Part 12

Ada, the servant, was out, and she looked round the kitchen and thought how cosy it was, how much nicer, really, than any other room in the house, except, perhaps, the study. Upstairs Serge laughed. No one else in the house laughed--not like Serge. He was always so happy. No one else was happy like that. Not her father, nor her mother, nor Gertrude, even though Bennett Lawrie loved her so. . . . Bennett Lawrie was a vivid figure to Annette. He was so intense, but he never laughed. She felt that she would like to make him laugh. She began to invent foolish jokes and antics that perhaps might make him laugh, and was so busied with them that without her hearing him Frederic came into the kitchen and stood above her.

"Get me some supper," he said, "I'm devilish hungry."

"Oh! You!"

Annette lit the gas and stood staring at him with her hand above her head, leaning on the gas-bracket. He looked very white and mean and shrivelled, and the skin under his eyes was puffy.

"What are you staring at?" he said. "I'm hungry."

Annette put food in front of him, and he ate wolfishly.

"I'm devilish hungry," he said. "I've been walking miles. I'm tired and hungry. I've walked miles."

"Did you go to see her?" It was out before she was aware.

Frederic dropped his knife into his plate with a clatter.

"What the devil do you mean? Who?"

"Annie."

Frederic gripped her wrist and jumped to his feet and thrust his face close to hers.

"For God's sake!" he said under his breath. "For God's sake! What do you mean? Don't you blab. Don't you blab!"

"You're hurting me."

"What do you mean?"

"I read her letter. It was in your coat. I was mending it. I didn't mean to. Why don't you write to her."

"What letter? I don't know any letter."

"You do. She wants you to write to her."

"I have written."

"Go on with your supper, then."

"You won't tell any one. Promise you won't tell any one."

"No. All right. I won't tell any one."

"You're a queer one, Annette. You don't seem to mind."

"Mind!"

Annette was astonished to find that she had got beyond being distressed or shocked. She was hardly at all interested in Frederic's state of mind or condition. She felt that something must be done, and she wanted to know exactly what. Annie, whoever or whatever she might be, was unhappy and something must be done to help her. Annette turned to Frederic and said:

"What are you going to do?"

He replied:

"What can I do? Don't look at me like that. I'm not so bad as all that, I'm not."

"But it is wicked."

"I know it is, but you can't help it. I don't know. Everything seems all wrong. You go along quite quietly for months and months, and then suddenly everything's all wrong. It's queer to be talking to you like this. You don't understand the least little bit, though you are such a queer one. But I can talk to you just because you don't understand."

"I do understand," said Annette.

"How could you? You're only a little girl. Annie Lipsett--that's her name. She's going to have a baby. I suppose I ought to marry her. Lots of fellows do get married like that. I can't afford it. I don't love her. That's what's so horrible. I don't love her, and I can't pretend that I do, I can't make myself believe that I do. I was so beastly miserable, that's what it was. Things go wrong, and they stay wrong, and then you want something and clutch at it and miss it. Miss it all the time. It wasn't just a beastly thing, I swear it wasn't. I was so miserable, that's what it was. I'm miserable now, and the worst of it all is that I'm enjoying it. That's the sort of brute I am."

Annette found that she was crying. Large tears welled out of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks into her mouth. The thing was closing in on her from all sides and suffocating her. Her imagination was baffled. She had thought herself bold, and suddenly she was out of her depth. She struck out blindly, and presently found a footing on the hard rock of conventional morality. From a suffering human being, craving sympathy, Annie Lipsett became a wicked woman to be condemned and shunned, a base creature who had enticed and enchained Frederic. Her footing on this rock was very insecure. Soon she was swept off it and flung hurtling down an empty sense of the treachery of her own emotions.

She heard Frederic saying again:

"Don't you tell any one!"

She muttered a reply. Frederic finished his supper and she removed his plate and the empty dish into the scullery. Frederic followed her, She trembled from head to foot, and longed only for him to leave her. He stood plucking at the roller-towel on the door, and he said:

"If any one did to you what I've done to her I should have to horsewhip him. Isn't it odd? I should think it simply absurd if anybody wanted to horsewhip me."

Annette had a sudden gust of rage and through her clenched teeth she threw at him:

"If you don't go away I'll smash a plate in your face."

Frederic laughed nervously.

"You are a queer one," he said. "But we're a queer family, and this is a queer house, isn't it?"

Annette rushed by him, all her nerves tingling and throbbing, and flew upstairs until she came to Serge's room. There she stood gasping, and presently broke out laughing and crying together. Serge gave her water and slapped her hands, and motioned to Basil Haslam to leave the room. Basil went and Annette clung to Serge and began to sob. Her laughter ceased, and when she had done crying Serge laid her on the bed and sat holding her hand for a long time, during which he forbade her to speak. Her head began to ache furiously, and every little sound in the house became explosive and a torment to her. Serge seemed to realise that too, and began to talk to her in a low, soothing voice. He described the bay at Cape Town as the ship heaves and throbs her way out of it with the little fringe of lights on the water's-edge under the mountain, and he told of long days at sea, the whole voyage home to England, the most beautiful country in the world. Something he gave her of what it had been to him to see green fields again and English skies and orchards and red poppies in the corn, and little, comfortable, cool English rivers.

She hardly heard what he said. His voice lulled her, and his presence, the pressure of his hand were infinitely soothing. Soon she fell asleep, and while she slept he did not stir.

She woke happy and smiled at him, peering through the darkness for his kind eyes. She told him then, and because he said nothing she asked him if he did not think it wicked.

"Wicked!" he said. "There's good in it and bad too, just the same as there is in everything and everybody. Their happiness has been theirs, their folly has been theirs. Their unhappiness must be theirs too. You and I can do nothing to alter it. We can only help Frederic if he wants help. We can't help him if we make the blunder of applying an abstract moral formula to what is to him a very concrete, actual, human mess. Keep it to yourself, my dear. You will understand one day."

XIV

WHITE BEARD AND GREY

_Maggior dolore e ben la Ricordanza O nell' amaro inferno amena stanza?_ D. G. ROSSETTI

FRANCIS had many moments of doubt as to the wisdom of encouraging and abetting Bennett Lawrie in his desire to enter the Church. To begin with he had no money; he was engaged--Francis supposed it must be called an engagement--to Gertrude, and even supposing it were possible to take the young man as curate as soon as he was ordained, that meant at most eighty pounds a year, and he was already earning more than that. Without influence the prospect of his being granted a living was, to say the least of it, remote. To be sure the rector of St. James, Irlam, had begun life as an itinerant violinist, but then he had a fruity tenor voice which made him very popular with women; also he had married a lady with a snug fortune.

"One must," thought Francis, half apologising to himself. "One must think of these things materially. If I had thought of it materially I should never have. . ."

He broke off the thought and began to tell himself that he ought to encourage the young in high-souled endeavour. Young Lawrie was certainly remarkable, talented, very much in earnest, and, as far as one could see, very much in love. To be sure Gertrude was a good ten years older than he, but that was no bad thing for a young man of an ardent temperament. Certainly from Gertrude's point of view it was better for her to be the wife of a clergyman than the wife of a clerk. But ought one to let these social considerations weigh in the matter? It was very difficult (thought Francis), very difficult. She would be poor in any case. She might have a large family. She was a little woman, rather plain, just the type that produces enormous families. And families--could there be anything more harassing than to have a large family and to have no means of making provision for them?

On that Francis's reflections stopped. They went round and round. It was his business to encourage the production of children (in wedlock), and year in and year out he had faithfully fulfilled his duty, without ever pausing to consider whether he had practised what he preached. Now he saw that he had done so, and was shocked to find himself rather dismayed at the result, and reluctant to face the possibility of his daughter doing the same. For years he had hardly thought about his work. Since the death of his son and the brutal outbreak that followed it, hostilities had ceased (with the exception of an occasional splutter at an Easter vestry meeting) and the work of his church, like his domestic life, had run on automatically. Time had hardly existed for him. His thoughts from disuse had grown sluggish, and it was very very slowly borne in upon him that his children were beginning to claim a separate existence, and that they had every right to do so. When he realised it he was forced painfully to face the fact that he was impotent to help them either with money, or, what is more precious, real sympathy. It was only with an effort that he was able to set aside the grotesqueness of Gertrude's fancy and to force himself to see it with her eyes and to take it seriously. He looked back over the years and caught a glimpse of the wasted opportunities, and though he never indulged in the luxury of self-torment he cried in his heart:

"God forbid that when they are as old as I they should be even as I am."

He was not sufficiently skilled in self-analysis to lay his finger on the weakness that had brought him to such a pass. He thought no ill of his wife. He knew enough of human nature to admit that nothing outside a man's own soul could dishonour him or bring him to harm. Unconsciously he was disloyal to the tenets of his calling in considering his own case. With all others he professed that God moved in a mysterious way and that everything happened for the best according to God's providence. He had long since abandoned all belief in the possibility of a noble collective life here on earth, for he had seen too much not to know that when two or three are gathered together it is not to seek God, but to promote knavery and jealousy. Moments of agony he had had when he had half seen his own scepticism, but the simple devotion of some of his parishioners, craftsmen, and factory hands, and his own great liking for many of his poor had kept him from throwing up his work, and he would say:

"Though I do it ill, yet it might be done worse."

Besides, he could not afford to renounce the stipend. Every year he had made small inroads upon his capital, fifty pounds here and a hundred there to satisfy creditors or sudden demands of charity for larger sums than he could afford to pay out of income.

Well, well--no doubt he was making a mountain out of a molehill, and things were not nearly so bad as they seemed. The house had been much jollier since Serge came back and Annette brought youth and joy into it, and if none of the family seemed to be on the way to brilliant lives, after all there were better things in the world than success, and nothing mattered so much as affection and love. And yet, how small a part love played in human life! How soon it died!

In the end Francis laughed at himself, and told himself that thinking was no use. It neither made good better nor bad worse. Things were what they were and nothing would alter them. Young Lawrie, with his brain stuffed full of illusions, wished to enter into Holy Orders. So be it. He had promised to do all he could to help him: after all it was something to find a young man with thoughts higher than the pleasure next to hand, and the first step seemed to be to see his father.

So Francis Folyat wrote to James Lawrie in his awkward spidery hand--(he could not bear writing letters)--and asked for an interview in order to discuss with him the future of his son Bennett.

James Lawrie replied courteously, appointing a day, and on it Francis walked across Dale Park and over the new Cromwell Bridge and up the shabby-genteel street from the river to the stucco Gothic house.

Tibby opened the door to him and looked him up and down.

"You'll be Mr. Folyat," she said.

"That is my name."

"Our Bennett's been a new lad since he went to your house, Mr. Folyat."

"I'm glad of that."

"It's not all to the good," said Tibby, grumpily, and she turned and led him down the long passage to the dining-room.

She announced:

"The Reverend Mr. Folyat to see you."

James Lawrie was sitting at the table engrossed in a game of dominoes. He looked up at Francis and nodded, and pointed with the stem of his pipe to a chair on the other side of the table. Francis took it, and Tibby left them. Old Lawrie rattled the dice and turned up a six and three. He grunted:

"Can't do it. H'm. H'm. Can't borrow again. No more credit. Will you join me, sir?"

"Gladly," said Francis, and they began to play. They played for an hour in silence, and Francis won three times to his opponent's twice.

"You'll be a college man, sir?" asked old Lawrie.

"Dublin," said Francis, and helped himself to tobacco from the greasy old pouch that lay on the table.

"I've a great reverence for college men, having missed it myself. I had two or three friends in Edinburgh, but I was never there except in their letters. I've never been anywhere except in books, and wherever I go, and whatever I do, and whatever I be, I think there's always the printed page between me and myself. . . . Do you understand that?"

"I don't think so."

"It's like this. There's such a thing as a habit of loneliness, and if it really fastens on a man there's nothing can break through it, not love, not misery, not great joy, nor a wife and bairns, nothing. Living like that, a man gets a clear brain like a searchlight so that he can see all his comings out and his goings in and the play of his thoughts, honest and dishonest, and he prowls about and about his own self like a caged beast. Do you know that?"

"Something like it."

"Nine-tenths of us are condemned to it. My father was a minister up in Galloway. A real hell-fire man he was, but he died of a consumption, hell-fire being nothing against the mists of the place he lived in. Several men from our glen, my uncles among them, had gone to England and made money. They said it was easy, so I came down the first. I had a head stuffed full of poetry and the Bible and Scots righteousness--you need to be a Scot to know what that means--and for years I was desperately lonely. Two of my brothers followed me. They did well, as they call it. They made money and saved and saved, and made more money. They both married rich women. I got lonelier and lonelier, and more and more caught up in the trick of watching myself. I lived with my mother for years. I married to get away from her, and it was an awful day for the woman that married me. I could not let her in to me. . . . Can you make anything of that? You're a younger man than I am. Can you make anything of that? I'm an old white-bearded sinner, and if all my life was to be written they'd say it was an awful tragedy. But it isn't that. It's a fool's comedy. There's no tragedy save in a strong man who can put up a fight against his own weakness. Men like me, and that's most of us, waste our lives in fighting against our own strength. Oh! I tell you there's many a thing a man thinks of in his loneliness, but it's all thought, thought, thought; it never grows into action. One thing a man realises pretty quickly, and that is that there is nothing wrong with the world except the monstrous egoism of men and women. It is easy to realise but almost impossible to fight against. All along the line we refuse to accept the laws and principles that govern the universe because they are so little flattering to our precious vanity. We make laws against nature, organise ourselves into churches or states and nations against her, invent trumpery codes of morality in the blind hope of cheating her. From generation to generation it is one long wasteful and pitifully vain struggle against nature. . . . Look at the result. Look at the places we live in. Look at what we call society. Why we haven't even devised any method of insuring that every man and every woman shall have the bare necessaries of life; in thousands of years we haven't learned to contrive that civilisation shall give the majority of men greater comfort and happiness than they can find in barbarism. We've tried this game of civilisation over and over again, but we have never got beyond the most stupid materialism. You can almost count the really civilised men--men who have been masters of life and lived it at all points and enriched it for all those with whom they came in contact--on two hands. The rest of us are caught up by the habit of loneliness, and we are prisoners all our lives. I know. I don't give a brass farthing for material success or failure. I know the bitterness of spiritual failure. You want to talk to me about my son. I know nothing of him. He knows nothing of me. That is my fault, not his. Now, what have you to say?"

"This is all very interesting," replied Francis, rather at a loss where to begin. "My eldest son would discuss the merits and demerits of civilisation with you better than I, and certainly with more warmth than I can bring to bear on the subject."

He had an uncomfortable feeling that he entirely agreed with old Lawrie, and an equally uncomfortable sense that he would agree also with the opposite side if it were presented, and suddenly candour made him say so. Lawrie chuckled and rode off on his crotchet of loneliness again:

"That is so. That is so. Because of the habit of loneliness there cannot be unity among men. What men think is of no importance, because it has so little relation to what they do or what they are. The opinion of any body of men, even the most intelligent, is generally only the lowest common multiple of their prejudices. Theories are quite useless, so are opinions. When a man is in possession of the truth he acts. When he is not he theorises, or cowers behind his prejudicies, which amounts to the same thing. Look at the people in this town. How many of them are capable of action, how many are there whose days are not spent in superficial employments, first to get bread, and second to escape boredom when their work is done. They muddle through their work, they make a great deal of money for a few people who have no idea what to do with it when they have got it, and, since they are in an intolerable position, they have nothing to support them, and the monstrous system they have drifted into creating, but a hard, conceited pride. That makes them blinder than ever. They can do nothing to make their city beautiful, nothing to remedy the shiftless blundering of their fathers, nothing in the way of art to make amends to the people whose lives they have cramped and ruined in their factories and slums. Their only notion is to get more and more money out of them."

"I never thought of it like that," rejoined Francis. "All the people I meet seem to be very pleasant."

"They don't know they're doing it. They follow their own little rules of expedience and call them the unchanging laws of God. Your Pharisee always imagines he has made things all right by taking God's name in vain, vain indeed, for they beget nothing but vanity. I'm just as bad as they, for I've sold my three sons to them for a wage that begins at ten shillings a week and, in the course of thirty years, will grow into a salary of three hundred pounds a year."

"I have worked for thirty years and more for very little more than that."

"Aye, but you believe that you are working in a holy cause, so that the work itself is enough, and you're content while you can pay your way. All work ought to be in a holy cause and done in a holy spirit. . . . I used to think that when I was a young man. I used to feel it too. I think so now, but I don't feel it any more. These things just go on, and I sit and watch them and do nothing, and I understand why everyone else does nothing either. It's the old men who profit by it all and the young men are never wise enough to overturn it, and they could so easily by refusing to step into the old men's shoes. But we must all grow old."

"The youngest time in all my life," said Francis, "was during the years after I first came here, when I had to fight to do things in my own way in my own church."

"Exactly," said old Lawrie. "That's it. The fighting; the fighting to do things in your own way, in your own life; if you can do it, if you can keep it up, and hold out to the very end."

Francis pounced on that as an opportunity of coming to his mission, and he set forth all that he had to say about Bennett.

Old Lawrie received it in blank astonishment.

"Well, well," he said. "Wants to be a parson, does he? Is it the clothes he's after? He was always a great one for dressing up."

"I think it is more serious with him than that. I think it is very serious."

Old Lawrie thought for a long time and tugged at his beard, while Francis gazed at him and said to himself what a fine face the old fellow had.

"Do you mind," said the old man at length, "do you mind if I read you some poetry?" He took up a scrapbook and put spectacles on his beak-like nose and read in a great voice:

_Two shepherds on the windy fell Sat crackin' in the peep o' day. They heard the tolling o' the bell That marked a soul had passed away._

_And white beard to old grey beard said, "Another soul has passed away." But old grey beard this answer made, "The night is flowering into day."_

_"Nay, nay," said white beard, "that's not true, Tis day that's sinking into night." "Night into day!"--and high words flew. They cursed and swore with all their might._

_They argued on that windy fell And came to blows. . . . The twilight sped. The distant tolling of the bell Told the great sun a man was dead._

That was the end of the poem.

Francis said:

"Did you write that yourself?"

"I did. I wrote that myself. . . . You wish me to say will I or will I not let my son Bennett go for a parson. Have you a mind for irony? There's irony in this. In the first place I have no money. In the second I cannot say 'Yes' or 'No' to that or any other thing in this house. You must see the boy's mother. I'll send you to her with a note. . . . What are you staring at, man? Have you never seen a prisoner before? When you live in a prison you comply with the regulations. . . . Do you see that scar on my forehead? My eldest son did that when he was a boy of twelve. He's a man now and speaks to me once a month. He comes in here and stands by the door, and he says 'How are you, father?' And I say 'I'm very well,' and then he goes away. He's a man now, and, let me tell you, he has a bath every morning."