The waiting in London for July to come was daily more unbearable to Shelton, and if it had not been for Ferrand, who still came to breakfast, he would have deserted the Metropolis. On June first the latter presented himself rather later than was his custom, and announced that, through a friend, he had heard of a position as interpreter to an hotel at Folkestone.
"If I had money to face the first necessities," he said, swiftly turning over a collection of smeared papers with his yellow fingers, as if searching for his own identity, "I 'd leave today. This London blackens my spirit."
"Are you certain to get this place," asked Shelton.
"I think so," the young foreigner replied; "I 've got some good enough recommendations."
Shelton could not help a dubious glance at the papers in his hand. A hurt look passed on to Ferrand's curly lips beneath his nascent red moustache.
"You mean that to have false papers is as bad as theft. No, no; I shall never be a thief—I 've had too many opportunities," said he, with pride and bitterness. "That's not in my character. I never do harm to anyone. This"—he touched the papers—"is not delicate, but it does harm to no one. If you have no money you must have papers; they stand between you and starvation. Society, has an excellent eye for the helpless—it never treads on people unless they 're really down." He looked at Shelton.
"You 've made me what I am, amongst you," he seemed to say; "now put up with me!"
"But there are always the workhouses," Shelton remarked at last.
"Workhouses!" returned Ferrand; "certainly there are—regular palaces: I will tell you one thing: I've never been in places so discouraging as your workhouses; they take one's very heart out."
"I always understood," said Shelton coldly; "that our system was better than that of other countries."
Ferrand leaned over in his chair, an elbow on his knee, his favourite attitude when particularly certain of his point.
"Well," he replied, "it 's always permissible to think well of your own country. But, frankly, I've come out of those places here with little strength and no heart at all, and I can tell you why." His lips lost their bitterness, and he became an artist expressing the result of his experience. "You spend your money freely, you have fine buildings, self-respecting officers, but you lack the spirit of hospitality. The reason is plain; you have a horror of the needy. You invite us—and when we come you treat us justly enough, but as if we were numbers, criminals, beneath contempt—as if we had inflicted a personal injury on you; and when we get out again, we are naturally degraded."
Shelton bit his lips.
"How much money will you want for your ticket, and to make a start?" he asked.
The nervous gesture escaping Ferrand at this juncture betrayed how far the most independent thinkers are dependent when they have no money in their pockets. He took the note that Shelton proffered him.
"A thousand thanks," said he; "I shall never forget what you have done for me"; and Shelton could not help feeling that there was true emotion behind his titter of farewell.
He stood at the window watching Ferrand start into the world again; then looked back at his own comfortable room, with the number of things that had accumulated somehow—the photographs of countless friends, the old arm-chairs, the stock of coloured pipes. Into him restlessness had passed with the farewell clasp of the foreigner's damp hand. To wait about in London was unbearable.
He took his hat, and, heedless of direction, walked towards the river. It was a clear, bright day, with a bleak wind driving showers before it. During one of such Shelton found himself in Little Blank Street. "I wonder how that little Frenchman that I saw is getting on!" he thought. On a fine day he would probably have passed by on the other side; he now entered and tapped upon the wicket.
No. 3 Little Blank Street had abated nothing of its stone-flagged dreariness; the same blowsy woman answered his inquiry. Yes, Carolan was always in; you could never catch him out—seemed afraid to go into the street! To her call the little Frenchman made his appearance as punctually as if he had been the rabbit of a conjurer. His face was as yellow as a guinea.
"Ah! it's you, monsieur!" he said.
"Yes," said Shelton; "and how are you?"
"It 's five days since I came out of hospital," muttered the little Frenchman, tapping on his chest; "a crisis of this bad atmosphere. I live here, shut up in a box; it does me harm, being from the South. If there's anything I can do for you, monsieur, it will give me pleasure."
"Nothing," replied Shelton, "I was just passing, and thought I should like to hear how you were getting on."
"Come into the kitchen,—monsieur, there is nobody in there. 'Brr! Il fait un froid etonnant'!"
"What sort of customers have you just now?" asked Shelton, as they passed into the kitchen.
"Always the same clientele," replied the little man; "not so numerous, of course, it being summer."
"Could n't you find anything better than this to do?"
The barber's crow's-feet radiated irony.
"When I first came to London," said he, "I secured an engagement at one of your public institutions. I thought my fortune made. Imagine, monsieur, in that sacred place I was obliged to shave at the rate of ten a penny! Here, it's true, they don't pay me half the time; but when I'm paid, I 'm paid. In this, climate, and being 'poitrinaire', one doesn't make experiments. I shall finish my days here. Have you seen that young man who interested you? There 's another! He has spirit, as I had once—'il fait de la philosophie', as I do—and you will see, monsieur, it will finish him. In this world what you want is to have no spirit. Spirit ruins you."
Shelton looked sideways at the little man with his sardonic, yellow, half-dead face, and the incongruity of the word "spirit" in his mouth struck him so sharply that he smiled a smile with more pity in it than any burst of tears.
"Shall we 'sit down?" he said, offering a cigarette.
"Merci, monsieur, it is always a pleasure to smoke a good cigarette. You remember, that old actor who gave you a Jeremiad? Well, he's dead. I was the only one at his bedside; 'un vrai drole'. He was another who had spirit. And you will see, monsieur, that young man in whom you take an interest, he'll die in a hospital, or in some hole or other, or even on the highroad; having closed his eyes once too often some cold night; and all because he has something in him which will not accept things as they are, believing always that they should be better. 'Il n'y a riens de plus tragique'!"
"According to you, then," said Shelton—and the conversation seemed to him of a sudden to have taken too personal a turn—"rebellion of any sort is fatal."
"Ah!" replied the little man, with the eagerness of one whose ideal it is to sit under the awning of a cafe, and talk life upside down, "you pose me a great problem there! If one makes rebellion; it is always probable that one will do no good to any one and harm one's self. The law of the majority arranges that. But I would draw your attention to this"—and he paused; as if it were a real discovery to blow smoke through his nose—"if you rebel it is in all likelihood because you are forced by your nature to rebel; this is one of the most certain things in life. In any case, it is necessary to avoid falling between two stools—which is unpardonable," he ended with complacence.
Shelton thought he had never seen a man who looked more completely as if he had fallen between two stools, and he had inspiration enough to feel that the little barber's intellectual rebellion and the action logically required by it had no more than a bowing acquaintanceship.
"By nature," went on the little man, "I am an optimist; it is in consequence of this that I now make pessimism. I have always had ideals; seeing myself cut off from them for ever, I must complain; to complain, monsieur, is very sweet!"
Shelton wondered what these ideals had been, but had no answer ready; so he nodded, and again held out his cigarettes, for, like a true Southerner, the little man had thrown the first away, half smoked.
"The greatest pleasure in life," continued the Frenchman, with a bow, "is to talk a little to a being who is capable of understanding you. At present we have no one here, now that that old actor's dead. Ah! there was a man who was rebellion incarnate! He made rebellion as other men make money, 'c'etait son metier'; when he was no longer capable of active revolution, he made it getting drunk. At the last this was his only way of protesting against Society. An interesting personality, 'je le regrette beaucoup'. But, as you see, he died in great distress, without a soul to wave him farewell, because as you can well understand, monsieur, I don't count myself. He died drunk. 'C'etait un homme'!"
Shelton had continued staring kindly at the little man; the barber added hastily:
"It's difficult to make an end like that one has moments of weakness."
"Yes," assented Shelton, "one has indeed."
The little barber looked at him with cynical discretion.
"Oh!" he said, "it 's to the destitute that such things are important.When one has money, all these matters—"
He shrugged his shoulders. A smile had lodged amongst his crow's-feet; he waved his hand as though to end the subject.
A sense of having been exposed came over Shelton.
"You think, then," said he, "that discontent is peculiar to the destitute?"
"Monsieur," replied the little barber, "a plutocrat knows too well that if he mixes in that 'galere' there 's not a dog in the streets more lost than he."
Shelton rose.
"The rain is over. I hope you 'll soon be better; perhaps you 'll accept this in memory of that old actor," and he slipped a sovereign into the little Frenchman's hand.
The latter bowed.
"Whenever you are passing, monsieur," he said eagerly, "I shall be charmed to see you."
And Shelton walked away. "'Not a dog in the streets more lost,'" thought he; "now what did he mean by that?"
Something of that "lost dog" feeling had gripped his spirit. Another month of waiting would kill all the savour of anticipation, might even kill his love. In the excitement of his senses and his nerves, caused by this strain of waiting, everything seemed too vivid; all was beyond life size; like Art—whose truths; too strong for daily use, are thus, unpopular with healthy people. As will the, bones in a worn face, the spirit underlying things had reached the surface; the meanness and intolerable measure of hard facts, were too apparent. Some craving for help, some instinct, drove him into Kensington, for he found himself before his, mother's house. Providence seemed bent on flinging him from pole to pole.
Mrs. Shelton was in town; and, though it was the first of June, sat warming her feet before a fire; her face, with its pleasant colour, was crow's-footed like the little barber's, but from optimism, not rebellion. She, smiled when she saw her son; and the wrinkles round her eyes twinkled, with vitality.
"Well, my dear boy," she said, "it's lovely to see you. And how is that sweet girl?"
"Very well, thank you," replied Shelton.
"She must be such a dear!"
"Mother," stammered Shelton, "I must give it up."
"Give it up? My dear Dick, give what up? You look quite worried. Come and sit down, and have a cosy chat. Cheer up!" And Mrs. Shelton; with her head askew, gazed at her son quite irrepressibly.
"Mother," said Shelton, who, confronted by her optimism, had never, since his time of trial began, felt so wretchedly dejected, "I can't go on waiting about like this."
"My dear boy, what is the matter?";
"Everything is wrong!"
"Wrong?" cried Mrs. Shelton. "Come, tell me all, about it!"
But Shelton, shook his head.
"You surely have not had a quarrel——"
Mrs. Shelton stopped; the question seemed so vulgar—one might have asked it of a groom.
"No," said Shelton, and his answer sounded like a groan.
"You know, my dear old Dick," murmured his mother, "it seems a little mad."
"I know it seems mad."
"Come!" said Mrs. Shelton, taking his hand between her own; "you never used to be like this."
"No," said Shelton, with a laugh; "I never used to be like this."
Mrs. Shelton snuggled in her Chuda shawl.
"Oh," she said, with cheery sympathy, "I know exactly how you feel!"
Shelton, holding his head, stared at the fire, which played and bubbled like his mother's face.
"But you're so fond of each other," she began again. "Such a sweet girl!"
"You don't understand," muttered Shelton gloomily; "it 's not her—it's nothing—it's—myself!"
Mrs. Shelton again seized his hand, and this time pressed it to her soft, warm cheek, that had lost the elasticity of youth.
"Oh!" she cried again; "I understand. I know exactly what you 're feeling." But Shelton saw from the fixed beam in her eyes that she had not an inkling. To do him justice, he was not so foolish as to try to give her one. Mrs. Shelton sighed. "It would be so lovely if you could wake up to-morrow and think differently. If I were you, my dear, I would have a good long walk, and then a Turkish bath; and then I would just write to her, and tell her all about it, and you'll see how beautifully it'll all come straight"; and in the enthusiasm of advice Mrs. Shelton rose, and, with a faint stretch of her tiny figure, still so young, clasped her hands together. "Now do, that 's a dear old Dick! You 'll just see how lovely it'll be!" Shelton smiled; he had not the heart to chase away this vision. "And give her my warmest love, and tell her I 'm longing for the wedding. Come, now, my dear boy, promise me that's what you 'll do."
And Shelton said: "I'll think about it."
Mrs. Shelton had taken up her stand with one foot on the fender, in spite of her sciatica.
"Cheer up!" she cried; her eyes beamed as if intoxicated by her sympathy.
Wonderful woman! The uncomplicated optimism that carried her through good and ill had not descended to her son.
From pole to pole he had been thrown that day, from the French barber, whose intellect accepted nothing without carping, and whose little fingers worked all day, to save himself from dying out, to his own mother, whose intellect accepted anything presented with sufficient glow, but who, until she died, would never stir a finger. When Shelton reached his rooms, he wrote to Antonia:
I can't wait about in London any longer; I am going down to Bideford to start a walking tour. I shall work my way to Oxford, and stay there till I may come to Holm Oaks. I shall send you my address; do write as usual.
He collected all the photographs he had of her—amateur groups, taken by Mrs. Dennant—and packed them in the pocket of his shooting-jacket. There was one where she was standing just below her little brother, who was perched upon a wall. In her half-closed eyes, round throat, and softly tilted chin, there was something cool and watchful, protecting the ragamuffin up above her head. This he kept apart to be looked at daily, as a man says his prayers.
One morning then, a week later, Shelton found himself at the walls ofPrincetown Prison.
He had seen this lugubrious stone cage before. But the magic of his morning walk across the moor, the sight of the pagan tors, the songs of the last cuckoo, had unprepared him for that dreary building. He left the street, and, entering the fosse, began a circuit, scanning the walls with morbid fascination.
This, then, was the system by which men enforced the will of the majority, and it was suddenly borne in on him that all the ideas and maxims which his Christian countrymen believed themselves to be fulfilling daily were stultified in every cellule of the social honeycomb. Such teachings as "He that is without sin amongst you" had been pronounced unpractical by peers and judges, bishops, statesmen, merchants, husbands—in fact, by every truly Christian person in the country.
"Yes," thought Shelton, as if he had found out something new, "the moreChristian the nation, the less it has to do with the Christian spirit."
Society was a charitable organisation, giving nothing for nothing, little for sixpence; and it was only fear that forced it to give at all!
He took a seat on a wall, and began to watch a warder who was slowly paring a last year's apple. The expression of his face, the way he stood with his solid legs apart, his head poked forward and his lower jaw thrust out, all made him a perfect pillar of Society. He was undisturbed by Shelton's scrutiny, watching the rind coil down below the apple; until in a springing spiral it fell on the path and collapsed like a toy snake. He took a bite; his teeth were jagged; and his mouth immense. It was obvious that he considered himself a most superior man. Shelton frowned, got down slowly, from the wall, and proceeded on his way.
A little further down the hill he stopped again to watch a group of convicts in a field. They seemed to be dancing in a slow and sad cotillon, while behind the hedge on every side were warders armed with guns. Just such a sight, substituting spears could have been seen in Roman times.
While he thus stood looking, a man, walking, rapidly, stopped beside him, and asked how many miles it was to Exeter. His round visage; and long, brown eyes, sliding about beneath their, brows, his cropped hair and short neck, seemed familiar.
"Your name is Crocker, is n't it?"
"Why! it's the Bird!" exclaimed the traveller; putting out his hand."Have n't seen you since we both went down."
Shelton returned his handgrip. Crocker had lived above his head at college, and often kept him, sleepless half the night by playing on the hautboy.
"Where have you sprung from?"
"India. Got my long leave. I say, are you going this way? Let's go together."
They went, and very fast; faster and faster every minute.
"Where are you going at this pace?" asked Shelton.
"London."
"Oh! only as far as London?"
"I 've set myself to do it in a week."
"Are you in training?"
"No."
"You 'll kill yourself."
Crocker answered with a chuckle.
Shelton noted with alarm the expression of his eye; there was a sort of stubborn aspiration in it. "Still an idealist!" he thought; "poor fellow!" "Well," he inquired, "what sort of a time have you had in India?"
"Oh," said the Indian civilian absently, "I've, had the plague."
"Good God!"
Crocker smiled, and added:
"Caught it on famine duty."
"I see," said Shelton; "plague and famine! I suppose you fellows really think you 're doing good out there?"
His companion looked at him surprised, then answered modestly:
"We get very good screws."
"That 's the great thing," responded Shelton.
After a moment's silence, Crocker, looking straight before him, asked:
"Don't you think we are doing good?"
"I 'm not an authority; but, as a matter of fact, I don't."
Crocker seemed disconcerted.
"Why?" he bluntly asked.
Shelton was not anxious to explain his views, and he did not reply.
His friend repeated:
"Why don't you think we're doing good in India?"
"Well," said Shelton gruffly, "how can progress be imposed on nations from outside?"
The Indian civilian, glancing at Shelton in an affectionate and doubtful way, replied:
"You have n't changed a bit, old chap."
"No, no," said Shelton; "you 're not going to get out of it that way. Give me a single example of a nation, or an individual, for that matter, who 's ever done any good without having worked up to it from within."
Crocker, grunting, muttered, "Evils."
"That 's it," said Shelton; "we take peoples entirely different from our own, and stop their natural development by substituting a civilisation grown for our own use. Suppose, looking at a tropical fern in a hothouse, you were to say: 'This heat 's unhealthy for me; therefore it must be bad for the fern, I 'll take it up and plant it outside in the fresh air.'"
"Do you know that means giving up India?" said the Indian civilian shrewdly.
"I don't say that; but to talk about doing good to India is—h'm!"
Crocker knitted his brows, trying to see the point of view his friend was showing him.
"Come, now! Should we go on administering India if it were dead loss? No. Well, to talk about administering the country for the purpose of pocketing money is cynical, and there 's generally some truth in cynicism; but to talk about the administration of a country by which we profit, as if it were a great and good thing, is cant. I hit you in the wind for the benefit of myself—all right: law of nature; but to say it does you good at the same time is beyond me."
"No, no," returned Crocker, grave and anxious; "you can't persuade me that we 're not doing good."
"Wait a bit. It's all a question of horizons; you look at it from too close. Put the horizon further back. You hit India in the wind, and say it's virtuous. Well, now let's see what happens. Either the wind never comes back, and India gasps to an untimely death, or the wind does come back, and in the pant of reaction your blow—that's to say your labour—is lost, morally lost labour that you might have spent where it would n't have been lost."
"Are n't you an Imperialist?" asked Crocker, genuinely concerned.
"I may be, but I keep my mouth shut about the benefits we 're conferring upon other people."
"Then you can't believe in abstract right, or justice?"
"What on earth have our ideas of justice or right got to do with India?"
"If I thought as you do," sighed the unhappy Crocker, "I should be all adrift."
"Quite so. We always think our standards best for the whole world. It's a capital belief for us. Read the speeches of our public men. Does n't it strike you as amazing how sure they are of being in the right? It's so charming to benefit yourself and others at the same time, though, when you come to think of it, one man's meat is usually another's poison. Look at nature. But in England we never look at nature—there's no necessity. Our national point of view has filled our pockets, that's all that matters."
"I say, old chap, that's awfully bitter," said Crocker, with a sort of wondering sadness.
"It 's enough to make any one bitter the way we Pharisees wax fat, and at the same time give ourselves the moral airs of a balloon. I must stick a pin in sometimes, just to hear the gas escape." Shelton was surprised at his own heat, and for some strange reason thought of Antonia—surely, she was not a Pharisee.
His companion strode along, and Shelton felt sorry for the signs of trouble on his face.
"To fill your pockets," said Crocker, "is n't the main thing. One has just got to do things without thinking of why we do them."
"Do you ever see the other side to any question?" asked Shelton. "I suppose not. You always begin to act before you stop thinking, don't you?"
Crocker grinned.
"He's a Pharisee, too," thought Shelton, "without a Pharisee's pride.Queer thing that!"
After walking some distance, as if thinking deeply, Crocker chuckled out:
"You 're not consistent; you ought to be in favour of giving up India."
Shelton smiled uneasily.
"Why should n't we fill our pockets? I only object to the humbug that we talk."
The Indian civilian put his hand shyly through his arm.
"If I thought like you," he said, "I could n't stay another day inIndia."
And to this Shelton made no reply.
The wind had now begun to drop, and something of the morning's magic was stealing again upon the moor. They were nearing the outskirt fields of cultivation. It was past five when, dropping from the level of the tors, they came into the sunny vale of Monkland.
"They say," said Crocker, reading from his guide-book—"they say this place occupies a position of unique isolation."
The two travellers, in tranquil solitude, took their seats under an old lime-tree on the village green. The smoke of their pipes, the sleepy air, the warmth from the baked ground, the constant hum, made Shelton drowsy.
"Do you remember," his companion asked, "those 'jaws' you used to have with Busgate and old Halidome in my rooms on Sunday evenings? How is old Halidome?"
"Married," replied Shelton.
Crocker sighed. "And are you?" he asked.
"Not yet," said Shelton grimly; "I 'm—engaged."
Crocker took hold of his arm above the elbow, and, squeezing it, he grunted. Shelton had not received congratulations that pleased him more; there was the spice of envy in them.
"I should like to get married while I 'm home," said the civilian after a long pause. His legs were stretched apart, throwing shadows on the green, his hands deep thrust into his pockets, his head a little to one side. An absent-minded smile played round his mouth.
The sun had sunk behind a tor, but the warmth kept rising from the ground, and the sweet-briar on a cottage bathed them with its spicy perfume. From the converging lanes figures passed now and then, lounged by, staring at the strangers, gossiping amongst themselves, and vanished into the cottages that headed the incline. A clock struck seven, and round the shady lime-tree a chafer or some heavy insect commenced its booming rushes. All was marvellously sane and slumbrous. The soft air, the drawling voices, the shapes and murmurs, the rising smell of wood-smoke from fresh-kindled fires—were full of the spirit of security and of home. The outside world was far indeed. Typical of some island nation was this nest of refuge—where men grew quietly tall, fattened, and without fuss dropped off their perches; where contentment flourished, as sunflowers flourished in the sun.
Crocker's cap slipped off; he was nodding, and Shelton looked at him. From a manor house in some such village he had issued; to one of a thousand such homes he would find his way at last, untouched by the struggles with famines or with plagues, uninfected in his fibre, his prejudices, and his principles, unchanged by contact with strange peoples, new conditions, odd feelings, or queer points of view!
The chafer buzzed against his shoulder, gathered flight again, and boomed away. Crocker roused himself, and, turning his amiable face, jogged Shelton's arm.
"What are you thinking about, Bird?" he asked.
Shelton continued to travel with his college friend, and on Wednesday night, four days after joining company, they reached the village of Dowdenhame. All day long the road had lain through pastureland, with thick green hedges and heavily feathered elms. Once or twice they had broken the monotony by a stretch along the towing-path of a canal, which, choked with water-lily plants and shining weeds, brooded sluggishly beside the fields. Nature, in one of her ironic moods, had cast a grey and iron-hard cloak over all the country's bland luxuriance. From dawn till darkness fell there had been no movement in the steely distant sky; a cold wind ruffed in the hedge-tops, and sent shivers through the branches of the elms. The cattle, dappled, pied, or bay, or white, continued grazing with an air of grumbling at their birthright. In a meadow close to the canal Shelton saw five magpies, and about five o'clock the rain began, a steady, coldly-sneering rain, which Crocker, looking at the sky, declared was going to be over in a minute. But it was not over in a minute; they were soon drenched. Shelton was tired, and it annoyed him very much that his companion, who was also tired, should grow more cheerful. His thoughts kept harping upon Ferrand: "This must be something like what he described to me, tramping on and on when you're dead-beat, until you can cadge up supper and a bed." And sulkily he kept on ploughing through the mud with glances at the exasperating Crocker, who had skinned one heel and was limping horribly. It suddenly came home to him that life for three quarters of the world meant physical exhaustion every day, without a possibility of alternative, and that as soon as, for some cause beyond control, they failed thus to exhaust themselves, they were reduced to beg or starve. "And then we, who don't know the meaning of the word exhaustion, call them 'idle scamps,'" he said aloud.
It was past nine and dark when they reached Dowdenhame. The street yielded no accommodation, and while debating where to go they passed the church, with a square tower, and next to it a house which was certainly the parsonage.
"Suppose," said Crocker, leaning on his arms upon the gate, "we ask him where to go"; and, without waiting for Shelton's answer, he rang the bell.
The door was opened by the parson, a bloodless and clean-shaven man, whose hollow cheeks and bony hands suggested a perpetual struggle. Ascetically benevolent were his grey eyes; a pale and ghostly smile played on the curves of his thin lips.
"What can I do for you?" he asked. "Inn? yes, there's the Blue Chequers, but I 'm afraid you 'll find it shut. They 're early people, I 'm glad to say"; and his eyes seemed to muse over the proper fold for these damp sheep. "Are you Oxford men, by any chance?" he asked, as if that might throw some light upon the matter. "Of Mary's? Really! I'm of Paul's myself. Ladyman—Billington Ladyman; you might remember my youngest brother. I could give you a room here if you could manage without sheets. My housekeeper has two days' holiday; she's foolishly taken the keys."
Shelton accepted gladly, feeling that the intonation in the parson's voice was necessary unto his calling, and that he did not want to patronise.
"You 're hungry, I expect, after your tramp. I'm very much afraid there 's—er—nothing in the house but bread; I could boil you water; hot lemonade is better than nothing."
Conducting them into the kitchen, he made a fire, and put a kettle on to boil; then, after leaving them to shed their soaking clothes, returned with ancient, greenish coats, some carpet slippers, and some blankets. Wrapped in these, and carrying their glasses, the travellers followed to the study, where, by doubtful lamp-light, he seemed, from books upon the table, to have been working at his sermon.
"We 're giving you a lot of trouble," said Shelton, "it's really very good of you."
"Not at all," the parson answered; "I'm only grieved the house is empty."
It was a truly dismal contrast to the fatness of the land they had been passing through, and the parson's voice issuing from bloodless lips, although complacent, was pathetic. It was peculiar, that voice of his, seeming to indicate an intimate acquaintanceship with what was fat and fine, to convey contempt for the vulgar need of money, while all the time his eyes—those watery, ascetic eyes—as plain as speech they said, "Oh, to know what it must be like to have a pound or two to spare just once a year, or so!"
Everything in the room had been bought for cheapness; no luxuries were there, and necessaries not enough. It was bleak and bare; the ceiling cracked, the wall-paper discoloured, and those books—prim, shining books, fat-backed, with arms stamped on them—glared in the surrounding barrenness.
"My predecessor," said the parson, "played rather havoc with the house. The poor fellow had a dreadful struggle, I was told. You can, unfortunately, expect nothing else these days, when livings have come down so terribly in value! He was a married man—large family!"
Crocker, who had drunk his steaming lemonade, was smiling and already nodding in his chair; with his black garment buttoned closely round his throat, his long legs rolled up in a blanket, and stretched towards the feeble flame of the newly-lighted fire, he had a rather patchy air. Shelton, on the other hand, had lost his feeling of fatigue; the strangeness of the place was stimulating his brain; he kept stealing glances at the scantiness around; the room, the parson, the furniture, the very fire, all gave him the feeling caused by seeing legs that have outgrown their trousers. But there was something underlying that leanness of the landscape, something superior and academic, which defied all sympathy. It was pure nervousness which made him say:
"Ah! why do they have such families?"
A faint red mounted to the parson's cheeks; its appearance there was startling, and Crocker chuckled, as a sleepy man will chuckle who feels bound to show that he is not asleep.
"It's very unfortunate," murmured the parson, "certainly, in many cases."
Shelton would now have changed the subject, but at this moment the unhappy Crocker snored. Being a man of action, he had gone to sleep.
"It seems to me," said Shelton hurriedly, as he saw the parson's eyebrows rising at the sound, "almost what you might call wrong."
"Dear me, but how can it be wrong?"
Shelton now felt that he must justify his saying somehow.
"I don't know," he said, "only one hears of such a lot of cases—clergymen's families; I've two uncles of my own, who—"
A new expression gathered on the parson's face; his mouth had tightened,and his chin receded slightly. "Why, he 's like a mule!" thoughtShelton. His eyes, too, had grown harder, greyer, and more parroty.Shelton no longer liked his face.
"Perhaps you and I," the parson said, "would not understand each other on such matters."
And Shelton felt ashamed.
"I should like to ask you a question in turn, however," the parson said, as if desirous of meeting Shelton on his low ground: "How do you justify marriage if it is not to follow the laws of nature?"
"I can only tell you what I personally feel."
"My dear sir, you forget that a woman's chief delight is in her motherhood."
"I should have thought it a pleasure likely to pall with too much repetition. Motherhood is motherhood, whether of one or of a dozen."
"I 'm afraid," replied the parson, with impatience, though still keeping on his guest's low ground, "your theories are not calculated to populate the world."
"Have you ever lived in London?" Shelton asked. "It always makes me feel a doubt whether we have any right to have children at all."
"Surely," said the parson with wonderful restraint, and the joints of his fingers cracked with the grip he had upon his chair, "you are leaving out duty towards the country; national growth is paramount!"
"There are two ways of looking at that. It depends on what you want your country to become."
"I did n't know," said the parson—fanaticism now had crept into his smile—"there could be any doubt on such a subject."
The more Shelton felt that commands were being given him, the more controversial he naturally became—apart from the merits of this subject, to which he had hardly ever given thought.
"I dare say I'm wrong," he said, fastening his eyes on the blanket in which his legs were wrapped; "but it seems to me at least an open question whether it's better for the country to be so well populated as to be quite incapable of supporting itself."
"Surely," said the parson, whose face regained its pallor, "you're not aLittle Englander?"
On Shelton this phrase had a mysterious effect. Resisting an impulse to discover what he really was, he answered hastily:
"Of course I'm not!"
The parson followed up his triumph, and, shifting the ground of the discussion from Shelton's to his own, he gravely said:
"Surely you must see that your theory is founded in immorality. It is, if I may say so, extravagant, even wicked."
But Shelton, suffering from irritation at his own dishonesty, replied with heat:
"Why not say at once, sir, 'hysterical, unhealthy'? Any opinion which goes contrary to that of the majority is always called so, I believe."
"Well," returned the parson, whose eyes seemed trying to bind Shelton to his will, "I must say your ideas do seem to me both extravagant and unhealthy. The propagation of children is enjoined of marriage."
Shelton bowed above his blanket, but the parson did not smile.
"We live in very dangerous times," he said, "and it grieves me when a man of your standing panders to these notions."
"Those," said Shelton, "whom the shoe does n't pinch make this rule of morality, and thrust it on to such as the shoe does pinch."
"The rule was never made," said the parson; "it was given us."
"Oh!" said Shelton, "I beg your pardon." He was in danger of forgetting the delicate position he was in. "He wants to ram his notions down my throat," he thought; and it seemed to him that the parson's face had grown more like a mule's, his accent more superior, his eyes more dictatorial: To be right in this argument seemed now of great importance, whereas, in truth, it was of no importance whatsoever. That which, however, was important was the fact that in nothing could they ever have agreed.
But Crocker had suddenly ceased to snore; his head had fallen so that a peculiar whistling arose instead. Both Shelton and the parson looked at him, and the sight sobered them.
"Your friend seems very tired," said the parson.
Shelton forgot all his annoyance, for his host seemed suddenly pathetic, with those baggy garments, hollow cheeks, and the slightly reddened nose that comes from not imbibing quite enough. A kind fellow, after all!
The kind fellow rose, and, putting his hands behind his back, placed himself before the blackening fire. Whole centuries of authority stood behind him. It was an accident that the mantelpiece was chipped and rusty, the fire-irons bent and worn, his linen frayed about the cuffs.
"I don't wish to dictate," said he, "but where it seems to me that you are wholly wrong in that your ideas foster in women those lax views of the family life that are so prevalent in Society nowadays."
Thoughts of Antonia with her candid eyes, the touch of freckling on her pink-white skin, the fair hair gathered back, sprang up in Shelton, and that word—"lax" seemed ridiculous. And the women he was wont to see dragging about the streets of London with two or three small children, Women bent beneath the weight of babies that they could not leave, women going to work with babies still unborn, anaemic-looking women, impecunious mothers in his own class, with twelve or fourteen children, all the victims of the sanctity of marriage, and again the word "lax" seemed to be ridiculous.
"We are not put into the world to exercise our wits,"—muttered Shelton.
"Our wanton wills," the parson said severely.
"That, sir, may have been all right for the last generation, the country is more crowded now. I can't see why we should n't decide it for ourselves."
"Such a view of morality," said the parson, looking down at Crocker with a ghostly smile, "to me is unintelligible."
Cracker's whistling grew in tone and in variety.
"What I hate," said Shelton, "is the way we men decide what women are to bear, and then call them immoral, decadent, or what you will, if they don't fall in with our views."
"Mr. Shelton," said the parson, "I think we may safely leave it in the hands of God."
Shelton was silent.
"The questions of morality," said the parson promptly, "have always lain through God in the hands of men, not women. We are the reasonable sex."
Shelton stubbornly replied
"We 're certainly the greater humbugs, if that 's the same."
"This is too bad," exclaimed the parson with some heat.
"I 'm sorry, sir; but how can you expect women nowadays to have the same views as our grandmothers? We men, by our commercial enterprise, have brought about a different state of things; yet, for the sake of our own comfort, we try to keep women where they were. It's always those men who are most keen about their comfort"—and in his heat the sarcasm of using the word "comfort" in that room was lost on him—"who are so ready to accuse women of deserting the old morality."
The parson quivered with impatient irony.
"Old morality! new morality!" he said. "These are strange words."
"Forgive me," explained Shelton; "we 're talking of working morality, I imagine. There's not a man in a million fit to talk of true morality."
The eyes of his host contracted.
"I think," he said—and his voice sounded as if he had pinched it in the endeavour to impress his listener—"that any well-educated man who honestly tries to serve his God has the right humbly—I say humbly—to claim morality."
Shelton was on the point of saying something bitter, but checked himself. "Here am I," thought he, "trying to get the last word, like an old woman."
At this moment there was heard a piteous mewing; the parson went towards the door.
"Excuse me a moment; I 'm afraid that's one of my cats out in the wet." He returned a minute later with a wet cat in his arms. "They will get out," he said to Shelton, with a smile on his thin face, suffused by stooping. And absently he stroked the dripping cat, while a drop of wet ran off his nose. "Poor pussy, poor pussy!" The sound of that "Poor pussy!" like nothing human in its cracked superiority, the softness of that smile, like the smile of gentleness itself, haunted Shelton till he fell asleep.
The last sunlight was playing on the roofs when the travellers entered that High Street grave and holy to all Oxford men. The spirit hovering above the spires was as different from its concretions in their caps and gowns as ever the spirit of Christ was from church dogmas.
"Shall we go into Grinnings'?" asked Shelton, as they passed the club.
But each looked at his clothes, for two elegant young men in flannel suits were coming out.
"You go," said Crocker, with a smirk.
Shelton shook his head. Never before had he felt such love for this old city. It was gone now from out his life, but everything about it seemed so good and fine; even its exclusive air was not ignoble. Clothed in the calm of history, the golden web of glorious tradition, radiant with the alchemy of memories, it bewitched him like the perfume of a woman's dress. At the entrance of a college they glanced in at the cool grey patch of stone beyond, and the scarlet of a window flowerbox—secluded, mysteriously calm—a narrow vision of the sacred past. Pale and trencher-capped, a youth with pimply face and random nose, grabbing at his cloven gown, was gazing at the noticeboard. The college porter—large man, fresh-faced, and small-mouthed—stood at his lodge door in a frank and deferential attitude. An image of routine, he looked like one engaged to give a decorous air to multitudes of pecadilloes. His blue eyes rested on the travellers. "I don't know you, sirs, but if you want to speak I shall be glad to hear the observations you may have to make," they seemed to say.
Against the wall reposed a bicycle with tennis-racquet buckled to its handle. A bull-dog bitch, working her snout from side to side, was snuffling horribly; the great iron-studded door to which her chain was fastened stayed immovable. Through this narrow mouth, human metal had been poured for centuries—poured, moulded, given back.
"Come along," said Shelton.
They now entered the Bishop's Head, and had their dinner in the room where Shelton had given his Derby dinner to four-and-twenty well-bred youths; here was the picture of the racehorse that the wineglass, thrown by one of them, had missed when it hit the waiter; and there, serving Crocker with anchovy sauce, was the very waiter. When they had finished, Shelton felt the old desire to rise with difficulty from the table; the old longing to patrol the streets with arm hooked in some other arm; the old eagerness to dare and do something heroic—and unlawful; the old sense that he was of the forest set, in the forest college, of the forest country in the finest world. The streets, all grave and mellow in the sunset, seemed to applaud this after-dinner stroll; the entrance quad of his old college—spaciously majestic, monastically modern, for years the heart of his universe, the focus of what had gone before it in his life, casting the shadow of its grey walls over all that had come after-brought him a sense of rest from conflict, and trust in his own important safety. The garden-gate, whose lofty spikes he had so often crowned with empty water-bottles, failed to rouse him. Nor when they passed the staircase where he had flung a leg of lamb at some indelicate disturbing tutor, did he feel remorse. High on that staircase were the rooms in which he had crammed for his degree, upon the system by which the scholar simmers on the fire of cramming, boils over at the moment of examination, and is extinct for ever after. His coach's face recurred to him, a man with thrusting eyes, who reeled off knowledge all the week, and disappeared to town on Sundays.
They passed their tutor's staircase.
"I wonder if little Turl would remember us?" said Crocker; "I should like to see him. Shall we go and look him up?"
"Little Turl?" said Shelton dreamily.
Mounting, they knocked upon a solid door.
"Come in," said the voice of Sleep itself.
A little man with a pink face and large red ears was sitting in a fat pink chair, as if he had been grown there.
"What do you want?" he asked of them, blinking.
"Don't you know me, sir?"
"God bless me! Crocker, isn't it? I didn't recognise you with a beard."
Crocker, who had not been shaved since starting on his travels, chuckled feebly.
"You remember Shelton, sir?" he said.
"Shelton? Oh yes! How do you do, Shelton? Sit down; take a cigar"; and, crossing his fat little legs, the little gentleman looked them up and down with drowsy interest, as who should say, "Now, after, all you know, why come and wake me up like this?"
Shelton and Crocker took two other chairs; they too seemed thinking, "Yes, why did we come and wake him up like this?" And Shelton, who could not tell the reason why, took refuge in the smoke of his cigar. The panelled walls were hung with prints of celebrated Greek remains; the soft, thick carpet on the floor was grateful to his tired feet; the backs of many books gleamed richly in the light of the oil lamps; the culture and tobacco smoke stole on his senses; he but vaguely comprehended Crocker's amiable talk, vaguely the answers of his little host, whose face, blinking behind the bowl of his huge meerschaum pipe, had such a queer resemblance to a moon. The door was opened, and a tall creature, whose eyes were large and brown, whose face was rosy and ironical, entered with a manly stride.
"Oh!" he said, looking round him with his chin a little in the air, "am I intruding, Turl?"
The little host, blinking more than ever, murmured,
"Not at all, Berryman—take a pew!"
The visitor called Berryman sat down, and gazed up at the wall with his fine eyes.
Shelton had a faint remembrance of this don, and bowed; but the newcomer sat smiling, and did not notice the salute.
"Trimmer and Washer are coming round," he said, and as he spoke the door opened to admit these gentlemen. Of the same height, but different appearance, their manner was faintly jocular, faintly supercilious, as if they tolerated everything. The one whose name was Trimmer had patches of red on his large cheek-bones, and on his cheeks a bluish tint. His lips were rather full, so that he had a likeness to a spider. Washer, who was thin and pale, wore an intellectual smile.
The little fat host moved the hand that held the meerschaum.
"Crocker, Shelton," he said.
An awkward silence followed. Shelton tried to rouse the cultured portion of his wits; but the sense that nothing would be treated seriously paralysed his faculties; he stayed silent, staring at the glowing tip of his cigar. It seemed to him unfair to have intruded on these gentlemen without its having been made quite clear to them beforehand who and what he was; he rose to take his leave, but Washer had begun to speak.
"Madame Bovary!" he said quizzically, reading the title of the book on the little fat man's bookrest; and, holding it closer to his boiled-looking eyes, he repeated, as though it were a joke, "Madame Bovary!"
"Do you mean to say, Turl, that you can stand that stuff?" said Berryman.
As might have been expected, this celebrated novel's name had galvanised him into life; he strolled over to the bookcase, took down a book, opened it, and began to read, wandering in a desultory way about the room.
"Ha! Berryman," said a conciliatory voice behind—it came from Trimmer, who had set his back against the hearth, and grasped with either hand a fistful of his gown—"the book's a classic!"
"Classic!" exclaimed Berryman, transfixing Shelton with his eyes; "the fellow ought to have been horsewhipped for writing such putridity!"
A feeling of hostility instantly sprang up in Shelton; he looked at his little host, who, however, merely blinked.
"Berryman only means," explains Washer, a certain malice in his smile, "that the author is n't one of his particular pets."
"For God's sake, you know, don't get Berryman on his horse!" growled the little fat man suddenly.
Berryman returned his volume to the shelf and took another down. There was something almost godlike in his sarcastic absent-mindedness.
"Imagine a man writing that stuff," he said, "if he'd ever been at Eton!What do we want to know about that sort of thing? A writer should be asportsman and a gentleman"; and again he looked down over his chin atShelton, as though expecting him to controvert the sentiment.
"Don't you—" began the latter.
But Berryman's attention had wandered to the wall.
"I really don't care," said he, "to know what a woman feels when she is going to the dogs; it does n't interest me."
The voice of Trimmer made things pleasant:
"Question of moral standards, that, and nothing more."
He had stretched his legs like compasses,—and the way he grasped his gown-wings seemed to turn him to a pair of scales. His lowering smile embraced the room, deprecating strong expressions. "After all," he seemed to say, "we are men of the world; we know there 's not very much in anything. This is the modern spirit; why not give it a look in?"
"Do I understand you to say, Berryman, that you don't enjoy a spicy book?" asked Washer with his smile; and at this question the little fat man sniggered, blinking tempestuously, as if to say, "Nothing pleasanter, don't you know, before a hot fire in cold weather."
Berryman paid no attention to the impertinent inquiry, continuing to dip into his volume and walk up and down.
"I've nothing to say," he remarked, stopping before Shelton, and looking down, as if at last aware of him, "to those who talk of being justified through Art. I call a spade a spade."
Shelton did not answer, because he could not tell whether Berryman was addressing him or society at large. And Berryman went on:
"Do we want to know about the feelings of a middle-class woman with a taste for vice? Tell me the point of it. No man who was in the habit of taking baths would choose such a subject."
"You come to the question of-ah-subjects," the voice of Trimmer genially buzzed he had gathered his garments tight across his back—"my dear fellow, Art, properly applied, justifies all subjects."
"For Art," squeaked Berryman, putting back his second volume and taking down a third, "you have Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ossian; for garbage, a number of unwashed gentlemen."
There was a laugh; Shelton glanced round at all in turn. With the exception of Crocker, who was half asleep and smiling idiotically, they wore, one and all, a look as if by no chance could they consider any subject fit to move their hearts; as if, one and all, they were so profoundly anchored on the sea of life that waves could only seem impertinent. It may have been some glimmer in this glance of Shelton's that brought Trimmer once more to the rescue with his compromising air.
"The French," said he, "have quite a different standard from ourselves in literature, just as they have a different standard in regard to honour. All this is purely artificial."
What he, meant, however, Shelton found it difficult to tell.
"Honour," said Washer, "'l'honneur, die Ehre' duelling, unfaithful wives—"
He was clearly going to add to this, but it was lost; for the little fat man, taking the meerschaum with trembling fingers, and holding it within two inches of his chin, murmured:
"You fellows, Berryman's awf'ly strong on honour."
He blinked twice, and put the meerschaum back between his lips.
Without returning the third volume to its shelf, Berryman took down a fourth; with chest expanded, he appeared about to use the books as dumb-bells.
"Quite so," said Trimmer; "the change from duelling to law courts is profoundly—"
Whether he were going to say "significant" or "insignificant," in Shelton's estimate he did not know himself. Fortunately Berryman broke in:
"Law courts or not, when a man runs away with a wife of mine, I shall punch his head!"
"Come, come!" said Turner, spasmodically grasping his two wings.
Shelton had a gleam of inspiration. "If your wife deceived you," he thought, looking at Trimmer's eyes, "you 'd keep it quiet, and hold it over her."
Washer passed his hand over his pale chaps: his smile had never wavered; he looked like one for ever lost in the making of an epigram.
The punching theorist stretched his body, holding the books level with his shoulders, as though to stone his hearers with his point of view. His face grew paler, his fine eyes finer, his lips ironical. Almost painful was this combination of the "strong" man and the student who was bound to go to pieces if you hit him a smart blow.
"As for forgiving faithless wives," he said, "and all that sort of thing,I don't believe in sentiment."
The words were high-pitched and sarcastic. Shelton looked hastily around. All their faces were complacent. He grew red, and suddenly remarked, in a soft; clear voice:
"I see!"
He was conscious that he had never before made an impression of this sort, and that he never would again. The cold hostility flashing out all round was most enlightening; it instantly gave way to the polite, satirical indulgence peculiar to highly-cultivated men. Crocker rose nervously; he seemed scared, and was obviously relieved when Shelton, following his example, grasped the little fat man's hand, who said good-night in a voice shaken by tobacco.
"Who are your unshaven friends?" he heard as the door was closed behind them.