask him." Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower. [Illustration: Still Mr. Pabsby said nothing;--but he smiled very sweetly, and laid his head a little lower.] "He knows we're on the respectable side," said Mr. Trigger. "The Wesleyans now are most as one as the Church of England,--in the way of not being roughs and rowdies." Sir Thomas, who did not know Mr. Pabsby, was afraid that he would be offended at this; but he showed no sign of offence as he continued to rub his hands. Mr. Pabsby was meditating his speech. "We're a little hurried, Mr. Pabsby," said Mr. Trigger; "perhaps you'll think of it." But Mr. Pabsby was not going to let them escape in that way. It was not every day that he had a Sir Thomas, or a candidate for the borough, or even a Mr. Trigger, in that little parlour. The fact was that Mr. Trigger, who generally knew what he was about, had made a mistake. Sir Thomas, who was ready enough to depart, saw that an immediate escape was impossible. "Sir Thomas," began Mr. Pabsby, in a soft, greasy voice,--a voice made up of pretence, politeness and saliva,--"if you will give me three minutes to express myself on this subject I shall be obliged to you." "Certainly," said Sir Thomas, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and holding his hat as though he were determined to go directly the three minutes were over. "A minister of the Gospel in this town is placed in a peculiar position, Sir Thomas," said Mr. Pabsby very slowly, "and of all the ministers of religion in Percycross mine is the most peculiar. In this matter I would wish to be guided wholly by duty, and if I could see my way clearly I would at once declare it to you. But, Sir Thomas, I owe much to the convictions of my people." "Which way do you mean to vote?" asked Mr. Trigger. Mr. Pabsby did not even turn his face at this interruption. "A private man, Sir Thomas, may follow the dictates of--of--of his own heart, perhaps." Here he paused, expecting to be encouraged by some words. But Sir Thomas had acquired professionally a knowledge that to such a speaker as Mr. Pabsby any rejoinder or argument was like winding up a clock. It is better to allow such clocks to run down. "With me, I have to consider every possible point. What will my people wish? Some of them are eager in the cause of reform, Sir Thomas; and some others--" "We shall lose the train," said Mr. Trigger, jumping up and putting on his hat. "I'm afraid we shall," said Sir Thomas rising, but not putting on his. "Half a minute," said Mr. Pabsby pleading, but not rising from his chair. "Perhaps you will do me the honour of calling on me when you are again here in Percycross. I shall have the greatest pleasure in discussing a few matters with you, Sir Thomas; and then, if I can give you my poor help, it will give me and Mrs. Pabsby the most sincere pleasure." Mrs. Pabsby had now entered the room, and was introduced; but Trigger would not sit down again, nor take off his hat. He boldly marshalled the way to the door, while Sir Thomas followed, subject as he came to the eloquence of Mr. Pabsby. "If I can only see my way clearly, Sir Thomas," were the last words which Mr. Pabsby spoke. "He'll give one to Griffenbottom, certainly," said Mr. Trigger. "Westmacott 'll probably have the other. I thought perhaps your title might have gone down with him, but it didn't seem to take." All this was anything but promising, anything but comfortable; and yet before he went to bed that night Sir Thomas had undertaken to stand. In such circumstances it is very hard for a man to refuse. He feels that a certain amount of trouble has been taken on his behalf, that retreat will be cowardly, and that the journey for nothing will be personally disagreeable to his own feelings. And then, too, there was that renewed ambition in his breast,--an ambition which six months ago he would have declared to be at rest for ever,--but which prompted him, now as strongly as ever, to go forward and do something. It is so easy to go and see;--so hard to retreat when one has seen. He had not found Percycross to be especially congenial to him. He had felt himself to be out of his element there,--among people with whom he had no sympathies; and he felt also that he had been unfitted for this kind of thing by the life which he had led for the last few years. Still he undertook to stand. "Who is coming forward on the other side?" he asked Mr. Trigger late at night, when this matter had been decided in regard to himself. "Westmacott, of course," said Trigger, "and I'm told that the real Rads of the place have got hold of a fellow named Moggs." "Moggs!" ejaculated Sir Thomas. "Yes;--Moggs. The Young Men's Reform Association is bringing him forward. He's a Trades' Union man, and a Reform Leaguer, and all that kind of thing. I shouldn't be surprised if he got in. They say he's got money." CHAPTER XXI. THE LIBERALS OF PERCYCROSS. Yes;--Ontario Moggs was appalled, delighted, exalted, and nearly frightened out of his wits by an invitation, conveyed to him by certain eager spirits of the town, to come down and stand on the real radical interest for the borough of Percycross. The thing was not suggested to him till a day or two after Sir Thomas had been sounded, and he was then informed that not an hour was to be lost. The communication was made in the little back parlour of the Cheshire Cheese, and Moggs was expected to give an answer then and there. He stood with his hand on his brow for five minutes, and then asked that special question which should always come first on such occasions. Would it cost any money? Well;--yes. The eager spirits of Percycross thought that it would cost something. They were forced to admit that Percycross was not one of those well-arranged boroughs in which the expenses of an election are all defrayed by the public spirit of the citizens. It soon became clear that the deputation had waited upon Moggs, not only because Moggs was a good Radical, but because also Moggs was supposed to be a Radical with a command of money. Ontario frowned and expressed an opinion that all elections should be made absolutely free to the candidates. "And everybody ought to go to 'eaven, Mr. Moggs," said the leading member of the deputation, "but everybody don't, 'cause things ain't as they ought to be." There was no answer to be made to this. Ontario could only strike his forehead and think. It was clear to him that he could not give an affirmative answer that night, and he therefore, with some difficulty, arranged an adjournment of the meeting till the following afternoon at 2 P.M. "We must go down by the 4.45 express to-morrow," said the leading member of the deputation, who even by that arrangement would subject himself to the loss of two days' wages,--for he was a foreman in the establishment of Mr. Spicer the mustard-maker,--and whose allowance for expenses would not admit of his sleeping away from home a second night. Ontario departed, promising to be ready with his answer by 2 P.M. on the following day. How bright with jewels was the crown now held before his eyes, and yet how unapproachable, how far beyond his grasp! To be a member of Parliament, to speak in that august assembly instead of wasting his eloquence on the beery souls of those who frequented the Cheshire Cheese, to be somebody in the land at his early age,--something so infinitely superior to a maker of boots! A member of Parliament was by law an esquire, and therefore a gentleman. Ralph Newton was not a member of Parliament;--not half so great a fellow as a member of Parliament. Surely if he were to go to Polly Neefit as a member of Parliament Polly would reject him no longer! And to what might it not lead? He had visions before his eyes of very beautiful moments in his future life, in which, standing, as it were, on some well-chosen rostrum in that great House, he would make the burning thoughts of his mind, the soaring aspirations of his heart, audible to all the people. How had Cobden begun his career,--and Bright? Had it not been in this way? Why should not he be as great,--greater than either;--greater, because in these coming days a man of the people would be able to wield a power more extensive than the people had earned for themselves in former days? And then, as he walked alone through the streets, he took to making speeches,--some such speeches as he would make when he stood up in his place in the House of Commons as the member for Percycross. The honourable member for Percycross! There was something ravishing in the sound. Would not that sound be pleasant to the ears of Polly Neefit? But then, was not the thing as distant as it was glorious? How could he be member for Percycross, seeing that in all matters he was subject to his father? His father hated the very name of the Cheshire Cheese, and was, in every turn and feeling of his life, diametrically opposed to his son's sentiments. He would, nevertheless, go to his father and demand assistance. If on such an occasion as this his father should give him a stone when he asked for bread, he and his father must be two! "If, when such a prospect as this is held out to his son, he cannot see it," said Ontario, "then he can see nothing!" But yet he was sure that his father wouldn't see it. To his extreme astonishment Mr. Moggs senior did see it. It was some time before Mr. Moggs senior clearly understood the proposition which was made to him, but when he did he became alive to the honour,--and perhaps profit,--of having a member of his firm in Parliament. Of politics in the abstract Mr. Moggs senior knew very little. Nor, indeed, did he care much. In matters referring to trade he was a Conservative, because he was a master. He liked to be able to manage his people, and to pay 5_s._ 3_d._ instead of 5_s._ 8_d._ for the making of a pair of boots. He hated the Cheshire Cheese because his son went there, and because his son entertained strange and injurious ideas which were propagated at that low place. But if the Cheshire Cheese would send his son to Parliament, Mr. Moggs did not know but what the Cheshire Cheese might be very well. At any rate, he undertook to pay the bills, if Ontario, his son, were brought forward as a candidate for the borough. He lost his head so completely in the glory of the thing, that it never occurred to him to ask what might be the probable amount of the expenditure. "There ain't no father in all London as 'd do more for his son than I would, if only I see'd there was something in it," said Moggs senior, with a tear in his eye. Moggs junior was profuse in gratitude, profuse in obedience, profuse in love. Oh, heavens, what a golden crown was there now within his grasp! All this occurred between the father and son early in the morning at Shepherd's Bush, whither the son had gone out to the father after a night of feverish longing and ambition. They went into town together, on the top of the omnibus, and Ontario felt that he was being carried heavenwards. What a heaven had he before him, even in that fortnight's canvass which it would be his glory to undertake! What truths he would tell to the people, how he would lead them with him by political revelations that should be almost divine, how he would extract from them bursts of rapturous applause! To explain to them that labour is the salt of the earth;--that would be his mission. And then, how sweet to teach them the value, the inestimable value, of the political privilege lately accorded to them,--or, as Ontario would put it, lately wrested on their behalf from the hands of an aristocracy which was more timid even than it was selfish;--how sweet to explain this, and then to instruct them, afterwards, that it was their duty now, having got this great boon for themselves, to see at once that it should be extended to those below them. "Let the first work of household suffrage be a demand for manhood suffrage." This had been enunciated by Ontario Moggs with great effect at the Cheshire Cheese;--and now, as the result of such enunciation, he was going down to Percycross to stand as a candidate for the borough! He was almost drunk with delight as he sat upon the knife-board of the Shepherd's Bush omnibus, thinking of it all. He, too, went down to Percycross, making a preliminary journey,--as had done Sir Thomas Underwood,--timing his arrival there a day or two after the departure of the lawyer. Alas, he, also, met much to disappoint him even at that early period of the contest. The people whom he was taken to see were not millionaires and tradesmen in a large way of business, but leading young men of warm political temperaments. This man was president of a mechanics' institute, that secretary to an amalgamation of unions for general improvement, and a third chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association. They were delighted to see him, and were very civil; but he soon found that they were much more anxious to teach him than they were to receive his political lessons. When he began, as unfortunately he did very early in his dealings with them, to open out his own views, he soon found that they had views also to open out. He was to represent them,--that is to say, become the mouthpiece of their ideas. He had been selected because he was supposed to have some command of money. Of course he would have to address the people in the Mechanics' Hall; but the chairman of the Young Men's Reform Association was very anxious to tell him what to say on that occasion. "I am accustomed to addressing people," said Ontario Moggs, with a considerable accession of dignity. He had the satisfaction of addressing the people, and the people received him kindly. But he thought he observed that the applause was greater when the secretary of the Amalgamation-of-Improvement-Unions spoke, and he was sure that the enthusiasm for the Young Men's chairman mounted much higher than had done any ardour on his own behalf. And he was astonished to find that these young men were just as fluent as himself. He did think, indeed, that they did not go quite so deep into the matter as he did, that they had not thought out great questions so thoroughly, but they had a way of saying things which,--which would have told even at the Cheshire Cheese. The result of all this was, that at the end of three days,--though he was, no doubt, candidate for the borough of Percycross, and in that capacity a great man in Percycross,--he did not seem to himself to be so great as he had been when he made the journey down from London. There was a certain feeling that he was a cat's-paw, brought there for certain objects which were not his objects,--because they wanted money, and some one who would be fool enough to fight a losing battle! He did not reap all that meed of personal admiration for his eloquence which he expected. And, then, during these three days there arose another question, the discussion of which embarrassed him not a little. Mr. Westmacott was in the town, and there was a question whether he and Mr. Westmacott were to join forces. It was understood that Mr. Westmacott and Mr. Westmacott's leading friends objected to this; but the chairmen of the young men, and the presidents and the secretaries on the Radical side put their heads together, and declared that if Mr. Westmacott were proud they would run their horse alone;--they would vote for Moggs, and for Moggs only. Or else,--as it was whispered,--they would come to terms with Griffenbottom, and see that Sir Thomas was sent back to London. The chairmen, and the presidents, and the secretaries were powerful enough to get the better of Mr. Westmacott, and large placards were printed setting forward the joint names of Westmacott and Moggs. The two liberal candidates were to employ the same agent, and were to canvass together. This was all very well,--was the very thing which Moggs should have desired. But it was all arranged without any consultation with him, and he felt that the objection which had been raised was personal to himself. Worse than all, when he was brought face to face with Mr. Westmacott he had not a word to say for himself! He tried it and failed. Mr. Westmacott had been a member of Parliament, and was a gentleman. Ontario, for aught he himself knew, might have called upon Mr. Westmacott for the amount of Mr. Westmacott's little bill. He caught himself calling Mr. Westmacott, sir, and almost wished that he could bite out his own tongue. He felt that he was a nobody in the interview, and that the chairmen, the secretaries, and the presidents were regretting their bargain, and saying among themselves that they had done very badly in bringing down Ontario Moggs as a candidate for their borough. There were moments before he left Percycross in which he was almost tempted to resign. But he left the town the accepted candidate of his special friends, and was assured, with many parting grasps of the hand on the platform, that he would certainly be brought in at the top of the poll. Another little incident should be mentioned. He had been asked by the electioneering agent for a small trifle of some hundred pounds towards the expenses, and this, by the generosity of his father, he had been able to give. "We shall get along now like a house on fire," said the agent, as he pocketed the cheque. Up to that moment there may have been doubts upon the agent's mind. As he went back to London he acknowledged to himself that he had failed hitherto,--he had failed in making that impression at Percycross which would have been becoming to him as the future member of Parliament for the borough; but he gallantly resolved that he would do better in the future. He would speak in such a way that the men of Percycross should listen to him and admire. He would make occasion for himself. He thought that he could do better than Mr. Westmacott,--put more stuff in what he had got to say. And, whatever might happen to him, he would hold up his head. Why should he not be as good a man as Westmacott? It was the man that was needed,--not the outside trappings. Then he asked himself a question whether, as trappings themselves were so trivial, a man was necessarily mean who dealt in trappings. He did not remember to have heard of a bootmaker in Parliament. But there should be a bootmaker in Parliament soon;--and thus he plucked up his courage. On his journey down to Percycross he had thought that immediately on his return to London he would go across to Hendon, and take advantage of his standing as a candidate for the borough; but as he returned he resolved that he would wait till the election was over. He would go to Polly with all his honours on his head. CHAPTER XXII. RALPH NEWTON'S DECISION. Ontario Moggs was at Percycross when Ralph Newton was making his formal offer to Polly Neefit. Ralph when he had made his offer returned to London with mixed feelings. He had certainly been oppressed at times by the conviction that he must make the offer even though it went against the grain with him to do so;--and at these moments he had not failed to remind himself that he was about to make himself miserable for life because he had been weak enough to take pecuniary assistance in the hour of his temporary necessities from the hands of Polly's father. Now he had made his offer; it had not been accepted, and he was still free. He could see his way out of that dilemma without dishonour. But then that dilemma became very much smaller to his sight when it was surmounted,--as is the nature with all dilemmas; and the other dilemma, which would have been remedied had Polly accepted him, again loomed very large. And as he looked back at the matrimonial dilemma which he had escaped, and at Polly standing before him, comely, healthy, and honest, such a pleasant armful, and so womanly withal,--so pleasant a girl if only she was not to be judged and sentenced by others beside himself,--he almost thought that that dilemma was one which he could have borne without complaint. But Polly's suggestion that they should allow a year to run round in order that they might learn to know each other was one which he could not entertain. He had but three days in which to give an answer to his uncle, and up to this time two alternatives had been open to him,--the sale of his reversion and independence, or Polly and the future lordship of Newton. He had thought that there was nothing but to choose. It had not occurred to him that Polly would raise any objection. He had felt neither fear nor hope in that direction. It followed as a consequence now that the lordship must go. He would not, however, make up his mind that it should go till the last moment. On the following morning he was thinking that he might as well go to the shop in Conduit Street, feeling that he could encounter Neefit without any qualms of conscience, when Mr. Neefit came to him. This was certainly a better arrangement. It was easier to talk of his own affairs sitting at ease in his own arm-chair, than to carry on the discussion among the various sporting garments which adorned Mr. Neefit's little back room, subject to interruption from customers, and possibly within the hearing of Mr. Waddle and Herr Bawwah. Neefit, seated at the end of the sofa in Ralph's comfortable room, looking out of his saucer eyes with all his energy, was in a certain degree degrading,--but was not quite so degrading as Neefit at his own barn-door in Conduit Street. "I was just coming to you," he said, as he made the breeches-maker welcome. "Well;--yes; but I thought I'd catch you here, Captain. Them men of mine has such long ears! That German who lets on that he don't understand only just a word or two of English, hears everything through a twelve-inch brick wall. Polly told me as you'd been with her." "I suppose so, Mr. Neefit." "Oh, she ain't one as 'd keep anything from me. She's open and straightforward, anyways." "So I found her." "Now look here, Captain. I've just one word to say about her. Stick to her." Ralph was well aware that he must explain the exact circumstances in which he stood to the man who was to have been his father-in-law, but hardly knew how to begin his explanation. "She ain't nowise again you," continued Mr. Neefit. "She owned as much when I put her through her facings. I did put her through her facings pretty tightly. 'What is it that you want, Miss?' said I. 'D' you want to have a husband, or d' you want to be an old maid?' They don't like that word old maid;--not as used again themselves, don't any young woman." "Polly will never be an old maid," said Ralph. "She owned as she didn't want that. 'I suppose I'll have to take some of 'em some day,' she said. Lord, how pretty she did look as she said it;--just laughing and crying, smiling and pouting all at once. She ain't a bad 'un to look at, Captain?" "Indeed she is not." "Nor yet to go. Do you stick to her. Them's my words. 'D' you want to have that ugly bootmaker?' said I. 'He ain't ugly,' said she. 'D' you want to have him, Miss?' said I. 'No, I don't,' said she. 'Well!' said I. 'But I do know him,' said Polly, 'and I don't know Mr. Newton no more than Adam!' Them were her very words, Captain. Do you stick to her, Captain. I'll tell you what. Let's all go down to Margate together for a week." That was Mr. Neefit's plan of action. Then Ralph got up from his easy-chair and began his explanation. He couldn't very well go down to Margate, delightful as it would be to sit upon the sands with Polly. He was so situated that he must at once decide as to the sale of his property at Newton. Mr. Neefit put his hands in his pockets, and sat perfectly silent, listening to his young friend's explanation. If Polly would have accepted him at once, Ralph went on to explain, everything would have been straight; but, as she would not do so, he must take his uncle's offer. He had no other means of extricating himself from his embarrassments. "Why, Mr. Neefit, I could not look you in the face unless I were prepared to pay you your money," he said. "Drat that," replied Neefit, and then again he listened. Ralph went on. He could not go on long in his present condition. His bill for 500 to Mr. Horsball of the Moonbeam was coming round. He literally had not 20 in his possession to carry on the war. His uncle's offer would be withdrawn if it were not accepted the day after to-morrow. Nobody else would give half so much. The thing must be done, and then;--why, then he would have nothing to offer to Polly worthy of her acceptance. "Bother," said Mr. Neefit, who had not once taken his eyes off Ralph's face. Ralph said that that might be all very well, but such were the facts. "You ain't that soft that you're going to let 'em rob you of the estate?" said the breeches-maker in a tone of horror. Ralph raised his hands and his eyebrows together. Yes;--that was what he intended to do. "There shan't be nothing of the kind," said the breeches-maker. "What! 7,000 a year, ain't it? All in land, ain't it? And it must be your own, let 'em do what they will; mustn't it?" He paused a moment, and Ralph nodded his head. "What you have to do is to get a wife,--and a son before any of 'em can say Jack Robinson. Lord bless you! Just spit at 'em if they talks of buying it. S'pose the old gent was to go off all along of apperplexy the next day, how'd you feel then? Like cutting your throat;--wouldn't you, Captain?" "But my uncle's life is very good." "He ain't got no receipt against kingdom come, I dare say." Ralph was surprised by his tradesman's eloquence and wit. "You have a chick of your own, and then you'll know as it'll be yours some way or other. If I'd the chance I'd sooner beg, borrow, starve, or die, before I'd sell it;--let alone working, Captain." There was satire too as well as eloquence in the breeches-maker. "No;--you must run your chance, somehow." "I don't see my way," said Ralph. "You have got something, Captain;--something of your own?" "Well;--just enough to pay my debts, if all were sold, and buy myself a rope to hang myself." "I'll pay your debts, Captain." "I couldn't hear of it, Mr. Neefit." "As for not hearing of it,--that's bother. You do hear of it now. And how much more do you want to keep you? You shall have what you want. You meant honest along of Polly yesterday, and you mean honest now." Ralph winced, but he did not deny what Neefit said, nor aught that was implied in the saying. "We'll bring you and Polly together, and I tell you she'll come round." Ralph shook his head. "Anyways you shall have the money;--there now. We'll have a bit of a paper, and if this marriage don't come off there'll be the money to come back, and five per cent. when the old gent dies." "But I might die first." "We'll insure your life, Captain. Only we must be upon the square." "Oh, yes," said Ralph. "I'd rather a'most lose it all than think such a chance should be missed. 7,000 a year, and all in land? When one knows how hard it is to get, to think of selling it!" Ralph made no positive promise, but when Mr. Neefit left him, there was,--so at least thought Mr. Neefit,--an implied understanding that "the Captain" would at once put an end to this transaction between him and his uncle. And yet Ralph didn't feel quite certain. The breeches-maker had been generous,--very
escape
How many times the word 'escape' appears in the text?
2