Ted did not reply, and after a moment Miss Wrexham continued——
“You can’t deny it, you see. Do you know, I think some of the saints must have been rather trying. It was St. Elizabeth, wasn’t it, who told her husband she’d only got some roses in her apron, when it was bread really? Poor dear! You see he knew it was bread, and she knew it was; and then, when she opened her apron, there was nothing but roses. I hope they pricked her—it really was mean. You know, if I was reading a novel on Sunday, and they asked me what book it was, I should say a novel. St. Elizabeth would have said a Septuagint. I hate her.”
Ted laughed.
“I wonder if you really care what my sister thought of you. Why should you care? You’ve only just seen her.”
“Ah, but what does that matter?” asked Maud. “Of course I care. I always make a point of being nice to people in railway carriages and ’buses—I always go in ’buses in London, don’t you?—even though I only see them for two minutes. I want to be nice to everybody. I care immensely what every one thinks of me.”
“But how can it matter?” said Ted. “Those people whom you meet just for two minutes have no opportunity of judging you. They form their impressions on perfectly superficial things.”
“Ah, I see! Your sister formed an unfavourable impression of me, and you excuse her by saying it was superficial.”
“I’ve got a great mind to tell you what she said,” remarked Ted.
Maud stopped for a moment, and turned to him.
“Ah, do tell me!”
“She said she thought you weren’t genuine.”
Maud stared for a moment in deep perplexity.
“Not genuine? Why—why, that is exactly what I am! Why did she think that?”
“I just remember her saying that you talked about early celebrations, and covering books for the parish library, as if they were one and the same thing.”
Maud stood still for a moment longer, recalling the scene, and then broke out into a light laugh.
“Oh, I see, I see!” she cried. “Oh dear me, how funny! She had every excuse for thinking that, butshe was so wrong. She hasn’t got a picturesque mind, I’m afraid. But I saw the whole picture of her in her life there so clearly. You can talk of a Madonna and the little Italian landscape behind her chair in one breath, can’t you? She thought I regarded them as equally essential. I’m so glad you told me that. I never take offence; I only profit by such things if they are true, and forget them if they are not. There is an atom of truth in this, although, as I say, she was wrong.”
The shooters were waiting, when they got up to them, for a long narrow valley of stubble to be driven down, and Ted and Maud got under shelter of the same tall hedge, which separated the fields, and waited with them.
Markham went up to where Tom was standing. The latter at once began talking in a whisper about the artistic beauty of a drive.
“If you shoot, you are called a barbarian,” he explained. “That’s so silly. Why, a drive is the most beautiful thing there is! First you wait, hearing nothing—and then you hear little far-away sounds, and you know they are off. Then there comes that flight of stupid sparrows and small birds, and then silence again. Then there’s a sudden rush through the hedge, perhaps, and out comes a hare. And then—and then—‘Mark over!’ and you hear the whistling of wings, which sound as if they wanted oiling. And, best of all, that extraordinary ceasing of voluntary motion. The bird’s wings clap down to his sides, you know, but he still goes on as if he was alive. I killed a bird once that was coming towardsme, and it fell slap on me and knocked me down. You needn’t believe me unless you like. There! They’ve started! Keep quiet, Teddy; it will all happen just as I said.”
Tom stepped a little way back from the hedge, in order to get a longer view, almost trembling with excitement as “Mark over!” sounded from higher up the valley. The covey came over Lord Ramsden, and he missed solemnly with both barrels.
“Those birds went on just as if they were alive,” remarked Ted in an undertone to Tom, who grinned maliciously.
“He missed eight birds this morning in succession,” he whispered; and then he said to Bob Wrexham, “You should see me play lawn-tennis. Look out, there’s another covey coming!”
A big lot approached the tall hedge like a stream, caught sight of Tom, and wheeled rapidly to the centre. Two, however, turned a little somersault in the air, and fell thirty yards behind him in the stubble.
“There, did you see?” asked Tom, reloading. “That’s another of those things like dropping matches in the Cam. They came blazing over, then there’s a little pause, and a thud. I’m afraid my poor uncle has missed again.”
Markham meditated.
“Yes, I see. That really was rather nice. There must be some satisfaction in doing that.”
“Of course, half the pleasure lies in not being certain whether you are going to hit or not. If I always hit I don’t think I should care about it—not so much, at any rate. It’s like gambling with an enormous proportion of chances in your favour if you play well.”
Miss Wrexham took almost as much interest in the proceedings as the shooters themselves, and she showed no wish to go back until they all went home. Lord Ramsden met with greater success towards the end of the afternoon, and they all returned in excellent spirits.
Tom and Miss Wrexham were walking a little in front of the others, and in answer to some questions of hers, he was saying what he was going to do when he left Cambridge.
“It must be such a blessing,” she said, “to know for certain, as you do, exactly what you want to be, and to be able to be it. Most people never know what they want to be. Bob is going into the army simply because he can’t think of anything else.”
“The worst of most professions is that they are only ways of making money,” said Tom. “Artists and clergymen are the only people who do what they have a passion for. No one can have a passion for cross-examining witnesses.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that!” objected Maud. “My mother—do you know my mother?—has a passion, literally a passion, for making arrangements. Really her chief joy in life is arranging things quite irrespective of what the arrangements are; but I think people like her are mostly women.”
“What is your passion?” asked Tom.
“Making people like me, especially if they hate me naturally. I wouldn’t say that it is my vocation,because lots of people detest me. Don’t trouble to say you don’t believe me. I am sure that sort of speech would come very badly from you.”
“Do you mean that I’ve got such awkward manners, or that I am naturally honest?”
“I mean that when a man doesn’t owe a compliment, it is no use his trying to pay one.”
“Compliments are a cheap way of paying debts. They are like apologies. I always apologize if it will do any good.”
Maud walked on in silence a little way.
“If I wasn’t a woman,” she said at length very slowly, “I should choose to be a man. No, it’s not such nonsense as it sounds. What I really mean is that men have great advantages over us in some ways. A woman can hardly ever become anything else than an amateur, and I want to be a professional artist, and a musician, and she-clergyman, living in the country. But I wouldn’t give up being a woman. Women have much more self than men, else they would have all taken to professions long ago. If men hadn’t professions they would all bore themselves to death. That is why they take to the Stock Exchange and politics—they do anything to make them forget their own selves. I don’t say that women are any better, but they find themselves more interesting than men do.”
“But men have to make money or else they couldn’t marry and support families,” said Tom rather feebly.
“Yes; but don’t you see that if women had not been sufficiently interested in themselves to make them not want professions, they would have had themlong ago? They would both have worked for their living. As it is, a woman’s chief object is to marry a rich man, so that she can’t possibly work.”
“That’s a new idea,” said Tom. “What are you going to do with it?”
“How do you mean?”
“You ought to marry a poor man, and help him to earn his living.”
“Unfortunately I have lots of money myself.”
Tom drew in a deep breath.
“That is a misfortune. I am in the same state. One can’t give it all to a lunatic asylum, or else people think you are laying up treasure for your own dotage. I wish I was poor, really poor, you know, out at elbows, having to work for my bread. It must be exquisite to be poor.”
“It’s a ridiculous arrangement,” said Maud suddenly. “My grandmother left me heaps of money, and poor Bob none; now Bob wants money and I don’t. But I expect, if one was poor, one would get to like money.”
“No doubt one would,” said Tom, “but that would do one no harm. One would get to know what its value was. At present I haven’t the slightest idea. That is not being miserly—misers never know the value of money; they only know the price of things they want, but refuse to buy.”
They had reached the front door, and stood waiting for the others.
“One ought to be allowed to change circumstances with one’s friends,” said Tom. “I would choose Ted Markham’s circumstances. He is poor, and he isworking at what he likes best. Just think how happy one would be! Success to him means the fullest possible success; position means opportunities.”
“What do you mean by opportunities?”
“Why, the University Press will consent to publish his editions of classical authors.”
“That’s narrow,” remarked Miss Wrexham. “Providence has spared me that limitation.”
“That’s what I’m always telling him. But it must be very comfortable to be narrow.”
“Until you know you are narrow.”
“Oh, but then you become broad,” said Tom, “and that’s nice too!”
“We are a pair of blighted beings,” said Miss Wrexham solemnly. “We have been made rich and broad, whereas we only want to be poor and narrow.”
“No, we should like to be narrow, if we couldn’t be broad,” said Tom—“just as you would like to be a man if you couldn’t be a woman.”
“Ah, well, one can’t have everything.”
Tom looked at her with radiant confidence.
“I mean to have everything!” he announced.
Tomwent back to Cambridge for his third year with his mind fully made up as regard his career. He was alone with his father his last night at home, and they had talked the matter out—or rather Tom talked the matter out, and his father expressed acquiescence with his proposed arrangements, and mingled a little cynical advice.
“You see, I must be a sculptor, father,” Tom had said, “at least, that is my passion. If you wish me to go into the business or go to the bar, I’ll go, but that won’t be the work of my life. You don’t object, do you?”
They were sitting in the smoking-room after dinner before the fire, for October had started with early frosts, and Mr. Carlingford loathed cold weather. He often stopped indoors for two or three weeks at a time in the winter.
“My dear boy,” he replied, “I don’t object to anything about you at present; I really find you the only satisfactory spot in a—a satisfactory life. There is only one thing I should object to, and that is if you made a fool of yourself. Don’t do that, Tom. Many people when they make fools of themselves think that they are being original, whereasthey are doing what nine-tenths of the human race has done since the beginning of the world—more than nine-tenths, probably. Adam and Eve both made fools of themselves, so did Cain and Abel—Abel particularly. And a sculptor has such unlimited opportunities for making a fool of himself.”
“In what way?” asked Tom.
“Falling in love with his models, or still worse, marrying them. If you are going to the devil, go to him like a gentleman. Then, sculptors often wear long hair, and Liberty fabric ties, with gold rings round them. I knew a sculptor once who wore a cameo ring. If you wear a cameo ring I shall cut my throat.”
“Oh, I shan’t do any of those things,” said Tom confidently.
“No, I think it is most probable that you won’t, otherwise I should make objections to your being a sculptor. But you can’t tell. You haven’t had many opportunities yet.”
“One can make a fool of one’s self at Cambridge if it comes to that,” said Tom.
“No, not very easily. Public opinion is against it, whereas in most places the fools themselves constitute public opinion. I’m glad of it, though it is only putting off the evil days a little longer. When I was at Cambridge, boys made fools of themselves earlier than they do now. For instance, people get drunk much less. It’s a change for the better, I suppose. But I don’t know that this generation will have gone through less dirt when they are forty, thanwe did. There comes a time to every one when they must decide definitely whether they are going to make fools of themselves or not. I’ve got very strong views about morality.”
His clever, wrinkled old face beamed with amusement.
“Morality is just a synonym for wisdom,” he went on, “and immorality is folly. I don’t know anything about the religious side of it all. I leave that to others, professionals. But I know a little about folly. It’s quite the worst investment you can make.”
“I don’t know that I ever thought about it at all,” said Tom frankly; “I don’t mean to be a brute if I can help it.”
“There are no such things as brutes,” said his father; “there are only wise men and fools—chiefly fools. Every man has to settle the question for himself as to which he will be: no one goes through life scot-free of the necessity of fighting inclinations. I haven’t ever talked to you before about it, because it is no use giving advice to young men, and the worst thing of all is to tell them to think about such things. You have to think about it when your time comes; till then it’s best not to know it. The best preparation is to lead a healthy life, and think about cricket, not to read White Cross tracts and go to purity meetings.”
Tom rose from his chair and knocked out the ashes of his pipe against the chimney-piece.
“I think you’re wrong, father,” he said; “if one has an aim in life, everything gives way to that. If one has principles, one cannot disregard them.”
“Sometimes principles interfere with interests,” remarked Mr. Carlingford.
Tom laughed.
“Idle men are the vicious men,” he said.
“I haven’t done a stroke of work for ten years,” remarked his father with amusement. “All the same, I haven’t been idle. I find plenty to do in watching other people. But there is one piece of advice I would really like to give you. If you find you fall in love with any unsuitable young person—a model probably—send her about her business. If it’s too far gone for that, cut her throat—it is probably her fault—she probably wanted you to fall in love with her, and if you see any objection to that, cut mine, or cut your own. Perhaps your own is best. It is unpleasant, no doubt, for the moment, but that is better than wishing every moment for the rest of your life that you had done it.”
“But one can always cut one’s throat. Besides, isn’t that making a fool of one’s self?”
“Not at all: it is the consequence of having made a fool of one’s self.”
Tom frowned.
“Ah, I don’t like people talking about consequences. That is the talk of cowards.”
His father laughed.
“Never mind me, Tom,” he said; “I don’t expect you to agree with me. I am a vicious coward, am I not?”
“What I mean is, that you can make the best or the worst of a bad job,” said Tom. “When people talk of consequences, they seem to mean the worstconsequences. When a man has made a mistake, it is stupid of him to sit down and say, ‘Well, that is done; now for the consequences.’ There is almost always a choice of consequences.”
“Very often there are no consequences,” remarked his father. “I don’t think I ever did anything which had any consequences. But then, I never remember doing anything either, except making some money. When are you going to marry, Tom?” he asked suddenly.
Tom looked startled.
“When I fall in love, I suppose,” he said roundly.
“That’s a man’s answer. Well, my boy, I’m going to bed. You go to Cambridge to-morrow, don’t you? Are you going to do well in your Tripos?”
“I should think it’s very unlikely,” said Tom. “It seems that I’m a fool.”
“That’s no reason why you shouldn’t do well.”
“Then it seems that I’m the wrong sort of fool.”
Mr. Carlingford lighted his candle.
“That is very likely. Don’t trouble to do well on my account. I really don’t care the least what you do.”
“I shan’t trouble to do well on my own,” said Tom, laughing. “We had better prepare for failure.”
It was very evident in the course of the next term that Tom was extremely unlikely to do well on anybody’s account. The wine of his passion had begun to ferment in his brain, and he lounged his mornings away sometimes in the cast museum, sometimes in his room over a bushel of sculptor’s clay. At other times he had fits of complete idleness. He wouldget up late, perhaps go to a lecture, then stroll up to the tennis court, and play till lunch-time. In the afternoon he would play football, and sit talking over tea till Hall time, and after Hall play whist till bed-time. Markham, who was busy writing a dissertation for his Fellowship, had not time to look after him at all, and those in authority gave him up as a bad job. Tom regarded his own position as an excellent example of a man determining the consequences of his acts.
“I haven’t done any work for weeks,” he said to Markham one day, “and I ought to be in hot water. As a matter of fact, I am not, because I make up for it by cordially agreeing with all that they say to me, and never being out after twelve.”
“Don’t you think you are behaving rather idiotically?” asked Markham. “You seem to be rather proud of doing no work. It’s very easy; any one can do it.”
“Yes, I know it’s very easy,” said Tom, who was in an exasperating mood, “that’s why I do it. At the same time, any one can’t do it. You couldn’t, for example.”
“I hope I should never wish to try.”
“My dear Ted, you are incapable of wishing to try. It isn’t in you. It’s not so easy to be idle—though I said it was just now, because I wanted to make you angry—you must have a great deal to think about in order to be idle. If you don’t do something, you must be something, and that requires thought.”
“May I ask what you are being just now?”
“You shouldn’t interrupt, Ted. I was going to say that of course there are some people, who neither do or are anything, but they are idiots. I’m not that sort of idiot myself; just now I am being an artist.”
“I don’t doubt it, but what reason have I for believing it?”
“Oh, none at all,” said Tom, “but you asked me. I am meditating. I shall do the better for this some day.”
Markham made an impatient movement in his chair.
“Excuse my saying that I want to go on with my work.”
Tom laughed.
“Poor, dear old Ted, how you must loathe me! You can’t understand my doing nothing any more than I can understand your doing so much. Is your work of such vital importance? What does it all come to?”
“You’ve asked that before,” remarked Ted.
“Yes, and you’ve never answered it. I can understand a man doing archæology; there’s some human interest in that. I like to know what sort of earrings the Greek women used to wear. Oh, Ted, do you know the sepulchral reliefs from Athens? there’s a cast of one in the Museum. It’s wonderful. I shall do one to you when you die.”
“I wish you would go to your room, and get on with it.”
“Is the deliberative subjunctive going to kill you so soon as that? Well, I’ve often warned you.Good-bye, Teddy. You’re not sociable this morning.”
Tom departed, whistling loudly, and out of tune.
The Fellowship elections took place in March, and as the days drew near, Markham, finding himself unable to work, and fretting because he could not, very wisely determined to go away from Cambridge for the last week, having made Tom promise to telegraph the result to him. Tom was just returning from the telegraph office, having performed what was a thoroughly pleasing and satisfactory duty, and was crossing the court in the gathering dusk, when he saw a figure standing on the path near the Hall, where the announcement was posted. A sociable curiosity made him tack off a little and see who it was, and to his astonishment he found Markham standing there.
“Why, Teddy, I’ve just telegraphed to you!” he cried.
Markham turned round to him.
“Quick! tell me quick!” he said.
“You may walk across the grass,” said Tom solemnly; this being one of the Fellows’ privileges “And you may set to work to become a fossil as soon as you please. Well, I congratulate you, I suppose, though I’m not sure it’s the best thing for you.”
Markham caught hold of Tom’s arm.
“I think,” he said, very slowly and deliberately, “I think I’ve been making a fool of myself. This morning I found I couldn’t stop away, and I came back about a quarter of an hour ago. Since thenI have been standing here, not daring to go in and see. Tom, I’m going to chapel.”
It was two or three days after this that the two were walking down to the Pitt on Sunday evening. On their way they passed one of the mission-rooms in the town, and the street was almost blocked by a crowd all trying to get in. Tom, who was never so happy as in a mass of surging humanity, insisted on mingling with them and seeing what was going on. Markham tried to dissuade him, but failed, and after a good deal of pushing he succeeded in getting inside.
It was a Revivalist meeting full to overflowing; the room was hung with flaring banners, lit with blazing gas-standards, and warm condensed moisture shone on the walls. Tom looked with wonder and slight disgust towards the platform, where a short, stumpy man with a chin beard was addressing the people. He was describing his own conversion, which transformed him, according to his own account, from a swindling greengrocer into one of the saved. This happy change had also been accompanied with a great improvement in the greengrocery business. Instead of giving short weight and being always in debt, he took to giving full measure and speedily opened an account at a savings bank. He also mentioned that he became a teetotaler at the same time, though the more obvious connection between this fact and the incident of the savings bank did not seem to occur either to him or to his audience. All these sumptuous results were a direct effect of grace.
Tom listened for some minutes with amusement struggling with disgust, until the preacher in a suddenburst of gratitude gave out a hymn of the most militant order, and packed solidly with concrete images of abstract ideas. A young woman in a large poke bonnet was busy thrusting hymn-books into the hands of the congregation, and gave one to Tom. The band struck up a tune expressive of the liveliest devotion, and the congregation joined at the top of their voices.
They were in the middle of the second verse, when a sudden stir ran through the crowd, and from the middle of the hall there ran up to the platform a young woman, smartly—over-smartly—dressed, who burst into a loud fit of hysterical crying, and cried out that she was saved. The hymn was stopped at once, and the preacher led her aside while the congregation waited. In a few moments he led her back to the front of the platform, and gave out another hymn:—
“There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay.”
“There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay.”
“There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay.”
Tom’s sense of amusement was gone—a frown gathered on his forehead. What on earth did it all mean? It was clear what sort of a girl it was who had “stormed the gate of Heaven,” as the preacher expressed it—he had often noticed her in the streets—and now she was—what? How was she suddenly different from what she was before? Had her previous life been blotted out? What was the change, what did it mean? It could have been no easy thing to make an exhibition of one’s self like that; and where was the driving power? He began to be almost afraid. And before the hymn was finished the same thing happened again, this time to anelderly, respectable-looking man, who delivered a short speech to the congregation with tears streaming down his face. There was some strange force abroad, and Tom did not like it at all. He was desperately afraid of making a fool of himself, and he remembered his father’s warnings, though they were delivered in a very different sense. The vulgarity, the loudness of the whole proceedings were still very present to him, but he felt that he was in the presence of some force, hysterical perhaps, or perhaps only that force which does exist in enthusiastic crowds, of the nature of which he was absolutely ignorant. For aught he knew it might lay its hands on him next. So he resorted to the most obvious way out of it, and pushing through the crowd, he left the room.
Late that night he strolled into Markham’s room, as the latter was just thinking that it was time to go to bed, and proceeded to deliver himself of his impressions at length.
“It made me confoundedly uncomfortable,” he commented, after giving a full account of what had taken place. “I didn’t half like it, Teddy; I never saw anything like it before, and it was so much more real than I expected. What do you suppose that girl felt, or that man either? How can the singing of a hymn change the whole moral character? It must be hysterical. That’s why I went away; I was afraid of becoming hysterical too. Think how flat one would feel the next morning. And oh! the awful commonness of it all. The elect greengrocerwas the scrubbiest sort of brute. Fancy announcing publicly that you were saved! Surely, that is the one thing in the world one would be reticent about. What does it all mean, Teddy?”
Markham felt the natural reserve which almost all young men feel in talking of such subjects, and Tom’s sudden curiosity about it surprised him. It was like Tom to mix with any crowd to see what was going forward, but it was so unlike him to have waited a single moment after seeing what it was, that Ted had waited in the street for him, expecting him to appear again every moment, and had eventually gone on to the Pitt, in a puzzled frame of mind.
“I don’t exactly know, Tom,” he said, after a pause. “I believe that that sort of conversion, as they call it, often has permanent effects. I think it quite conceivable that the greengrocer will continue to give full measure.”
“But about the savings bank!” burst out Tom; “how can that have anything to do with it?”
“You would put it differently, of course: you would say, ‘Honesty is the best policy.’”
“Possibly I should. At any rate, if one can account intelligibly for a thing it is better to do so, than to try to account for it fallaciously.”
Markham frowned.
“We’ve never talked of this kind of thing before,” he said tentatively. “I haven’t the remotest idea what your religion is, or, indeed, if you’ve got any.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking to myself all the evening,” remarked Tom. “I don’t know myself; I was only conscious that I felt no kind ofsympathy with those people. I was amused and disgusted, and then I was frightened.”
“I wish you had stopped,” said Markham, suddenly.
“Why on earth? Do you really think it would have done me any good to have been suddenly ‘taken’ as those people were? I suppose you will say I am a Pharisee—but what good would it have done me? What should I not do that I do now, or what should I do that I do not do? Early chapels, I suppose——”
“Ah, don’t!” said Markham, with sudden earnestness. “Those things may mean nothing to you, but they do to others—and among others to me.”
Tom stared in perplexity.
“To you—do you believe in that sort of conversion? Do you think that something can happen to you suddenly like that which changes you?”
“I can’t help believing it. How can I say that such things do not happen? I stake my life on such possibilities.”
“The whole thing seems so irrational to me,” said Tom. “In anything else, a man’s life is not changed by a little thing of that sort. And then the banking account——”
“Well, take an instance in your own line,” said Markham. “Can’t you imagine a modern artist who looks at a Raphael for the first time becoming a convert to that style of art?”
“That’s quite different,” said Tom. “These people have probably been brought up in these beliefs; the idea is not a new one to them. No doubt it camehome with more force at such a moment. It is like a man who had been looking at Raphaels all his life, and caring nothing for them, being suddenly convinced by one of them. That doesn’t seem to me likely.”
“You may be right, I can’t say, for you know more of the subject than I. But what right have you to say that a thing doesn’t seem likely in a matter of which, as you said, you know nothing?”
“That’s true,” said Tom, “I do know nothing of it. But who does?”
“The probability is, that people who have thought about it know more than those who haven’t.”
Tom got up, and began to walk up and down the room.
“Well, I want to know, but how can I? If I didn’t feel an interest in it, I shouldn’t have come to talk about it. But I am altogether at sea. I wasn’t brought up in a religious household. My father never speaks of such things. At school I had to read the Bible, chiefly the Acts, like any other school lesson. I was confirmed as a matter of course. If you are not religiously minded, how can you become religious? If a man is not literary, you don’t expect him to feel any interest in books.”
“But it’s a defect that he doesn’t.”
“Yes, because he naturally moves among people who do,” said Tom, “and he necessarily feels out of it. But though you move among religious people you don’t feel out of it, because their religion does not come into their lives. I suppose you would call my father an Atheist, but you wouldn’t know it, unless you inferred it from the fact that he doesn’t go tochurch on Sundays, and that we don’t have family prayers. How is it possible for me to feel such things? Perhaps—you see I never knew my mother, she died when I was a baby——”
“Were you not brought up to believe anything?”
“My nurse taught me to say my prayers. On cold evenings I used to ask if I might say them in bed, and I always got dropped on for it. It was considered a form of profanity. I never understood why. And when the age for nurses ceased, my prayers ceased also. I want to know where the difference between me and religious people comes in. A large number of religious people lose their tempers oftener than I do, because I was born with a better temper than they. You read of clergymen being convicted of theft. I never was, because I never stole anything. Gentlemen don’t do such things. It seems to me that we both agree with a certain code of morality for different reasons.”
“Did it never occur to you to wonder why you existed, or how you existed, or what was the object of your existence at all?”
Tom looked at him straight in the face.
“No, never. What good would it do me to puzzle my head about such things even if it had occurred to me? Here I am; how or why I have no means of telling. But I mean to make other people know why I existed; one can’t do more than that. I am going to be an artist.”
Markham felt the hopelessness of making Tomunderstand. It was like describing colours to a blind man; for himself he had been brought up in a childlike faith, and he was childlike still. His life had been sheltered, nursed in traditions, and when it was transplanted to the outer air, it was a sapling capable of striking roots, and standing by itself. It had never known what the drenching showers of autumn, or the winds of winter were, till it was capable, not exactly of despising them, but of being unconscious of them. If Tom was blind, he was blind, too, in another sense.
There was a long silence. Tom had halted in his walk by the chimney-piece, and was poking a paper spill down his pipe stem. Markham was sitting at the table, puzzled and helpless. It was a couple of minutes perhaps before Tom spoke. Then he spoke decidedly.
“I’m not going to bother about it,” he said. “I don’t understand what it all means, but I don’t understand what most things mean. If it is a big thing, you may be sure that there are many ways of getting at it. One man can’t see all the way round a big thing. You are at one side of it, Ted, perhaps I am nowhere; but then, again, I may be at the other side of it. I may be meant to come to it by roads you can never guess of. If I am meant to know it, I shall know it some time. By-the-by, we play tennis at ten to-morrow.”
“You’ve got a lecture at ten,” said Markham.
“Many things may happen at ten,” said Tom “but the probability is in favour of only one thing happening. I don’t think the lecture has supreme rights. However, if it has, you won’t get a game.”
“Oh, but you promised you’d play!” said Markham unwisely.
“I can’t go back on that,” said Tom. “I never promised to go to a lecture. You shall give me breakfast at nine—or perhaps a little after nine. Let’s call it nine-ish.”
Maud Wrexhamwas sitting in her mother’s room one morning, towards the end of July, after breakfast, telling Lady Chatham her engagements for the day. This piece of ritual was daily and invariable, and her mother spent the succeeding three-quarters of an hour in trying “to work things in,” as she called it—in other words, to manage that one carriage should drop two people in different parts of London, and call for them both again at the hour they wanted. These manœuvres usually ended in both parties concerned taking hansoms, after waiting a considerable time for the carriage to pick them up, and driving home separately, while the empty carriage, with the coachman, who was always sceptical about such arrangements, returned home gloomily about half an hour later.
“I think I shall go to Victoria and meet Arthur,” Maud was just saying; “he will catch the first boat from Calais, and his train gets in about five.”
“Dear Arthur!” exclaimed Lady Chatham with effusion, “I hope he won’t be dreadfully relaxed. Athens is so relaxing; I wish he could have stopped at Berlin.”
Arthur Wrexham had just spent his first year atAthens, as third Secretary to the Legation, and was coming home for two months’ leave.
“He’ll have a lot of luggage, mother,” went on Maud; “you’d far better let me take a hansom, and then he and I can come back in one, and send his luggage by a four-wheeler.”
Lady Chatham examined her engagement-book with avidity.
“No, Maud, it’s the easiest thing in the world. What a coincidence! I’ve got to pick your father up at Victoria Mansions at a quarter-past five. I will drop you at Victoria, and then go on. If we are there by ten minutes past, it will do perfectly; the boat is sure to be late.”
“It will be rather stupid if I miss him,” said Maud.
“You’ll be in plenty of time—or if you like, I will start five minutes earlier, and go round to see—no, I can’t do that. Then, as you say, you can take a hansom. No, you needn’t do that. If I take the landau we can all come back together. Five minutes for getting to Victoria Mansions, and five minutes back. He’ll take ten minutes getting his luggage out. How much luggage will he have?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Because we might take the lighter things—I needn’t take a footman—and send the heavier ones home by Carter and Paterson.”
“I think it would be safer to get a cab, wouldn’t it?”
“I’ll think about it, and tell you at lunch. Dear Arthur! Well, what else are you going to do?”
“We’re going to the Ramsdens’ dance this evening, and dining there first.”
“Then the other carriage can take us, and if Arthur cares to go to the dance—they didn’t know he’d be back, but I’m sure they want him to come—Lady Ramsden told me so, if he was back by any chance—it can come back here, and take him on again at ten. Then you and I will come back in it, when you’ve had enough, and if Arthur wants to stop, I’m afraid he must find his own way back. Is that all?”
“I’m lunching with the Cornishes.”
“Well, then, I’ll leave a note for you about Arthur’s luggage, as I shan’t see you at lunch. Where do the Cornishes live?”
“In Pont Street.”
“Then it’s the most convenient thing in the world. I’m going to my dentist at half-past twelve, and I shall be back by two. Then the carriage can take you on at once.”
“They lunch at two, I’m afraid, mother.”
“Well, dear, you’ll only be a few minutes late. It will save you the bother of taking a hansom, or walking.”
“Oh, never mind! I shall be out, I expect, and shall go there straight.”
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, shopping.”
“Well, then, I might drop you on my way to the dentist’s wherever you liked. If you will be ready at twelve I will take you. Or five minutes to twelve, if you are going out of my way.”
Maud got up.
“No, start at twelve as you intended, and ifI’m in, and ready, I’ll come with you. Don’t wait for me, mother.”
“If you’d only tell me exactly where you want to go, and when, Maud, I’ve no doubt I could work it in.”
“I’ve got to go to Houghton and Gunn’s first.”
“Very well, then,” said her mother, triumphantly, “nothing can be simpler. I drop you there, and go to the dentist’s. Then I send the carriage back for you, and you do anything else you want, and come back to the dentist’s at half-past one. Then we drive straight to Pont Street, and I drop you again, and go home.”
Maud’s chief object at this moment, it must be confessed, was to get out of the room. So she assented with fervour.
“That’s beautiful, mother. How clever of you to work it all in!”
Lady Chatham heaved a sigh of well-earned satisfaction. “Yes, I think everything is provided for. Ring the bell, darling, will you? I must send word to the stables at once.”
Lady Chatham felt that she had really deserved a painless visit to the dentist. She was always regretting that her time was so dreadfully taken up with little things, and that she never could do anything she really wanted to do, though what that was is quite unknown. It is to be suspected that in addition to her daily arrangements, she spent much time in making plans for Maud’s future, which included far more than the ordinary maternally matrimonial plans include. She intended, for instance, to sendher out to Athens for a few months during the winter, where she would live with her brother, and see a little foreign life. Foreign life, she considered, was something very mysterious, but very broadening in its effects on the human mind. The fact that you no longer had meat breakfast at half-past nine, and lunch at two, butcafé au laitat eight anddéjeûnerat twelve or half-past, was apparently the door to whole vistas of widening experiences. Breakfast at half-past nine and lunch at two were parts of the organism of life, and the substitution of other hours instead of those was a change the importance of which could not be overlooked. She had spent six months in Rome when she was a girl, with an uncle, who was ambassador there, and she always looked back to that six months as having been something very revolutionary and startling. It had made, she often said, the whole difference to her.
To-day, however, the arrangements, owing to a distinct intervention of Providence, who roughened the seas, and made the train late, went off more satisfactorily than usual, and as they drove to the Ramsdens in the evening, Lady Chatham felt that the dentist really had hurt her more than he should have been allowed to do, and hoped that she would have a pleasant dinner to make up for it.
The Ramsdens lived in one of the few houses in London which do not remind one of barracks, and Lady Ramsden’s parties had the reputation, among those who were asked, of being very smart, while those who were not considered her a pushing woman. Four or five times a year her dinners had a littleparagraph all to themselves in theMorning Post, beginning with a Royal Highness and ending with Colonels in attendance, on the page that announced the movements of nations and the quarrels of kings. Lady Ramsden always snipped these out, and pasted them in an extract book. There was a certain monotony about them, but you cannot have too much of a good thing. But this was not one of her really smart parties; originally it was to have been, but the Highness had been unable to come, and she had to have recourse, not only to mere Honourables, but even a plain Mr., in the shape of Tom Carlingford.
Tom had already arrived when Lady Chatham got there, and Maud was quite surprised to find how glad she was to see him again. Apparently, her mission of being nice to people had been successful in this instance, for he was evidently equally glad to see her. He took her in to dinner, and as Tom’s custom was, began exactly where they had left off.
“I’m going out to Greece in October,” he was saying. “I’ve finished with Cambridge.”
“I remember your telling me you were going out,” said Maud. “I’m going too; did you know that? My brother is at the Legation there.”
“Oh, but how nice!” said Tom. “Are you going soon?”
“Well, about the beginning of December, for a month or two. You’ll see my brother to-night. He’s coming to the dance afterwards. Have you taken your degree? By the way, I saw that your friendMr. Markham had got a Fellowship. I was so pleased. I nearly wrote to congratulate him.”
“Why didn’t you quite?” asked Tom.
“Surely it was sufficiently shocking that I nearly did. Are you going to get a Fellowship too?”
Tom grinned.
“Well, it’s not imminent.”
“Why, aren’t you ambitious? It’s a pity for a man not to be ambitious.”
“My ambitions don’t lie in those lines. Besides, I’m a fool. Every one has told me so scores of times.”
Later on in the evening the two were sitting out in a charming little courtyard in the centre of the house, open to the air, and walled with banks of flowers. The place was lit up by small electric lights among the flowers, and the air was deliciously cool and dim after the hot glare of the ball-room. The steady hum of a London night came to them clearly in the stillness, that noise of busy people, which never is quiet. The place was nearly deserted, and Maud was fanning herself lazily.
“There, do you hear it?” she said; “that’s the noise I love. I like to know that I am in the middle of millions of people.”
Tom smiled.
“Ah! you like it too, do you?” he said. “It’s the finest thing in the world. But I always want to get at it, to make its heart beat quicker or slower as I wish. That’s a modest ambition, isn’t it?”
Maud stopped fanning herself, and dropped her hands into her lap.
“Yes; how is one to do it? I’m going to do ittoo, you know. We shall have to send word to each other whether its heart is to go quick or slow, else there will be trouble. I feel so dreadfully small in London. I suppose it is good for one, but it’s very unpleasant.”
“No, it’s not good for one, except that if you know you are small, you are already half-way to being big,” said Tom. “At any rate, one can never be big without the consciousness of being small.”
Maud sat still for a moment, saying nothing.
“Why did you care nothing about what you did at Cambridge, then?” she asked. “Surely you could have made a beginning there.”
“I got a third in my Tripos,” remarked Tom. “Have you ever done Greek grammar, or Thucydides?”
“No, never; why?”
“It’s the sort of thing a parrot could be taught to do.”
“And because you are not a parrot, they couldn’t teach you. Is that it?”
Tom laughed.
“Well, you needn’t believe it unless you like, but I believe I could have done well if I had wanted to enough. I really didn’t want to. There’s not time for that sort of thing.”
“What did you do instead?”
“I enjoyed myself. I’ve had my holiday, and now I’m going to work. Here’s your brother coming to look for you.”
Arthur Wrexham was a slight, delicate-looking man, who apparently suffered from extreme languor;he was very well dressed, and had weak blue eyes, which looked only a quarter awake. He had already roused Tom’s wrath by confessing, in answer to certain questions, that he had never been into any of the museums.
“There’s such a lot to do, you know,” he explained. “One has to go to the Legation every day to see if there are any letters to be written, and then one has to take some exercise, you know, and go out to dinner. Then there are cigarettes to smoke.”
“Perhaps you don’t care about art?” Tom had said charitably.
“Oh dear, yes, I’m devoted to it! I mean to let all the museums burst upon me some day.”
“They won’t burst upon you unless you go there,” Tom had replied.
Just now, Arthur was peculiarly gentle andpiano; he dangled his hands weakly before him, and wore an expression of appreciative languor.
“Oh, here you are!” he said. “I wish you’d come home, Maud. I think I shall go, in any case. Do you think there’s a hansom about anywhere?”
Maud laughed.
“Poor dear, shall I go and call one for you?”
“I suppose there’s sure to be one somewhere in the street, isn’t there? Delightful party it’s been, hasn’t it? No, I haven’t danced, but it’s so nice to be in London again. I shall go and sit in the Park to-morrow, on a little civilized green chair. There are no green chairs in Athens, you know, and no parks either. It really is a barbarous place; I can’t think why you want to go there, Maud.”
“Why don’t you take a little civilized green chair with you, Arthur,” she said, “and put it in the garden? That would do for the park.”
“Yes, it’s so good of you to suggest that; but it wouldn’t do at all. It’s not only the little green chair, it’s the civilization generally, and the grey sky, and sirloins of beef one wants.”
“I thought you hated beef,” said Maud. “I’m sure I’ve heard you say that it was barbarous food.”
“Oh yes, I know it is; but I like to know that it’s there. I don’t want to eat it, but there always ought to be some on the sideboard. Well, won’t you come, Maud?”
“No, I’m not coming yet.”
Tom grew exasperated.
“Can’t you find your way home alone?” he asked.
Arthur Wrexham looked at him for a moment with mild and slightly piteous surprise.
“Oh yes, I shall be all right,” he said, “if I can only get a hansom! I suppose there’s a man who will call a hansom for me if I give him a shilling. Good night, Maud.”
He went very quietly away, bestowing a nod and a tired smile on Tom.
“It’s so funny that he should be my brother,” said Maud, when he was out of hearing; “and all he wants to do is to read little French books, and sit in the Park, and have tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. I wonder he didn’t mention that.”
“I dare say he’ll do it in a day or two, when he gets less tired,” said Tom; “he evidently means to begin gently.”
Maud drew on her gloves again.
“Here’s my partner coming to look for me,” she said. “I must go. Mind you come and see us. You are in London for a time, are you not?”
“Oh yes, till the end of July, or nearly. I don’t suppose I ever spent a whole week in London before, but father has at last consented to take a house for a couple of months. He even came to Henley this year, though I must say he was much bored by it, and almost perfectly silent, except once when a lot of dabchicks came swimming round, and he looked up and said, ‘The very dabchicks come about me unawares, making mouths at me.’ He likes sitting in the Park, too, and observing the weaknesses of the human race.”
“He must have his hands full. Doesn’t he observe their strong points as well?”
“No, I don’t think he does,” said Tom. “He likes them weak.”
Tom, fool though he might be, was wise enough to know that there are a great many interesting things to see in London, and had deliberately set himself to see them, with the result that in two or three weeks he knew more about the town than most Englishmen, and nearly as much as most Americans. Though he meant to specialize in sculpture, he had an “all-round eye,” as the saying is, and a great power of reducing what he saw to mental pictures and little dramatic vignettes, and he found food for imagination scattered broadcast. Its extraordinary crude contrasts struck him most, and he often went rather early to theatres or to the opera, in order to stand for a few minutes atthe street corner and watch the upper classes going to have their emotions tickled, while the grimy crowd round them hustled and pushed along in a never-ending stream. On one of these occasions a sturdy beggar asked him for money, and Tom, seized by a sudden impulse, showed him half-a-sovereign and asked him what he would do with it if he gave it him. The man’s eyes glistened, and he looked Tom full in the face.
“I should be drunk for a week, sir,” he said.
Tom broke into a roar of appreciative laughter, and gave it him.
The action was wholly indefensible from every point of view, but it was thoroughly characteristic. Love of life, in any form and in any guise, was stronger in him than the whole world beside. Anything which gave the genuine ring of life, whether made of gold or the basest of alloys, was worth the most valuable metals if they had no currency.
At other times he would go to the British Museum, which is quite worth a visit, and look at the Elgin marbles till his head ached. But he usually came away feeling rather helpless and dispirited. There was often a large number of young men and women copying them in chalks or oils, and Tom had sudden revulsions of feelings when he gazed at these. There was one girl in particular, with a frizzy fringe of seaweed-coloured hair and spectacles, who was making an admirable copy of the Olympos figure. She was dressed in a velveteen body, rather short in the sleeves, a badly cut skirt of green cloth, and wore very high-heeled shoes of antique patent leather.Somehow the combination of such an artist with such a subject confirmed the impression he had received at Cambridge when looking at the Discobolus figure. The thing was no longer possible. Beautiful nude youths did not now sit on lion-skins at street-corners, any more than Queen Victoria ate Homeric meals like Agamemnon. The grand style was obsolete. And on such occasions Tom would leave the Elgin room with a sigh. If the world was to be conquered it must be conquered with modern weapons of war; no amount of spears and slings would be a match for Martini rifles, field-guns, and cordite. Spears and slings were more beautiful, no doubt, but they were out of date. Just now that meant a good deal to Tom.
But if the Elgin marbles were out of date, still more out of date was Cambridge with its deliberative subjunctives. He thought with something like horror of the dull steady life there; of the long mornings when decorous isolation was observed throughout the college; when men sat with dictionaries and notebooks in front of them, and discreetly analysed Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war. That was more hopelessly obsolete than the Elgin marbles, for the latter were in the vanguard of their times, whereas Cambridge was painfully crawling back to times long past, and thinking throughout the tedious process that it was in the forefront of thought and advancement. It was the classical branches of that eminent university which seemed to him so woefully retrograde in their tendencies—for the medical, scientific, and even mathematical schools he felt, if not sympathy, at any rate no impatient condolence. “And then they marched twoparasangs and came to the River Amaspis ... and after having dinner there and marching two more parasangs, they encamped for the night.” The old sentences came back to him, as a Wagnerian may remember bars of Donizetti or Rossini heard in the unregenerate days.
And Markham? Markham came up to town for a few days in July, and worked at manuscripts in the British Museum. He was collating texts of an obscure Greek author, and explaining to a limited section of society how certain glosses crept in. It appeared that the copyist of the thirteenth century had taken unwarrantable liberties with the text, and that he had also frequently copied a word into a line he was writing, either from the preceding or the subsequent line, and this naturally led to a great deal of unnecessary confusion. One of the most vital results of this carelessness, as it appeared to Tom, lay in the fact that a sensible man like Markham should be spending the best years of his life in determining where this deplorable scribe had not taken the trouble to copy exactly what lay before him. And as no earlier copy of the work was extant, there was a field for the most various and lively conjectures, the truth of which would for ever remain in pleasing uncertainty. Markham, of course, was staying with Tom, and one evening the latter waxed quite hot on the subject, to his father’s great amusement.
“Did I tell you of that beggar I gave half a sovereign to one night?” he asked. “Well, I consider him to be infinitely your superior. When theJudgment day comes, he will know much more about his fellow-men than you ever will, and, according to all creeds, he will be in a better position than you when the accounts are settled.”
“If you mean that to get drunk for a week is knowing about your fellow-men,” said Markham, “I agree with you. But that sort of knowledge doesn’t seem to me worth much.”
“Oh, Teddy, I really wish you would get drunk once or twice, or be disreputable in some way! It would be the making of you. You are without charity; you don’t even know what it means. You have never known what it is to make allowances for anybody.”
“On the contrary, I am employed just now in making allowances for my thirteenth-century copyist, whom you gird at so.”
“No, you don’t make allowances for him in the least,” said Tom; “you note down in a cold critical way just where he goes obviously wrong. You gloat over his mistakes because they enable you to make brilliant—I suppose you are brilliant—guesses at what he should have written. You don’t think of the poor old man having to copy out dull Greek iambics by the yard, and getting very sleepy over the process. There would be some interest in that; what you do is to rob everything of all the human interest it ever possessed.”
Mr. Carlingford had spent his life from the age of fourteen to fifty-eight in learning how to acquire money and in proceeding to do so, and had existed entirely for the business house which he had foundedand raised to an important and safe position. But his work had never been a passion to him, and at the latter age he had retired, leaving the management of affairs in the hands of his old partner and his son, who had a few years afterwards been also taken into the business. Mr. Carlingford on retiring had not left his capital merely as a deposit in the business, but remained a partner, though he took no part whatever in the management of the affairs. In his elder partner he felt as much confidence as it was in his nature to feel towards any one, and as, since his retiring, his income had shown no signs of falling off, his confidence had rapidly flowered into a total indifference to all such concerns. His fortune, in fact, was sufficiently large to enable him to feel a profound contempt for money, bred from familiarity with it, and he did not put the slightest opposition in the way of Tom becoming a sculptor or adopting any profession, except that of a clergyman, however unremunerative.
Tom very soon got known and even discussed in a certain section of London society. He was extremely presentable, he made himself uniformly agreeable, except to Markham, and he had the incidental advantage of being the heir of an exceedingly rich man. Lady Chatham in the intervals of arranging about carriages congratulated herself on having previously settled for Maud to go out with her brother to Athens that winter. She even went so far as to allude to it once to her husband, who always saw the darker side of any scheme.
“Well, my dear, I think it very rash of you toencourage their intimacy,” he said; “Mr. Carlingford has no land, and even land is worth nothing now.”
Lady Chatham was rather horror-struck at this very unveiled way of stating the objection to a subject she had introduced so cautiously.
“Tom Carlingford is just as nice as he can be,” she replied, “and very well connected, and what investments and land have to do with the question, Chatham, I really don’t know.”
“But you were saying only the other day that you hoped Maud would marry well.”
“I have my only daughter’s real advantage at heart, and that only,” she replied with finality.
Lord Chatham overlooked the finality, and continued—
“Then did you only mean that you hoped she would marry a nice man, when you said you hoped she would marry well?”
“Of course it is an advantage to marry a man who can keep her in boots and gloves,” said Lady Chatham, stung into innocuous sarcasm.
“Oh, well, I dare say Tom Carlingford could do that, even if his father’s business smashed altogether. Mind you send the carriage back for me punctually, dear; I’ve got another meeting to go to after the House, and if it isn’t ready I shall have to take a cab, and the carriage perhaps will wait half an hour or more, and we shall be late for dinner.”