OLIVER CONSTABLE VOL. II.

OLIVER CONSTABLE MILLER AND BAKER BY SARAH TYTLER AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. II. LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1880 [All rights reserved]

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

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CHAPTER XI. OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD.

Oliver was happy enough to discover, in the course of an evening call which Jack Dadd paid at the mill-house, that Jack had turned his mind a little in the direction of the rearing of vegetables, and the training and bearing of fruit trees. He had a voice in making the best of his father’s garden. His own name had appeared in the list of successful competitors at the Horticultural Show.

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‘Your blockhead of a gardener is making a mess of these artichokes, and your medlar don’t carry half the crop it ought to;’ Jack found fault in his free and easy style, as Oliver and he were strolling in the garden, while Fan sat in solitary dignity within doors.

‘Very likely,’ Oliver answered, philosophically at first; and then he proposed quickly, ‘Give us a lesson, Dadd?’

‘You ain’t above taking it,’ said Jack Dadd, nodding, ‘though your ass of a man may be. But you don’t suppose I’m going to put a spoke in my own wheel, by telling you how to be my successful rival at the show?’

Jack was not in earnest in his refusal, for he was naturally obliging and good-natured, while dealing with customers who were mostly women gave him a habit of civility. But he considered it smart and out of shop to appear knowing, selfish, and blustering, just as he reckoned it spirited and dashing to use bad [Pg 3]language on occasions, without entering much into the meaning of the words. Oliver had fallen out of knowledge of the lad, and was not certain either of his simplicity or his affectation, so he changed a little in his tack.

‘What would you say to setting up a field naturalists’ society in Friarton, and having occasional excursions to furnish a correct catalogue of the flora of this district of England—not a bad district for the purpose?’ suggested Oliver.

Oliver’s mind had gone off to a version of the pursuit of herbs in which there should be only the mildest species of rivalry. ‘If we were to tramp whole days,’ he said to himself sanguinely, after what he half hoped was an inspiration, ‘over pastures, through woods, and down the centre of ditches, crying “Eureka!” with one consent, when we came upon an outlying specimen of nettle, we should assuredly hob-nob together before we had gone out three times.’

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‘Oh! bother, no,’ said Jack, throwing a bucketful of cold water on the first spark of the project. ‘There is some sense in growing vegetables and fruit, and even garden flowers—though the breakjaw names of the last is enough to stop the business—I mean, of course, the last things out in the flower line, for nobody cares about the poor old things that had no show along with their scent, like cottage bonnets and short skirts, which mother will tell you were so modest and tidy. But to take the trouble to hunt up and nickname weeds, I call sheer waste of body and mind, fit only for pottering gentlefolks, schoolmasters, and fogies of that kidney, or for your would be geniuses among the working-men. You would have a pretty sprinkling of the lowest ruck wanting an excuse to be off from a day’s work, and expecting you to pay them for joining your society. I tell you, Constable, it don’t pay—either him or anyone else—to take a working-man from [Pg 5]his work and set him up as a genius. Just you see how it would answer with your bakers. Besides, I, for one,

don’t care for being mixed up with every blacksmith and carter who takes it into his conceited noddle that he has a turn for gathering weeds and storing trash.’ And Jack strutted a little as he walked, and puffed out his pink and white cheeks.

‘You are wrong,’ maintained Oliver, ‘and more’s the pity for the other ways in which a working-man spends his holiday. But look here, Jack, you meet him in the cricket-field?’

‘Oh! that is different,’ said young Dadd, carelessly. ‘That is an understood thing. But as for my club, we have only a young weaver and a shoemaker or two able to bat and bowl at our evening practice. The working-man who lives by his cart-horse sinews is mostly too tired for any place save the alehouse, after six o’clock.’

In spite of the slightness of the encouragement [Pg 6]he had received, Oliver did feel his way to originating a field naturalists’ society. He sounded his own millers and bakers, and discovered no Robert Dick among them; none went in for weeds. However, in his search, Oliver hit on a stalwart journeyman in his service, who had a small taste for butterflies. Oliver himself had no elegant scientific bent in this direction, but he introduced his baker to the ancient keeper of an ancient, dusty, mouldy, and well-nigh forgotten museum in the town. True, the keeper, in the neglect and oblivion which had fallen upon his charge, had lapsed into hopeless indifference and absolute infidelity to his trust: but he was sufficiently moved by the strange event of a visitor—a pupil—however humble, to the museum, not only to furbish up the remains of what had once been a creditable display of native and foreign butterflies, in the entomological cases, he showed a salutary sense of shame, by volunteering to make a report to [Pg 7]the survivors of

the committee, who had mismanaged the affairs of the museum, for the purpose of inducing them to employ a portion of the small fund which still remained at their disposal, to pay the young baker to replace the native ‘peacocks’ and ‘emperors,’ that had dropped and crumbled from their pins.

Oliver fondly flattered himself that he had done some good in this quarter. But unfortunately, the big young baker was of a self-conscious, sensitive disposition. He was abashed by the sudden favourable notice of a pursuit, which, though he had fallen into it, he had always been accustomed to look upon as very much the childish folly his companions held it to be. He allowed himself to be overcome by the half-jealous chaff which went on in the shop at the result of the jeering information which some of the men had volunteered to give their master. The unfortunate admirer of butterflies began to hate the mention even of a [Pg 8]beetle or a bumble-bee. He doggedly declined to have anything to do with refilling the cases in the museum. He showed Oliver, in a nervous but unmistakable manner, that the man would have none of the master’s sympathy, and took refuge in the skittle-ground nearest to his lodgings, that he might not be tempted into the fields, and betrayed into the absurdity of butterfly-hunting, thus destroying the esprit de corps between him and his brother-bakers, and

alienating them from his side. Oliver’s small amount of good done effervesced in harm. And when a letter in the ‘Friarton News’ only bore the fruit of several more or less cordial and enthusiastic replies from those ‘pottering gentlefolks,’ schoolmasters, and a working-man or two, of whom Jack Dadd had spoken, Oliver withdrew from the scheme, leaving the members who had suggested themselves to render it an accomplished fact and to include in the society—if they had the wisdom [Pg 9]to extend their bounds in that direction, all the idle young ladies in the neighbourhood—who were not too fastidious, or too delicate, or too lazy to enter the ranks, and to take to making herbariums, in place of playing incessant games of croquet, badminton, or lawn-tennis, whichever happened to be in the ascendant, alternately with district-visiting under the last fascinating curate. They were very well qualified to do this work without him. Oliver was sensible that he might incur the reproach of not knowing his own mind. But he

did know it well enough not to be diverted, by a specious and rather agreeable prospect, from his proper purpose. If none of the Dadd and Polley set could be drawn out to study botany, he would let it alone for the present.

The next bright idea which struck Oliver was to join Jack Dadd’s company of volunteers—not that Jack was their captain, but he was an influential member of the corps. He was a [Pg 10]tolerably smart soldier, a fair shot, proud of his uniform and of what he had learnt of drill. He might be a greater man in the volunteer ball-room than at a sham fight, but he was honestly possessed with the notion that he was serving his country and forming part of her martial bulwark. For that matter he occasionally terrified his mother by swaggering and threatening, after a tiff with his father, to join any reserved force which should be called abroad.

Oliver was perfectly aware that he could never be what Jack called ‘a dab’ of a soldier, but he was not sure that Jack would not like him the better for his defects. It would be a great nuisance and fatigue to Oliver to walk and hold himself straight and still, like other men, and not to be perpetually in disgrace, but he might try what he could accomplish in bodily self-restraint. It would be what moralists would call ‘good discipline’ for him, at any [Pg 11]rate. At the same time he remembered, and even reminded Fan of what he had said to her on the evening of his coming home, as to his being out of place in a barrack yard.

Fan was not too generous to refrain from assenting with grave irony, though she had no particular objection to his joining the company of volunteers, which included men of all ranks, if only Oliver had asserted his claims and got a commission—not put himself on a level with young Dadd. ‘Jack Dadd is odious,’ Fan had said with effusion to Oliver one day, as she recalled the young draper’s loud trousers, tight boots, and ‘light kids,’ when he figured as a ‘Sunday swell.’ Fan also cherished lively recollections of what she had suffered from Jack Dadd on the occasion of a party at the Polleys, which she had been forced to attend soon after leaving school. Jack would not be kept at a distance by any effort of girlish majesty, and when he had happened to sit next [Pg 12] to her, he had presumed to administer sundry nudges with his elbow to emphasise points in his conversation, without regard to her stony disregard of the signals.

‘Not a bit,’—Oliver denied the odiousness stoutly; ‘Dadd is not half a bad fellow; he is manly in his way, and though that way may not be good form,’ reflected Oliver, falling inadvertently into school slang, ‘it is not altogether his fault, poor beggar.’

Oliver paid heavy penalties for his ambition, in the Masonic Hall—converted for the nonce into a drill hall—and in the five-acre field, where the volunteers went through their exercise. Discipline alone prevented Jack Dadd and his cronies from roaring and rolling about with laughter at the recruit’s disqualifications and misdemeanours. After many evenings’ enforced attendance and irksome drudgery, at the hall and in the field, and a journey along with some scores of excited men cooped up in the [Pg 13]insufficient accommodation of a limited number of railway carriages, followed by a march of several miles through clouds of dust in order to perform a series of wildly entangled evolutions, before a general officer, who smiled grimly at the performance, and marked out Oliver for particular reprobation, Oliver counted disconsolately his gains from the extensive sacrifice of his leisure. He was on easier terms with Jack Dadd and the rest, since they had at least one more subject in common. He was invited as a matter of course, and had, indeed, a right, to join the others in what

Jack called their ‘watering,’ and which might more appropriately have been styled their ‘beering,’ and their occasional little suppers at the inns they affected after drill. These young men of the people were not dissipated fellows farther than what was implied by the fact that certain members, like Jack, were inclined to aspire to a flavour of dissipation as an element in manliness. [Pg 14]Their gambling was to a very limited extent, though it might reach to the bottom of their slenderly lined purses, in stakes of small silver at the billiard table, which an enterprising Friarton innkeeper had provided for them, as well as for their betters, in addition to cribbage boards and packs of cards. The noise and riot into which the high spirits of the company broke out at times might be a little coarse, but it was not more outrageous than the mad nonsense which Oliver had witnessed, and, sober-minded as he was for the most part, had joined in, occasionally, when well-bred lads met in each other’s rooms on the banks of the Isis. For that matter,

its utterance served in both cases as a safety-valve for the exuberance of life, the joy in existence, which soon enough expends itself and is replaced by a burden of care, worry and weariness, even when men stop short of bitterness of heart and despair of spirit.

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The pity was that though there were no deans and proctors at Friarton, and though the intervention of the rural Charlies or Bobbies might not be called for, the public of the little town was at once more lynx-eyed and sterner in its judgments. There was far less allowance made for the young plebeians than for the young patricians. Unaccountably and inconsistently, much more was expected from the former than from the latter. Old heads on young shoulders were unhesitatingly demanded in many quarters in the case of the embryo tradesmen, with their poor education, and their slender resources by comparison for occupying their leisure hours. It was hard to say why this inequality of opinion existed, unless the early call of these young shopmen to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and the hand-to-hand struggle of some of them with poverty and privation from their cradles upwards, might be supposed, by an austere necessity, to [Pg 16]steady and dignify the lads betimes, not to drive them desperate and impel them to snatch

greedily at any small indulgence, however base and fatal, which came within their reach. If this were the explanation, an exceptional though perilous honour was conferred on ‘the counter-jumpers’ when they were expected to be wiser than their fellows.

For Oliver was certain of one thing, that if any draper’s assistant, or saddler or ironmonger’s apprentice, in Friarton happened to be simply intoxicated, not so much with strong drink as with the restless energy and furious mirth of youth in an ebullition that would be treated with tolerant tenderness at a university, and punished by nothing worse than the mild reproof or the nominal fine, which was a trifle light as air to the privileged undergraduate, the young tradesman would be generally set down as drunk with less ethereal liquor. If caught in the act of creating a disturbance so heinous as [Pg 17]waking the silent night with hideous clamour, giving chase to a surprised, surrounded, and hustled guardian of the public peace, smashing wantonly a street lamp, or wrenching off ‘maliciously’ a bell or knocker, he would be hailed before a bench of magistrates, and mulcted of a sum out of all proportion to his exchequer. And that was not all. He would have to pay what was for him a far heavier penalty. His character, which

was his capital, his chief dependence for work and livelihood, would suffer. His employer, though he had been young himself once, would be so influenced by the magisterial verdict as to begin to lose confidence in his assistant. The inspector of the Sunday or night school in which the lad might have been religiously enough inclined, and sufficiently benevolent to take an interest and have a class, would sharply signify to the offender that he was no credit to the institution, and had better give up his connection with it. [Pg 18]The clergyman, receiving the report of the inspector, would not think himself justified in interfering; on the contrary, he, too, would commence to look coldly on his young parishioner. The lad, sunk in his own estimation by the judgment of those he had respected and who ought to know best, slinking away from their condemnation to seek refuge with his fellow-sinners, who could not at least set their faultlessness against his errors, might become the dog with a bad name in a fair way to be hung.

Oliver Constable did not see how the unequal dispensation of justice was to be made even, but he smarted under the sense of it. The smart tempted him to act very much after the fashion of the great Dr. Johnson when the young bucks for whom he had a kindly regard invaded his room at midnight and summoned him to a lark. In like manner and with less solicitation, Oliver remained many an evening [Pg 19]in the society of Jack Dadd, and of lads with even fewer hostages to respectability than Jack, and went with them—careless of what people said of his, Oliver’s, taste—in the young tradesmen’s senseless but harmless enough raids through the town, because Oliver Constable believed that his presence was a protection to the others, even more than a check on their erratic proceedings; yet in return for the double support, Oliver’s protégés to a great extent fought shy of him.

In these boyish demonstrations in which he chose to bear a part, Oliver had not the relief of cultured cleverness, some development of which had usually been intermingled with the ‘great fun’ and ‘awful jolliness’ of a gathering of university lads, whose rollicking propensities had not been altogether toned down by blue china and sage-green portières. If at a certain stage of the entertainment, missiles would fly about, howls be resorted to, and batterings of [Pg 20]the door indulged in, at another there would occur lively mimicry of the Union speeches; parodies of old classic odes would carry the mind back to Greek and Roman feasts; viewiest of views—transcending the most extravagant speculations of ancient and modern philosophy—would be aired, and would serve at least to show that the young revellers had inherited thoughts and fancies, however crude, as well as the rampant spirits of their years.

But here among the youth of Friarton, which was not golden, or even gilded, a bad style of practical joking and buffoonery—gone out elsewhere save in the worst style of regiment; the boisterous rendering of the mock heroic and still more excruciating comic songs of the lower order of theatres; and a good deal of rude wrangling for lack of a better mode of argument, traversing the horse-play and threatening now and then to terminate in the rowdyism of a free fight, formed the sole alternatives to [Pg 21]sheer noise. These young shopmen, who were very ordinary lads, were nearly a century behind their social superiors in superficial civilisation. Oliver used to compare his class sorrowfully to those nations in Europe like the Poles and Hungarians kept back to do the needful work of repelling the hordes of Eastern barbarians, and apparently never able to make up for lost time.