All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story. Walter Besant
of Painting, Drawing, Sculpture and Design; and lectures on Furniture, Color, and Architecture. The arts of photography, china painting, and so forth were to be cultivated; and there were to be classes for the encouragement of leather-work, crewel-work, fret-work, brass-work, wood and ivory carving, and so forth.
"There shall be no house in the East End," cried the girl, "that shall not have its panels painted by one member of the family; its woodwork carved by another, its furniture designed by a third, its windows planted with flowers by another."
Her eyes glowed, her lips trembled.
"You ought to have had the millions," said Harry.
"Nay, you, for you devised it all," she replied. She was so glowing, so rosy red, so soft and sweet to look upon; her eyes were so full of possible love – though of love she was not thinking – that almost the young man fell upon his knees to worship this Venus.
"And all these beautiful things," she went on, breathless, "are only designed for the sake of the Palace of Delight.
"It shall stand somewhere near the central place, this Stepney Green, so that all the East can get to it. It shall have many halls," she went on. "One of them shall be for concerts, and there shall be an organ; one of them shall be for a theatre, and there will be a stage and everything; one shall be a dancing-hall, one a skating rink, one a hall for lectures, readings and recitations; one a picture gallery, one a permanent exhibition of our small arts. We will have our concerts performed from our School of Music; our plays shall be played by our amateurs taught at our School of Acting; our exhibitions shall be supplied by our own people; the things will be sold, and they will soon be sold off and replaced, because they will be cheap. Oh! oh! oh!" She clasped her hands, and fell back in her chair, overpowered with the thought.
"It will cost much money," said Harry weakly, as if money was any object – in dreams.
"The college must be endowed with £30,000 a year, which is a million of money," Angela replied, making a little calculation. "That money must be found. As for the palace, it will require nothing but the building, and a small annual income to pay for repairs and servants. It will be governed by a board of directors, elected by the people themselves, to whom the Palace will belong. And no one shall pay or be paid for any performance. And the only condition of admission will be good behavior, with exclusion as a penalty."
The thing which she contemplated was a deed the like of which makes to tingle the ears of those who hear it. To few, indeed, is it given to communicate to a whole nation this strange and not unpleasant sensation.
One need not disguise the fact that the possession of this power, and the knowledge of her own benevolent intentions, gave Angela a better opinion of herself than she had ever known before. Herein, my friends, lies, if you will rightly regard it, the true reason of the feminine love for power illustrated by Chaucer. For the few who have from time to time wielded authority have ever been persuaded that they wielded it wisely, benevolently, religiously, and have of course congratulated themselves on the possession of so much virtue. What mischiefs, thought Elizabeth of England, Catharine of Russia, Semiramis of Babylon, and Angela of Whitechapel, might have followed had a less wise and virtuous person been on the throne!
It was not unnatural, considering how much she was with Harry at this time, and how long were their talks with each other, that she should have him a great deal in her mind. For these ideas were certainly his, not hers. Newnham, she reflected humbled, had not taught her to originate. She knew that he was but a cabinet-maker by trade. Yet, when she involuntarily compared him, his talk, his manners, his bearing, with the men whom she had met, the young Dons and the undergraduates of Cambridge, the clever young fellows in society who were reported to write for the Saturday, and the Berties and the Algies of daily life, she owned to herself that in no single point did this cabinet-maker fellow compare unfavorably with any of them. He seemed as well taught as the last-made Fellow of Trinity who came to lecture on Literature and Poetry at Newnham; as cultivated as the mediæval Fellow who took Philosophy and Psychology, and was supposed to entertain ideas on religion so original as to amount to a Fifth Gospel: as quick as the most thorough-going society man who has access to studios, literary circles, musical people, and æsthetes; and as careless as any Bertie or Algie of the whole set. This it was which made her blush, because if he had been a common man, a mere Bunker, he might, with his knowledge of his class, have proved so useful a servant to her; so admirable a vizier. Now, unfortunately, she felt that she could only make him useful in this way after she had confided in him; and that to confide in him might raise dangerous thoughts in the young man's head. No: she must not confide in him.
It shows what a thoughtful young person Angela was, that she would blush all by herself only to think of danger to Harry Goslett.
She passed all that night and the whole of the next day and night in a dream over the Palace of Delight and the college for educating people in the sweet and pleasant things – the College of Art.
On the next morning a cold chill fell upon her, caused I know not how; not by the weather, which was the bright and hot weather of last July; not by any ailment of her own, because Angela owned the most perfect mechanism ever constructed by Nature; nor by any unpleasantness in the house, because, now that she had her own room, she generally breakfasted alone; nor by anything in the daily papers – which frequently, by their evil telegrams and terrifying forebodings, do poison the spring and the fountain-head of the day; nor by any letter, because the only one she had was from Constance Woodcote at Newnham, and it told the welcome news that she was appointed Mathematical Lecturer with so much a head for fees, and imploring Angela to remember her promise that she would endow Newnham with a scholarship. Endow Newnham! Why, she was going to have a brand-new college of her own, to say nothing of the high schools for boys and girls. Perhaps the cause of her depression was the appearance of Bunker, who came to tell her that he had at last found the house which would suit her. No other house in the neighborhood was in any way to compare with it; the house stood close by, at the southwest corner of Stepney Green. It was ready for occupation, the situation was as desirable as that of Tirzah the Beautiful; the rent was extremely low, considering the many advantages; all the nobility and gentry of the place, he declared, would flock around a dressmaker situated in Stepney Green itself; there were rooms for show-rooms, with plenty of other rooms and everything which would be required; finally, as if this were an additional recommendation, the house belonged to himself.
"I am ready," he said, with a winning smile, "to make a sacrifice of my own interests in order to oblige a young lady, and I will take a lower rent from you than I would from anybody else."
She went with him to "view" the house. One looks at a picture, a horse, an estate, a book, but one "views" a house. Subtle and beautiful distinction, which shows the poetry latent in the heart of every house agent! It was Bunker's own. Surely that was not the reason why it was let at double the rent of the next house, which belonged to Angela herself, nor why the tenant had to undertake all the repairs, paper, and painting, external and internal, nor why the rent began from that very day, instead of the half-quarter or the next quarter-day. Bunker himself assured Miss Kennedy that he had searched the whole neighborhood for a suitable place, but could find none so good as his own house. As for the houses of the Messenger property, they were liable, he said, to the demands of a lawyer's firm, which had no mercy on a tenant, while, as for himself, he was full of compassion, and always ready to listen to reason. He wanted no other recommendation than a year's rent paid in advance, and would undertake to execute, at the tenant's cost, the whole of the painting, papering, whitewashing, roofing, pipes, chimneys, and general work himself; "whereas, young lady," he added, "if you had taken one of those Messenger houses, you cannot tell in what hands you would have found yourself, nor what charges you would have had to pay."
He shook his fat head, and rattled his keys in his pocket. So strong is the tendency of the human mind to believe what is said, in spite of all experience to the contrary, that his victim smiled and thanked him, knowing very well that the next minute she would be angry with herself for so easily becoming a dupe to a clumsy rogue.
She thanked him for his consideration, she said, yet she was uneasily conscious that he was overreaching her in some way, and she hesitated.
"On the Green," he said. "What a position! Looking out on the garden! With such rooms! And