Yeast: a Problem - Charles Kingsley

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beseeching editor to send to post that night; next, he was on the windward side of the cover, and dare not light a cigar; and lastly, his mucous membrane in general was not in the happiest condition, seeing that he had been dining the evening before with Mr. Vaurien of Rottenpalings, a young gentleman of a convivial and melodious turn of mind, who sang—and played also—as singing men are wont—in more senses than one, and had ‘ladies and gentlemen’ down from town to stay with him; and they sang and played too; and so somehow between vingt-un and champagne-punch, Lancelot had not arrived at home till seven o’clock that morning, and was in a fit state to appreciate the feelings of our grandfathers, when, after the third bottle of port, they used to put the black silk tights into their pockets, slip on the leathers and boots, and ride the crop-tailed hack thirty miles on a winter’s night, to meet the hounds in the next county by ten in the morning.  They are ‘gone down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,’ with John Warde of Squerries at their head—the fathers of the men who conquered at Waterloo; and we their degenerate grandsons are left instead, with puny arms, and polished leather boots, and a considerable taint of hereditary disease, to sit in club-houses, and celebrate the progress of the species.

      Whether Lancelot or his horse, under these depressing circumstances, fell asleep; or whether thoughts pertaining to such a life, and its fitness for a clever and ardent young fellow in the nineteenth century, became gradually too painful, and had to be peremptorily shaken off, this deponent sayeth not; but certainly, after five-and-thirty minutes of idleness and shivering, Lancelot opened his eyes with a sudden start, and struck spurs into his hunter without due cause shown; whereat Shiver-the-timbers, who was no Griselda in temper—(Lancelot had bought him out of the Pytchley for half his value, as unrideably vicious, when he had killed a groom, and fallen backwards on a rough-rider, the first season after he came up from Horncastle)—responded by a furious kick or two, threw his head up, put his foot into a drain, and sprawled down all but on his nose, pitching Lancelot unawares shamefully on the pommel of his saddle.  A certain fatality, by the bye, had lately attended all Lancelot’s efforts to shine; he never bought a new coat without tearing it mysteriously next day, or tried to make a joke without bursting out coughing in the middle . . . and now the whole field were looking on at his mishap; between disgust and the start he turned almost sick, and felt the blood rush into his cheeks and forehead as he heard a shout of coarse jovial laughter burst out close to him, and the old master of the hounds, Squire Lavington, roared aloud—

      ‘A pretty sportsman you are, Mr. Smith, to fall asleep by the cover-side and let your horse down—and your pockets, too!  What’s that book on the ground?  Sapping and studying still?  I let nobody come out with my hounds with their pocket full of learning.  Hand it up here, Tom; we’ll see what it is.  French, as I am no scholar!  Translate for us, Colonel Bracebridge!’

      And, amid shouts of laughter, the gay Guardsman read out,—

      ‘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 trot—the 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 ride’s-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.  ‘What’s 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 on—down 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.

      ‘Thorough bush, through brier,

      Thorough park, through pale;’

      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.  ‘He’s 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 Reynard’s 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 colonel’s 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 shan’t go round,’ quietly observed the colonel.

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

      ‘You’re a brace of geese,’ politely observed the old squire; ‘and you’ll find it out in rheumatic fever.  There—“one fool makes many!”  You’ll kill Smith before you’re done, colonel!’ and the old man wheeled away up the meadow, as Bracebridge shouted after him,—

      ‘Oh, he’ll make a fine rider—in 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 colonel’s long practice and consummate skill in all he took in hand,—his experience of all society, from the prairie Indian to Crockford’s, 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

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