Yeast: a Problem - Charles Kingsley 3 стр.

St. Francis de Sales: Introduction to a Devout Life.

Poor Lancelot!  Wishing himself fathoms under-ground, ashamed of his book, still more ashamed of himself for his shame, he had to sit there ten physical seconds, or spiritual years, while the colonel solemnly returned him the book, complimenting him on the proofs of its purifying influence which he had given the night before, in helping to throw the turnpike-gate into the river.

But all things do end, and so did this; and the silence of the hounds also; and a faint but knowing whimper drove St. Francis out of all heads, and Lancelot began to stalk slowly with a dozen horsemen up the wood-ride, to a fitful accompaniment of wandering hound-music, where the choristers were as invisible as nightingales among the thick cover.  And hark! just as the book was returned to his pocket, the sweet hubbub suddenly crashed out into one jubilant shriek, and then swept away fainter and fainter among the trees.  The walk became a trotthe trot a canter.  Then a faint melancholy shout at a distance, answered by a Stole away! from the fields; a doleful toot! of the horn; the dull thunder of many horsehoofs rolling along the farther woodside.  Then red coats, flashing like sparks of fire across the gray gap of mist at the rides-mouth, then a whipper-in, bringing up a belated hound, burst into the pathway, smashing and plunging, with shut eyes, through ash-saplings and hassock-grass; then a fat farmer, sedulously pounding through the mud, was overtaken and bespattered in spite of all his struggles;until the line streamed out into the wide rushy pasture, startling up pewits and curlews, as horsemen poured in from every side, and cunning old farmers rode off at inexplicable angles to some well-known haunts of pug: and right ahead, chiming and jangling sweet madness, the dappled pack glanced and wavered through the veil of soft grey mist.  Whats the use of this hurry? growled Lancelot.  They will all be back again.  I never have the luck to see a run.

But no; on and ondown the wind and down the vale; and the canter became a gallop, and the gallop a long straining stride; and a hundred horsehoofs crackled like flame among the stubbles, and thundered fetlock-deep along the heavy meadows; and every fence thinned the cavalcade, till the madness began to stir all bloods, and with grim earnest silent faces, the initiated few settled themselves to their work, and with the colonel and Lancelot at their head, took their pleasure sadly, after the manner of their nation, as old Froissart has it.

till the rolling grass-lands spread out into flat black open fallows, crossed with grassy baulks, and here and there a long melancholy line of tall elms, while before them the high chalk ranges gleamed above the mist like a vast wall of emerald enamelled with snow, and the winding river glittering at their feet.

A polite fox! observed the colonel.  Hes leading the squire straight home to Whitford, just in time for dinner.

They were in the last meadow, with the stream before them.  A line of struggling heads in the swollen and milky current showed the hounds opinion of Reynards course.  The sportsmen galloped off towards the nearest bridge.  Bracebridge looked back at Lancelot, who had been keeping by his side in sulky rivalry, following him successfully through all manner of desperate places, and more and more angry with himself and the guiltless colonel, because he only followed, while the colonels quicker and unembarrassed wit, which lived wholly in the present moment, saw long before Lancelot, how to cut out his work, in every field.

I shant go round, quietly observed the colonel.

Do you fancy I shall? growled Lancelot, who took for grantedpoor thin-skinned soul! that the words were meant as a hit at himself.

Youre a brace of geese, politely observed the old squire; and youll find it out in rheumatic fever.  Thereone fool makes many!  Youll kill Smith before youre done, colonel! and the old man wheeled away up the meadow, as Bracebridge shouted after him,

Oh, hell make a fine riderin time!

In time!  Lancelot could have knocked the unsuspecting colonel down for the word.  It just expressed the contrast, which had fretted him ever since he began to hunt with the Whitford Priors hounds.  The colonels long practice and consummate skill in all he took in hand,his experience of all society, from the prairie Indian to Crockfords, from the prize-ring to the continental courts,his varied and ready store of information and anecdote,the harmony and completeness of the man,his consistency with his own small ideal, and his consequent apparent superiority everywhere and in everything to the huge awkward Titan-cub, who, though immeasurably beyond Bracebridge in intellect and heart, was still in a state of convulsive dyspepsia, swallowing formulæ, and daily well-nigh choked; diseased throughout with that morbid self-consciousness and lust of praise, for which God prepares, with His elect, a bitter cure.  Alas! poor Lancelot! an unlicked bear, with all his sorrows before him!

Come along, quoth Bracebridge, between snatches of a tune, his coolness maddening Lancelot.  Old Lavington will find us dry clothes, a bottle of port, and a brace of charming daughters, at the Priory.  In with you, little Mustang of the prairie!  Neck or nothing!

And in an instant the small wiry American, and the huge Horncastle-bred hunter, were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream, till they floated into a deep reach, and swam steadily down to a low place in the bank.  They crossed the stream, passed the Priory Shrubberies, leapt the gate into the park, and then on and upward, called by the unseen Ariels music before them.Up, into the hills; past white crumbling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered juniper and tottering ashes, their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and vegetation, like wooded islets in a sea of milk.Up, between steep ridges of tuft crested with black fir-woods and silver beech, and here and there a huge yew standing out alone, the advanced sentry of the forest, with its luscious fretwork of green velvet, like a mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles, all glittering and steaming as the sun drank up the dew-drops.  The lark sprang upward into song, and called merrily to the new-opened sunbeams, while the wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly about the hollows, and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine.Up into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,but who can describe them?  Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and transcendental?  How much more those mighty downs, with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in a thin veil of silvery green.

Up, into a vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the narrow sky above.  And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,a little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and grassy graves.  A climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings round the churchyard, told of human care; and from the graveyard itself burst up one of those noble springs known as winter-bournes in the chalk ranges, which, awakened in autumn from the abysses to which it had shrunk during the summers drought, was hurrying down upon its six months course, a broad sheet of oily silver over a temporary channel of smooth greensward.

The hounds had checked in the woods behind; now they poured down the hillside, so close together that you might have covered them with a sheet, straight for the little chapel.

A saddened tone of feeling spread itself through Lancelots heart.  There were the everlasting hills around, even as they had grown and grown for countless ages, beneath the still depths of the primeval chalk ocean, in the milky youth of this great English land.  And here was he, the insect of a day, fox-hunting upon them!  He felt ashamed, and more ashamed when the inner voice whisperedFox-hunting is not the shamethou art the shame.  If thou art the insect of a day, it is thy sin that thou art one.

And his sadness, foolish as it may seem, grew as he watched a brown speck fleet rapidly up the opposite hill, and heard a gay view-halloo burst from the colonel at his side.  The chase lost its charm for him the moment the game was seen.  Then vanished that mysterious delight of pursuing an invisible object, which gives to hunting and fishing their unutterable and almost spiritual charm; which made Shakespeare a nightly poacher; Davy and Chantrey the patriarchs of fly-fishing; by which the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an enchanters wand, potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world, to call up spirits from the vasty deep, which will really come if you do call for themat least if the conjuration be orthodoxand they there.  That spell was broken by the sight of poor wearied pug, his once gracefully-floating brush all draggled and drooping, as he toiled up the sheep-paths towards the open down above.

But Lancelots sadness reached its crisis, as he met the hounds just outside the churchyard.  Another momentthey had leaped the rails; and there they swept round under the gray wall, leaping and yelling, like Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones, over the cradles of the quiet dead.

Lancelot shudderedthe thing was not wrongit was no ones fault,but there was a ghastly discord in it.  Peace and strife, time and eternitythe mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal spirit,the frivolous game of lifes outside show, and the terrible earnest of its inward abysses, jarred together without and within him.  He pulled his horse up violently, and stood as if rooted to the place, gazing at he knew not what.

The hounds caught sight of the fox, burst into one frantic shriek of joyand then a sudden and ghastly stillness, as, mute and breathless, they toiled up the hillside, gaining on their victim at every stride.  The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of rolling flints died away above.  Lancelot looked up, startled at the silence; laughed aloud, he knew not why, and sat, regardless of his pawing and straining horse, still staring at the chapel and the graves.

On a sudden the chapel-door opened, and a figure, timidly yet loftily stepped out without observing him, and suddenly turning round, met him full, face to face, and stood fixed with surprise as completely as Lancelot himself.

That face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them, entered his heart at once, never again to leave it.  Her features were aquiline and grand, without a shade of harshness; her eyes shone out like twain lakes of still azure, beneath a broad marble cliff of polished forehead; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward round the towering neck.  With her perfect masque and queenly figure, and earnest, upward gaze, she might have been the very model from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherinethe ideal of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by girlish devotion.  She was simply, almost coarsely dressed; but a glance told him that she was a lady, by the courtesy of man as well as by the will of God.

They gazed one moment more at each otherbut what is time to spirits?  With them, as with their Father, one day is as a thousand years.  But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the decided interference of the horse, who, thoroughly disgusted at his masters whole conduct, gave a significant shake of his head, and shamming frightened (as both women and horses will do when only cross), commenced a war-dance, which drove Argemone Lavington into the porch, and gave the bewildered Lancelot an excuse for dashing madly up the hill after his companions.

What a horrible ugly face! said Argemone to herself, but so clever, and so unhappy!

Blest pity! true mother of that graceless scamp, young Love, who is ashamed of his real pedigree, and swears to this day that he is the child of Venus!the coxcomb!

[Here, for the sake of the reader, we omit, or rather postpone a long dissertation on the famous Erototheogonic chorus of Aristophaness Birds, with illustrations taken from all earth and heaven, from the Vedas and Proclus to Jacob Boëhmen and Saint Theresa.]

The dichotomy of Lancelots personality, as the Germans would call it, returned as he dashed on.  His understanding was trying to ride, while his spirit was left behind with Argemone.  Hence loose reins and a looser seat.  He rolled about like a tipsy man, holding on, in fact, far more by his spurs than by his knees, to the utter infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers, who kicked and snorted over the down like one of Mephistopheless Demon-steeds.  They had mounted the hillthe deer fled before them in terrorthey neared the park palings.  In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their fox, struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets of fur, a panting, steaming ring of horses round them.  Half a dozen voices hailed him as he came up.

Where have you been?  Hell tumble off!  Hes had a fall!  No he hasnt!  Ware hounds, man alive!  Hell break his neck!

He has broken it, at last! shouted the colonel, as Shiver-the-timbers rushed at the high pales, out of breath, and blind with rage.  Lancelot saw and heard nothing till he was awakened from his dream by the long heave of the huge brutes shoulder, and the maddening sensation of sweeping through the air over the fence.  He started, checked the curb, the horse threw up his head, fulfilling his name by driving his knees like a battering-ram against the palesthe top-bar bent like a withe, flew out into a hundred splinters, and man and horse rolled over headlong into the hard flint-road.

For one long sickening second Lancelot watched the blue sky between his own knees.  Then a crash as if a shell had burst in his facea horrible grinda sheet of flameand the blackness of night.  Did you ever feel it, reader?

When he awoke, he found himself lying in bed, with Squire Lavington sitting by him.  There was real sorrow in the old mans face, Come to himself! and a great joyful oath rolled out.  The boldest rider of them all!  I wouldnt have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick and span Colonel Bracebridges!

Quite right, squire! answered a laughing voice from behind the curtain.  Smith has a clear two thousand a year, and I live by my wits!

CHAPTER II: SPRING YEARNINGS

I heard a story the other day of our most earnest and genial humorist, who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and genial novelist.  I like your novel exceedingly, said a lady; the characters are so naturalall but the baronet, and he surely is overdrawn: it is impossible to find such coarseness in his rank of life!

The artist laughed.  And that character, said he, is almost the only exact portrait in the whole book.

So it is.  People do not see the strange things which pass them every day.  The romance of real life is only one to the romantic spirit.  And then they set up for critics, instead of pupils; as if the artists business was not just to see what they cannot seeto open their eyes to the harmonies and the discords, the miracles and the absurdities, which seem to them one uniform gray fog of commonplaces.