Part 21

"I gather that you will be charged with drunkenness and obscene language."

"Aye. When I'm fou I'm mighty full o' poetry. The exact words were 'bloody symbol.' The man probably thought I was referring to his vices. I told him he was a symbol of Society's hypocritical endeavour to suppress the consequences of its own villainy. My drunkenness is one of those consequences. It is the direct outcome of the habit of loneliness. . . . Did I talk to you about that before? . . . No. It would be your father. Have you ever been to prison?"

Serge regretted that he had never had that experience.

"It was a dirty cell they put me in, but it was shining with the truth, the blackguardly truth of all humanity. Man, I found there what I've been seeking these thirty years. . . . I wonder now if ye'll understand me. I would like to know what ye make of life, or if ye make anything of it at all."

"It seems to me simple enough," replied Serge. "A man is born. Two things lie before him, love and death."

"That's it. That's it. Now mark what I'm going to tell you. On the walls of my cell were drawings and writings--horrible drawings of women, lewd verses, and hysterical outbursts in the name of Jesus Christ. They were conventional, I admit, but that only makes it all the worse. It means that men are imprisoned in their own minds, debarred from woman on the one hand and from God on the other. You may tell me that my cell has been occupied only by lowest types, but if the Prince of Wales were to be incarcerated in it he would in time add to the collection of bawdy rhymes, and if he were followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury there would be one more such inscription as: 'Christ died to save me and the magistrate.' Some men are reduced to filthiness, some to hysteria, some to both. For the superficial and trivial purposes of existence such as the day's work, marriage, family duties, the so-called pleasures of society, they contrive to cover up their deplorable condition. Within themselves they are reduced to the most devastating loneliness. In their day-to-day prison of Society they do not write their thoughts on the walls (except for an occasional jubilant outburst over the successful issue of an amorous adventure), and it has remained for me to find in an actual acknowledged prison the frank revelation of the state of the human mind. . . . It has always been so. . . . Britons never shall be slaves indeed! They never have been, never will be, anything else."

Serge quoted:

"L'inconvénient du règne de l'opinion, c'est qu'elle se mêle à ce dont elle n'a que faire; par exemple, la vie privée. De là la tristesse de l'Amérique et de l'Angleterre."

"Aye," said the old man. "And what would the man that wrote that say if he could see our town and all the other towns, the rusty links in the world-wide thing the men of our time are so pleased to call industrialism? Men make everything in their own image. If you want to know what men are look at their towns, look at their houses, look at their books, their art. . . . At first, being human, ye'll be dazzled and pleased by the conceit and egoism that have gone to the making of them, but soon beneath the conceit and the egoism ye'll find nothing but fear--fear of death, fear of love; appeals to Jesus Christ from the one, abuse of women by way of escape from the other. Fools and blind! There's no escape. There's no good life but in the honest meeting of the one and the other. . . ."

"And women?" asked Serge.

"Their minds reflect only the minds of men. I think now that all the trouble, all the distress, and all the muddle come from the arrogance of men, who have always preferred the reflection of life in the flattering mirror of their minds to life itself. They have dropped the bone for the shadow, when they might have had both. They could have admired the shadow and eaten the bone; but, in the folly of their arrogance, they have thrown both away. . . . They must be almost as great a trial to God as they are to themselves. God is very merciful, since, though they will not love, yet He allows them to die. The mistake is understandable. A man's eyes, all his senses, assure him that he is the centre of the universe. Quite obviously his senses lie, but it is often difficult to see the obvious. There cannot be more than one centre of the universe, and, if a man will only reflect for a moment, he will see that all his neighbours, his dog, the tree in his garden--if he has a garden--every star in the sky, must be victims of the same delusion. Unhappily, though man has lived on this world for thousands of years, he has not yet made the small mental effort necessary for the slight correction of his senses. It has taken him thousands of years to discover that this earth on which he has his dwelling is not the centre of the solar system. That was a shock to his vanity, and his endeavour since then has been to prove his own all-importance in the scheme of things. He has turned to and pigeon-holed his knowledge and called it science. He has become increasingly adventurous and busy, simply because of the restlessness that has come over him on being confronted with his mistakes. He has discovered the whole habitable globe and proceeded to defile it. In my lifetime he has blundered into the discovery of steam-power, electricity, and they talk of oil as a generator of more power. I have seen many changes, but always it has come back to the same thing. The principles of life are few and simple. Every discovery puts a girdle round the earth, every invention that liberates man in body and mind makes the command sound clearly and more loud: 'Thou shalt love and thou shalt die. . . .' With every discovery however the egoism of mankind waxes more and more fat and they stop their ears to the command. They insist that they are the crowning achievement and purpose of creation--the old delusion, you observe, of being the centre of the universe. Those who are most strongly obsessed by this delusion thrust those in whom the conviction is not so strong away from their path or down under their feet. They thrust and fight their way to the centres of human organisation, which they mistake for the centre of the universe, the point at which their centre-hood can be most openly declared for all men to see. They thrust and fight their way to power, only to find themselves powerless, for, in spite of themselves, in spite of the lies with which they are fed and feed themselves, men do obey the laws of love and death. . . . But in such a way, such a halting, mean, decrepit, stealthy way!"

Here the old fellow paused, and Serge said:

"You have come to my contention that good and bad, for men and women, lie wholly in the use or the abuse of things."

But old Lawrie was so intent on his own thoughts that he seemed not to hear Serge. They came to the bridge under the Collegiate Church and leaned against the parapet. Oily black the river ran under the dark walls of warehouses and mills. The lights of the windows and the street lamps shone and flickered in the greasy depths of the tainted water.

"Yon river," said old Lawrie, "is like the life of a man. I know not where it rises, but it comes pure and sweet from the hill-side, meandering and murmuring through meadows, growing wider and ever wider in its irresistible and purposeful progress to the sea. In the towns and cities of men it becomes poisoned and poisonous, but, tainted as it is, it hastens onward to its goal. . . . I beg your pardon if I have obscured my meaning with parable. What I see, and what much bitter experience has taught me, is that there is evil enough lying in wait for men without their adding to the sum of it by mental and moral confusion. Say their place in the creation is the highest, say that in them life finds its keenest expression, should not their glory be the glory of service rather than the vain-glory of servitude? Why must they always be demanding applause for the work they do so ill? Is there any work that men have ever done--outside the arts--that could not have been done better? . . . I say there is none. And I have found the answer to all these questions only to-day, in my prison-cell. To a man diseased with egoism--and how many men are not?--love and death are hurtful things, for they are not flattering to his vanity. In the reflection of life in which men strive to live (for in that reflection their vanity can have free play, exactly as it can and always does when a man scans his features in a glass) love and death are not seen. All human codes of conduct and of morals, all dealings between man and man, are cut to fit the reflection and not life itself. . . . What, then, is human life?--what are the depths that sustain the yeasty turbulence of man's knavery and folly and dirtiness and hysteria? . . . A man is kin and comrade with all things living, from the great sun to the motes dancing in the sun's rays. He is a part of that radiance which rises from the centre of the universe and courses through the veins of every stone and every tree and every living thing. . . . Aye, such a power of life in a man, and such a comical small thing as he makes of himself! . . . Such a comical, small thing as I've made of myself! . . . Rapacity made this town what it is. Think what it might have been, what all towns might have been, if love had made them! . . . There'll come a time when Society will no longer be a prison walled off with fear of love and fear of death. The poets have not lived and sung for nothing. They'll cleanse the walls of the filth and the cry of bitter anguish; and when man has done with discovering the world and playing at conquerors and king o' the castle, he will come to the most glorious day of all when he shall know himself, what he is:

_Great Nature spoke, with air benign: 'Go on, ye human race! This lower world I you resign, Be fruitful and increase. The liquid fire of strong desire, I've poured in every bosom; Here, on this hand, does Mankind stand, And there is Beauty's blossom.'_

That's Robert Burns for ye! . . . Good night."

He walked away abruptly, and Serge only remembered then that he had intended to inform the old man of the fate that had befallen his son. More than ever he felt that Bennett and Annette were, in the main principle of their action, right, though they might be wrong in the details of their manner of doing it. The world would exact a heavy penalty of them. The world would be wrong.

* * *

Old Lawrie awoke next morning to find his wife standing by his bedside holding out a letter. It was from Mrs. Folyat and was extremely offensive. Old Lawrie read it:

"There's no doubt," he said, "that he's a son of mine."

He handed the letter back to his wife, turned over on his side and went to sleep again.

XXVI

MINNA'S CHOICE

_It is always difficult to get rid of a woman at the end of a tragedy._ CHARLES LAMB.

THERE was no competition for the mantle of Annette. In the Burdley Park house the Folyats began to realise that they were increasingly uncomfortable. Annette's powers of organisation had not been great, but she had acquired considerable skill in preventing the consequences of her mistakes and laches being generally felt. . . . When she left there was a sort of domestic collapse. No meals were ever punctual, nor were they tolerably cooked. Mrs. Folyat's temper suffered, and she lashed her three remaining daughters with shrill sarcasm. . . . Mary had a sudden influx of new pupils and absented herself all day long. Gertrude arranged for a round of visits, and Minna became extremely zealous in church work, while Mrs. Folyat simmered in her indignation against the world in general, Annette in particular, and especially against love, that laughing enemy of public opinion. Not Annette's duplicity, not her secrecy, not her defiance of parental authority so rankled in her mother's mind as the black-and-white fact before all the vulgar, prying world that Bennett's father was not respectable. The unlucky Bennett had inserted an advertisement of the marriage--he read it many times himself: _Lawrie--Folyat. On the_ 28_th Sept., Edward Bennett, youngest son of James Lawrie, to Annette, youngest daughter of the Rev. Francis Folyat;_ for it was the first time he had seen words of his own in print. Lower down on the same page was a short paragraph describing his father's appearance in the police court, where, surely, the magistrate had seldom had such an entertaining quarter of an hour. Old Lawrie pursued the argument begun overnight with the policeman (Serge had the third movement of it) and closed it with variations on an idea borrowed from Ruskin, that, Society being responsible for every crime and misdemeanour committed by its individual members, lots should be cast in each case as to which citizen of a certain district should bear the brunt of it. This, he said, would at any rate promote a feeling of responsibility towards one's neighbour, and would in time lead each man to love his neighbour as himself. When that came about there would be neither crime nor misdemeanour.

"Till then," said the magistrate, "I must administer the law as it stands. I am not a philosopher, but it seems to me that the condition you aspire to does obtain. Men do love their neighbours as themselves: that is, very little." (Laughter.)

James Lawrie, cotton-broker and journalist, was fined ten shillings and costs.

The Lawrie family read the report and pretended that they had not done so. The Folyat family read it, and Mrs. Folyat, by continually explaining it away, forced it on the attention of many people who would otherwise never have heard of it. . . . She never forgave Annette. She declared that they, as a family, were utterly disgraced, would never hold up their heads again, that no one would ever call, that there was nothing to be done except for Francis to retire and them all to go and live in some place where no one had ever heard of them before. It was a splendid opportunity for her talent for inventing evils and calling monsters from the vasty deep, and she wasted no moment of it. With her own foolish tongue she set so many scandals going that, for a time, the clerical ladies were chary of calling. The scandals reached the bishop's palace and were inquired into. The bishop's wife, a kindly lady, laid them by calling, and, more, by sending, as she had not done for some years, an invitation to her garden-party. This so elated Mrs. Folyat that she forgot her gloom and tears and set Mary to work on her best black silk gown.

No member of the family, except Francis and Serge, visited Annette in her lodgings in the house of the German woman.

For the benefit of his mother and his fiancée, Frederic vowed that, when next he met Bennett Lawrie, he would horsewhip him.

"At least," said Mrs. Folyat for Serge's benefit, "I have one son who is a man."

* * *

They might refuse to visit Annette, but they could not forget her. Now that she was gone, they realised her more nearly than they had ever done when the whole burden of their comfortable existence rested upon her shoulders. Mrs. Folyat grew more and more querulous as the household fell into worse and worse confusion. She demanded an extra servant; Francis said they could not afford it. She dismissed the hobgoblin, now a fully developed gnome, and, one after another, engaged a series of incompetent, untidy, and immoral females. At last, when one of them corrupted the washerwoman--the washing was done at home in those days on a Monday and Tuesday--and drew her into a wholesale conspiracy of theft, Mrs. Folyat, in despair, sent for Minna and implored her to take the burden of housekeeping off her hands. With a fair show of grace Minna set to, but it was not long before she went to see Annette. Annette was delighted. The days without Bennett were very long, and in their two rooms there was not enough work to occupy her hands for the morning; also, very frequently, she had no money at all and could not go out into the town. She thought, too, that Mina's coming was a sign that her mother was on the point of relenting. Annette never doubted that she loved her mother, and her disapproval often weighed heavily on her spirit.

With a child's pride in a new toy she displayed her two rooms and Bennett's handiwork on the walls and wood and the bulrushes he had painted in oils on the bathroom window.

"What an awful street you live in," said Minna.

"Is it?" Annette had never considered it æsthetically. It was the place she lived in, the scene of her honeymoon. She had filled it with romance and held it holy.

"Ma says," remarked Minna, settling herself largely in Bennett's wicker-chair so that she seemed to overflow it and fill the room,--"Ma says that she is quite sure Bennett will take to drink."

"I don't believe Ma could have said anything so odious."

"Then you don't know Ma."

Minna took stock of the room, and she was divided between pity and contempt for her sister--pity that she should live in such a poor place, contempt that she should be satisfied and pleased with it, and she thought with a shudder of the day when the scales should fall from the lovers' eyes and they should see themselves as they were, in that place, as it was. Minna had so often opened her heart to love only to expel it on finding it ridiculous that she could not conceive of any affection as permanently seated. She was like an inept gardener, who might plant spring flowers in his borders and deem it natural and inevitable that summer and autumn should be empty of all save weeds. She had cultivated a taste for falling in love, and always lost patience with it before she came to love.

She had come to ask Annette how she had contrived the more or less smooth-running of household affairs in Fern Square and Burdley Park, but found herself instead pondering marriage as here represented and also as applied to herself. She asked Annette what she did all day long. Annette told her: she sewed, mended, thought of Bennett, went out to buy his supper.

"A little different from home?" suggested Minna.

"Of course," replied Annette, "I'd like more people. It's hard to make it go all the day round when there's only one. But then, I read. I usedn't to be able to do that."

"How did you manage at home? I can't."

"I don't think I managed at all. Bennett says I'm an awfully bad manager. There were such a lot of things to do that they had to be done."

"How did you make the servant work?"

"I didn't. I did it all myself. If she did anything I generally had to do it all over again. She lit the fires in the morning and cleaned the boots and all the nasty work. I think in their own homes they leave all the rest undone."

Minna rose from her seat and demanded to be shown the bedroom. This was very ugly. She made a wry face.

"Do you like it?--being married, I mean."

Annette smiled. Musingly she said:

"What a silly question!"

* * *

Minna returned to Burdley Park little enlightened but uneasy and troubled. She went to the kitchen and worked, as she thought, very hard, and scolded the servant and lashed herself into a state of anger with things in general. By the evening she was entirely miserable. She sat down in her bedroom and wrote to Basil Haslam:

"I am miserable. Things are getting worse and worse. You have often scolded me for not taking things seriously enough. You little know me. Do men ever know women? Do they ever take women seriously? Don't they always fall back on the woman's instinct which they have invented as an excuse for their own silence and reticence? . . .

"I have been to see Annette. Poor child! It has upset me. I should like to see you--to-morrow, if possible. Can you come? "Yours, M."

She also wrote to Herbert Fry, on a sudden mischievous impulse which she did not take the trouble to understand, she enjoyed it so thoroughly:

"I am going to be married, and I hope to come to London. This place isn't fit to live in, certainly not to be married in."

Her pen scrawled triumphantly as she added:

"Kind regards to Mrs. Fry. "Yours, M."

She sent the letter to Mr. Fry's office address in London Wall. She did not know where he lived.

* * *

Basil Haslam came next day bursting with sympathy and high hope. Minna received him, for the sake of effect, in the kitchen. Like Charlotte, she was cutting bread and butter. She had sent the servant out on an errand.

Basil came in very quietly, and made Minna think of a young inexperienced doctor cultivating a bedside manner. However, she repressed her desire to tease him and said:

"I have learned my lesson."

"What lesson?"

"Something about a stalled ox."

She scraped the butter very thin on the bread by way of heightening her own sensation of a chastening poverty.

"We shall be very poor," she said.

"Oh, Minna! I will make you rich."

"I suppose there is a lot of money in London."

"Will you come to London with me?"

"Didn't I say so in my letter?"

Basil was always literal. He took out her letter and read it again.

"Stupid," said Minna. "I meant it if I didn't say it."

She laid down the knife and the loaf and submitted to her lover's embraces.

Basil could not contain his delight:

"There's my one-fifty a year. I can make three hundred the first year, five hundred the next, a thousand the next . . ."

"A thousand!"

"We'll live in a studio first of all. Then we'll live in a house and give dinner to the dealers and editors. And then we'll live in a house with a studio and the dealers and editors shall give dinner to us."

"That will be fun," said Minna.

Together they carried the tea-tray upstairs and broke the news of their engagement to Mrs. Folyat. Frederic and Jessie Clibran-Bell were there. They had been conspiring with Mrs. Folyat to bring about a speedy wedding. With the assistance of Mr. Clibran-Bell Frederic had been taking work on his own account and had made fifty pounds in a year. Herbert Fry had assisted him by letting him act as his agent--on condition that he had Frederic's agency work in London--and now there was talk of his setting up in an office of his own, if his father could guarantee him one year's expenses.

Mrs. Folyat set all this before Basil and Minna, and excitedly they planned a double wedding in two months' time.

Mrs. Folyat saw in this project the chance of wiping out the stain of Annette's offence.

* * *

Francis was approached that very night. He was for waiting. They could sell no more of their Potsham houses, or there would be no provision for their old age. (He had already begun to think dimly of retirement to the softer south and a garden.) Mrs. Folyat, however, had set her heart on the plan. She wheedled, cajoled, coaxed, scolded, suggested scheme after scheme, until Francis agreed to sell his life-insurance policy, but on condition that the proceeds were divided equally between his children with the exception of Leedham, who was married to a wealthy Portuguese widow, ten years his senior, in Rio . . . Mrs. Folyat pounced on that, and next morning saw to it that he began to take the necessary steps.

Twelve hundred pounds were raised by this means. Serge disapproved and disclaimed his share, so that the rest had two hundred and forty pounds each.

Frederic took an office near Serge's studio, engaged two clerks, and was regarded as sufficiently established to enter into the state of matrimony.

There was an entertaining wedding. Bennett and Annette were invited and formally taken back into the fold. Basil and Minna Haslam went to London to spend their honeymoon in the studio they had taken in Chelsea. Frederic and Jessie Folyat took a house next door but one to James Lawrie's. There were many tears shed over the brides, and after Mrs. Folyat had delivered herself of a sort of funeral oration _à la_ Bossuet, Minna whispered to Serge:

"Ma always did love a theatrical performance."