Richard Dowling - Miracle Gold - A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)

"You will let me have all? I have tasted no food to-day."

"Oh, certainly. I am afraid all is very little. But James can get us more." A faint colour had come into Miss Ashton's face. James, the servant, who had been christened Wilfrid, passed his disengaged hand over his mouth to conceal a smile. Hanbury flushed purple. For a moment there was a pause in the talk of those within hearing.

"What's the matter?" asked a very young man with a very fresh healthy-looking face of a chatty dowager who was looking through a gold-rimmed eye-glass at the dwarf.

"Hanbury's friend, the dwarf, is eating! "

"Good Heavens!" cried the young man leaning against the wall at his back as in dismay.

Leigh went on eating.

"It is excellent bread-and-butter," said he when he had finished the last slice. "I have never tasted better."

Hanbury stooped to pick up nothing and whispered "This is not a restaurant," fiercely into Leigh's ear.

"Eh? No. I am well aware of that," said the other in an ordinary tone and quite audibly. "You would not find such good bread-and-butter as that in any restaurant I know of. Or it may be that I was very hungry."

"Shall I get some more?" asked Miss Ashton, who had by this time recovered from her surprise and was beaming with good-natured amusement.

"You are very kind, thank you. It was enough."

"I tell you what it is, Lady Forcar, that is a remarkable person," said the young man with the fresh complexion, to the dowager.

"If people hear of this it will become the fashion," said Lady Forcar, whose complexion never altered except in her dressing-room or when the weather was excessively hot.

"What?" asked the young man. "What will become the fashion?"

"Eating."

"How shocking!"

"If that man had only money and daring and a handsome young wife, he could do anything-anything. He could make pork sausages the rage. Have you ever eaten pork sausages, Sir Julius?"

"Thousands of times. They are often the only things I can eat for breakfast, but not in London. One should never eat anything they can make in London."

"Pork is a neglected animal," said Lady Forcar with a sigh. "It must be years since I tasted any."

"You know pork isn't exactly an animal?"

"No. Pork sausages are animalculæ of pork with bread and thyme and sweet marjoram and fennel and mint. Have you ever taken it into your mind, Sir Julius, to explain why it is that while a pig when alive is far from agreeable company, no sooner does he die than all the romantic herbs of the kitchen garden gather round him?"

"No doubt it comes under the head of natural selection."

"No doubt it does. Have you ever tried to account for the fact that there are no bones in pork sausages?"

"I fancy it may be explained by the same theory of natural selection. The bones select some other place."

"True. Very true. That never occurred to me before. Do you know I have often thought of giving up my intellect and devoting the remainder of my days to sensualism."

"Good gracious, Lady Forcar, that sounds appalling."

"It does. If I had as much genius as that humpbacked little man, I'd do it, but I feel my deficiency; I know I haven't the afflatus."

"The thing sounds very horrible as you put it. For what form of sensualism would you go in? climate? or soap? or chemical waters? or yachting?"

"None of them. Simply pork. You observe that the people who are nearest the sensible and uncorrupted beasts worship pork. If you hear anyone speak well of pork, that person is a sensualist at heart. I sigh continually for pork. The higher order of apes, including man, live in trees and on fruits that grow nearer to Heaven than any other thing. Cows and sheep and low types of man and brutes of moderate grossness eat things they find on the earth, such as grass and corn, and hares and deer and goats, but it is only pigs and men of the lowest types that burrow into the ground for food. The lowest creature of all is the sensualist, who not only eats potatoes and turnips and carrots but the very pigs that root for things nature has had the decency to hide away from the sight of the eyes of angels and of men. Can you conceive anything lower in the scale of sensual joy or more delicious than pork and onions? I tell you, Sir Julius, if this humpbacked dwarf only had money, a handsome wife and courage, he could popularize sausages being served before the soup. He is the only man since Napoleon the Great who has the manner of power sufficient for such a reform."

"Let us devoutly hope, Lady Forcar, that he may bring about the blessed change, that is if you wish it."

"Wish it! Good Heavens, Sir Julius, you don't for a moment fancy me capable of trifling with such a subject! I say to you deliberately, it is the only thing which would now save Society from ennui and its present awful anxiety about the temperature of the soup."

The dowager Lady Forcar was well known for her persiflage, her devotion to her young and plain daughter-in-law, the head now of her son's house, her inch-thick paint, of which she spoke freely and explained on the grounds of keeping in the swim, and her intense interest in all that affected the welfare of the rural cottager.

Sir Julius Whinfield, in spite of his very fresh young face and affectation, was an excellent authority on Hebrew and the manufacture of silk, so that if he had only happened to live once upon a time he might have talked wisdom to Solomon and dresses with Solomon's wives. He was not a clever conversationalist, but when not under pressure could say sound things pithily. Of Lady Forcar he once declared that he never understood what a saint must have been like when living until he met her. This did not come to her ears and had nothing to do with her liking for the young man.

The tall, military-looking man who had been speaking to Miss Ashton, and who was not a soldier but a composer of music, now came up and said:

"I am in sore need of you, Lady Forcar. I am about to start a new crusade. I am going to try to depose the greatest tyrant of the time."

"And who is that? Wagner? Bismarck? The Russian Bear? The Higher Culture?"

"No. Soap. I am of opinion that this age can do no good so long as it is bound to the chariot wheels of soap. This is the age of science, and soap is its god. Old Q. once became impatient with the river Thames, and said he could see nothing in it-"

"He was born too soon. In his time they had not begun to spy into the slums of nature. For my part I think the microscope is the tyrant of this age. What did old Q. say about our father Tiber?"

"He said he could see nothing in it, that it always went flow-flow-flow, and that was all."

"One must not expect too much of a river. A river is no more than human, after all. But what has soap been doing?"

"Nothing; and in the fact that it has been doing nothing lies one of my chief counts against it. Of old you judged a man by the club to which he belonged, the number of his quarterings, the tailor who made his clothes, the income he had, the wife he married, the horses he backed, or the wine he drank. Now we classify men according to the soap they use. There are more soaps now than patent medicines."

"Soaps are patent medicine for external use only," said Lady Forcar, touching her white plump wrist.

"There may be some sense in a pill against the earthquake, or against an unlucky star, but how on earth can soap be of any use? First you smear a horrid compound over you, and then you wash it off as quickly as possible. Can anything be more childish? It is even more childish than the Thames. It can't even flow of itself. It is a relic of barbarism."

"But are not we ourselves relics of barbarism? Suppose you were to abolish all relics of barbarism in man, you would have no man at all. Heads, and arms, and bodies, are relics of barbaric man. Had not barbaric man heads, and arms, and bodies? Are you going to abolish heads, and arms, and bodies?"