The Head of the House of Coombe, Frances Hodgson Burnett [adult books to read txt] 📗

By her fire she sat, an attracting presence, though only fine, strong lines remained of beauty ravaged by illness and years. The “polished forehead” was furrowed by the chisel of suffering; the delicate high nose springing from her waxen, sunken face seemed somewhat eaglelike, but the face was still brilliant in its intensity of meaning and the carriage of her head was still noble. Not able to walk except with the assistance of a cane, her once exquisite hands stiffened almost to uselessness, she held her court from her throne of mere power and strong charm. On the afternoons when people “ran in to warm themselves” by her fire, the talk was never dull and was often wonderful. There were those who came quietly into the room fresh from important scenes where subjects of weight to nations were being argued closely—perhaps almost fiercely. Sometimes the argument was continued over cups of perfect tea near the chair of the Duchess, and, howsoever far it led, she was able brilliantly to follow. With the aid of books and pamphlets and magazines, and the strong young man with the nice voice, who was her reader, she kept pace with each step of the march of the world.

It was, however, the modern note in her recollections of her world’s march in days long past, in which Coombe found mental food and fine flavour. The phrase, “in these days” expressed in her utterance neither disparagement nor regret. She who sat in state in a drawing-room lighted by wax candles did so as an affair of personal preference, and denied no claim of higher brilliance to electric illumination. Driving slowly through Hyde Park on sunny days when she was able to go out, her high-swung barouche hinted at no lofty disdain of petrol and motor power. At the close of her youth’s century, she looked forward with thrilled curiosity to the dawning wonders of the next.

“If the past had not held so much, one might not have learned to expect more,” was her summing up on a certain afternoon, when he came to report himself after one of his absences from England. “The most important discovery of the last fifty years has been the revelation that no man may any longer assume to speak the last word on any subject. The next man—almost any next man—may evolve more. Before that period all elderly persons were final in their dictum. They said to each other—and particularly to the young—‘It has not been done in my time—it was not done in my grandfather’s time. It has never been done. It never can be done’.”

“The note of today is ‘Since it has never been done, it will surely be done soon’,” said Coombe.

“Ah! we who began life in the most assured and respectable of reigns and centuries,” she answered him, “have seen much. But these others will see more. Crinolines, mushroom hats and large families seemed to promise a decorum peaceful to dullness; but there have been battles, murders and sudden deaths; there have been almost supernatural inventions and discoveries—there have been marvels of new doubts and faiths. When one sits and counts upon one’s fingers the amazements the 19th century has provided, one gasps and gazes with wide eyes into the future. I, for one, feel rather as though I had seen a calm milch cow sauntering—at first slowly—along a path, gradually evolve into a tiger—a genie with a hundred heads containing all the marvels of the world—a flying dragon with a thousand eyes! Oh, we have gone fast and far!”

“And we shall go faster and farther,” Coombe added.

“That is it,” she answered. “Are we going too fast?”

“At least so fast that we forget things it would be well for us to remember.” He had come in that day with a certain preoccupied grimness of expression which was not unknown to her. It was generally after one of his absences that he looked a shade grim.

“Such as—?” she inquired.

“Such as catastrophes in the history of the world, which forethought and wisdom might have prevented. The French Revolution is the obvious type of figure which lies close at hand so one picks it up. The French Revolution—its Reign of Terror—the orgies of carnage—the cataclysms of agony—need not have been, but they WERE. To put it in words of one syllable.”

“What!” was her involuntary exclamation. “You are seeking such similes as the French Revolution!”

“Who knows how far a madness may reach and what Reign of Terror may take form?” He sat down and drew an atlas towards him. It always lay upon the table on which all the Duchess desired was within reach. It was fat, convenient of form, and agreeable to look at in its cover of dull, green leather. Coombe’s gesture of drawing it towards him was a familiar one. It was frequently used as reference.

“The atlas again?” she said.

“Yes. Just now I can think of little else. I have realized too much.”

The continental journey had lasted a month. He had visited more countries than one in his pursuit of a study he was making of the way in which the wind was blowing particular straws. For long he had found much to give thought to in the trend of movement in one special portion of the Chessboard. It was that portion of it dominated by the ruler of whose obsession too careless nations made sly jest. This man he had known from his arrogant and unendearing youth. He had looked on with unbiassed curiosity at his development into arrogance so much greater than its proportions touched the grotesque. The rest of the world had looked on also, but apparently, merely in the casual way which goodnaturedly smiles and leaves to every man—even an emperor—the privilege of his own eccentricities. Coombe had looked on with a difference, so also had his friend by her fireside. This man’s square of the Chessboard had long been the subject of their private talks and a cause for the drawing towards them of the green atlas. The moves he made, the methods of his ruling, the significance of these methods were the evidence they collected in their frequent arguments. Coombe had early begun to see the whole thing as a process—a life-long labour which was a means to a monstrous end.

There was a certain thing he believed of which they often spoke as “It”. He spoke of it now.

“Through three weeks I have been marking how It grows,” he said; “a whole nation with the entire power of its commerce, its education, its science, its religion, guided towards one aim is a curious study. The very babes are born and bred and taught only that one thought may become an integral part of their being. The most innocent and blue eyed of them knows, without a shadow of doubt, that the world has but one reason for existence—that it may be conquered and ravaged by the country that gave them birth.”

“I have both heard and seen it,” she said. “One has smiled in spite of oneself, in listening to their simple, everyday talk.”

“In little schools—in large ones—in little churches, and in imposing ones, their Faith is taught and preached,” Coombe answered. “Sometimes one cannot believe one’s hearing. It is all so ingenuously and frankly unashamed—the mouthing, boasting, and threats of their piety. There exists for them no God who is not the modest henchman of their emperor, and whose attention is not rivetted on their prowess with admiration and awe. Apparently, they are His business, and He is well paid by being allowed to retain their confidence.”

“A lack of any sense of humour is a disastrous thing,” commented the Duchess. “The people of other nations may be fools—doubtless we all are—but there is no other which proclaims the fact abroad with such guileless outbursts of raucous exultation.”

“And even we—you and I who have thought more than others” he said, restlessly, “even we forget and half smile. There been too much smiling.”

She picked up an illustrated paper and opened it at a page filled by an ornate picture.

“See!” she said. “It is because he himself has made it so easy, with his amazing portraits of his big boots, and swords, and eruption of dangling orders. How can one help but smile when one finds him glaring at one from a newspaper in his superwarlike attitude, defying the Universe, with his comic moustachios and their ferocious waxed and bristling ends. No! One can scarcely believe that a man can be stupid enough not to realize that he looks as if he had deliberately made himself up to represent a sort of terrific military bogey intimating that, at he may pounce and say ‘Boo?”

“There lies the peril. His pretensions seem too grotesque to be treated seriously. And, while he should be watched as a madman is watched, he is given a lifetime to we attack on a world that has ceased to believe in the sole thing which is real to himself.”

“You are fresh from observation.” There was new alertness in her eyes, though she had listened before.

“I tell you it GROWS!” he gave back and lightly struck the table in emphasis. “Do you remember Carlyle—?”

“The French Revolution again?”

“Yes. Do you recall this? ‘Do not fires, fevers, seeds, chemical mixtures, GO ON GROWING. Observe, too, that EACH GROWS with a rapidity proportioned to the madness and unhealthiness there is in it.’ A ruler who, in an unaggressive age such as this, can concentrate his life and his people’s on the one ambition of plunging the world in an ocean of blood, in which his own monomania can bathe in triumph—Good God! there is madness and unhealthiness to flourish in!”

“The world!” she said. “Yes—it will be the world.”

“See,” he said, with a curve of the finger which included most of the Map of Europe. “Here are countries engaged—like the Bandarlog—in their own affairs. Quarrelling, snatching things from each other, blustering or amusing themselves with transitory pomps and displays of power. Here is a huge empire whose immense, half-savage population has seethed for centuries in its hidden, boiling cauldron of rebellion. Oh! it has seethed! And only cruelties have repressed it. Now and then it has boiled over in assassination in high places, and one has wondered how long its autocratic splendour could hold its own. Here are small, fierce, helpless nations overrun and outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic. Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here—in a well-entrenched position in the midst of it all—within but a few hundreds of miles of weakness, complicity, disastrous unreadiness and panic-stricken uncertainty of purpose, sits this Man of One Dream—who believes God Himself his vassal. Here he sits.”

“Yes his One Dream. He has had no other.” The Duchess was poring over the map also. They were as people pondering over a strange and terrible game.

“It is his monomania. It possessed him when he was a boy. What Napoleon hoped to accomplish he has BELIEVED he could attain by concentrating all the power of people upon preparation for it—and by not flinching from pouring forth their blood as if it were the refuse water of his gutters.”

“Yes—the blood—the blood!” the Duchess shuddered. “He would pour it forth without a qualm.”

Coombe touched the map first at one point and then at another.

“See!” he said again, and this time savagely. “This empire flattered and entangled by cunning, this country irritated, this deceived, this drawn into argument, this and this and this treated with professed friendship, these tricked and juggled with—And