The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler (new ebook reader .txt) 📗

upon it but Ernest never gets a letter from her without feeling that he is being written to by one who has had direct communication with an angel. “What an awful creature,” he once said to me, “that angel must have been if it had anything to do with making Charlotte what she is.”

“Could you like,” she wrote to him not long ago, “the thoughts of a little sea change here? The top of the cliffs will soon be bright with heather: the gorse must be out already, and the heather I should think begun, to judge by the state of the hill at Ewell, and heather or no heather⁠—the cliffs are always beautiful, and if you come your room shall be cosy so that you may have a resting corner to yourself. Nineteen and sixpence is the price of a return-ticket which covers a month. Would you decide just as you would yourself like, only if you come we would hope to try and make it bright for you; but you must not feel it a burden on your mind if you feel disinclined to come in this direction.”

“When I have a bad nightmare,” said Ernest to me, laughing as he showed me this letter, “I dream that I have got to stay with Charlotte.”

Her letters are supposed to be unusually well written, and I believe it is said among the family that Charlotte has far more real literary power than Ernest has. Sometimes we think that she is writing at him as much as to say, “There now⁠—don’t you think you are the only one of us who can write; read this! And if you want a telling bit of descriptive writing for your next book, you can make what use of it you like.” I daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of the words “hope,” “think,” “feel,” “try,” “bright,” and “little,” and can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of them more than once. All this has the effect of making her style monotonous.

Ernest is as fond of music as ever, perhaps more so, and of late years has added musical composition to the other irons in his fire. He finds it still a little difficult, and is in constant trouble through getting into the key of C sharp after beginning in the key of C and being unable to get back again.

“Getting into the key of C sharp,” he said, “is like an unprotected female travelling on the Metropolitan Railway, and finding herself at Shepherd’s Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to. How is she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction? And Clapham Junction won’t quite do either, for Clapham Junction is like the diminished seventh⁠—susceptible of such enharmonic change, that you can resolve it into all the possible termini of music.”

Talking of music reminds me of a little passage that took place between Ernest and Miss Skinner, Dr. Skinner’s eldest daughter, not so very long ago. Dr. Skinner had long left Roughborough, and had become Dean of a Cathedral in one of our Midland counties⁠—a position which exactly suited him. Finding himself once in the neighbourhood Ernest called, for old acquaintance sake, and was hospitably entertained at lunch.

Thirty years had whitened the Doctor’s bushy eyebrows⁠—his hair they could not whiten. I believe that but for that wig he would have been made a bishop.

His voice and manner were unchanged, and when Ernest remarking upon a plan of Rome which hung in the hall, spoke inadvertently of the Quirĭnal, he replied with all his wonted pomp: “Yes, the Quirĭnal⁠—or as I myself prefer to call it, the Quirīnal.” After this triumph he inhaled a long breath through the corners of his mouth, and flung it back again into the face of Heaven, as in his finest form during his headmastership. At lunch he did indeed once say, “next to impossible to think of anything else,” but he immediately corrected himself and substituted the words, “next to impossible to entertain irrelevant ideas,” after which he seemed to feel a good deal more comfortable. Ernest saw the familiar volumes of Dr. Skinner’s works upon the bookshelves in the Deanery dining-room, but he saw no copy of Rome or the Bible⁠—Which?

“And are you still as fond of music as ever, Mr. Pontifex?” said Miss Skinner to Ernest during the course of lunch.

“Of some kinds of music, yes, Miss Skinner, but you know I never did like modern music.”

“Isn’t that rather dreadful?⁠—Don’t you think you rather”⁠—she was going to have added, “ought to?” but she left it unsaid, feeling doubtless that she had sufficiently conveyed her meaning.

“I would like modern music, if I could; I have been trying all my life to like it, but I succeed less and less the older I grow.”

“And pray, where do you consider modern music to begin?”

“With Sebastian Bach.”

“And don’t you like Beethoven?”

“No, I used to think I did, when I was younger, but I know now that I never really liked him.”

“Ah! how can you say so? You cannot understand him, you never could say this if you understood him. For me a simple chord of Beethoven is enough. This is happiness.”

Ernest was amused at her strong family likeness to her father⁠—a likeness which had grown upon her as she had become older, and which extended even to voice and manner of speaking. He remembered how he had heard me describe the game of chess I had played with the doctor in days gone by, and with his mind’s ear seemed to hear Miss Skinner saying, as though it were an epitaph:⁠—

“Stay:
I may presently take
A simple chord of Beethoven,
Or a small semiquaver
From one of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words.”

After luncheon when Ernest was left alone for half an hour or so with the Dean he plied him so well with compliments that the old gentleman was pleased and flattered beyond his wont. He rose and bowed. “These expressions,” he said,