Maud got up.
“And I’ve got to go down to the House,” she said. “My father is making a statistical speech, and there will be a division. It is so tiresome his speaking to-night. I should have liked to sit in that armchair for ever. Good-night, Mrs. Carlingford. Do you know, I can’t call you Mrs. Carlingford any longer. Good-night, May. Do come and see me again soon.”
Tom went to see Maud off, and came back to the library. May was sitting in one of the big chairswith her hands idle on her lap. Tom threw himself down on the sofa near her and stared at the ceiling.
“London suits me,” he said, “and to-night I had London and Athens and you altogether. What had you and Manvers been talking about when I came in? You looked so grave.”
“Oh, nothing. He told me that he had known what fearful poverty was like.”
“Poor chap, yes. He doesn’t often speak of it. I’m awfully fond of him. He is nearly always amusing.”
“Yes, he seems clever,” said May.
Tom was silent a moment.
“Really I am a lucky devil,” he said. “I have everything I want. I have you first of all, and all life interests me and amuses me. And I’ve just paid my annual visit to the dentist.”
“Shall we go to Applethorpe for the Sunday?” asked May.
“Oh, I think not,” said Tom, “at least, unless you want to. I think Applethorpe would seem a little dull, don’t you?”
“Well, there are not so many things to do there as here, certainly,” said May, “and I suppose Mr. Manvers will be with us still.”
“I hope he will stop for a fortnight or more. It’s absurd his going to a hotel if we are in London.”
“Oh, of course,” said May, “but I want to go to Applethorpe soon. We didn’t go last Saturday or the Saturday before.”
Tom gave no answer for a moment.
“I’ll do exactly as you like,” he said; “we’ll go on Saturday if you wish.”
“Let’s go,” said May. “Mr. Manvers can come with us or go to the Chathams’. I know they want him to stay there a day or two.”
“Why not get Maud Wrexham as well, then?” said Tom. “If they would both come it would be delightful.”
May paused a moment. This was not exactly what she meant by a Sunday at Applethorpe.
“I expect they have people with them,” she said.
Tom was a little perplexed, but assumed that for some reason May did not want Maud Wrexham to come.
“Well, there’s no need to ask her unless you like,” he said, rising.
“I never said I didn’t want her.”
“No, dear, but I thought from your manner that perhaps you didn’t.”
May made a grab at the skirts of her retreating serenity.
“No, it would be delightful if she would come,” she said with an effort. “I’ll write a note to her to-night.”
Easterwas late, and when Tom and May left London to spend a week or two with old Mr. Carlingford at Applethorpe, spring had already burst out into freshest and greenest leaf. As they drove along the avenue from the Lodge gate, May thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. The ground sloped sharply from the road up on either side, and the russet of the last year’s dead bracken was mingled with the milky green of the fresh new shoots. Here and there an ash-tree with its black buds, or a lime on which the little fans of green leaves were beginning to burst from their red sheath, stood firmly among the young yearly plants, an experienced guarantee to the steadfast kindness of the varying seasons. Now and then a white-scutted rabbit bundled across the road, or a squirrel whisked up to some safer eminence, and scolded violently from among the branches. As they passed the lake, a moorhen half swam, half flew to seek the shelter of the rhododendron bushes, leaving a widening ripple behind it, and a sudden gust of wind arose, shaking half a dozen catkins from the listless birch-trees. The whole air was redolent of spring and country, and promise of fresh life.
Tom was driving, and May sat beside him. Shehad not been very well for a week or two, and as the wind struck her, he thought she shivered slightly.
“You’re not cold, are you, darling?” he said.
“No, Tom, only very happy.”
He laughed.
“Well, so am I; but I don’t shiver. Put that cloak round you.”
“Do you remember giving me your coat one night, Tom?” she asked.
“Yes; you were so obstinate, too. You refused to put it on for a long time.”
They drove on in silence for a little way.
“Are you glad to get down here?” asked Tom.
“Yes, very. I’ve got so many people I know here. You see, Tom, I’m not very clever, and I do like little quiet everyday things to do. And I see more of you here. You’re always so busy in London. Ted’s here, too. He got here two days ago.”
“Why doesn’t he come as your father’s curate?” asked Tom.
“Well, he has all his Cambridge work to do. He can’t very well give up that. And yet I don’t know.”
“I think he’s right,” said Tom. “He is doing splendid work, I believe. It doesn’t interest me, personally, but I do believe it ought to be done.”
“Ted told me you always used to howl at him so for working at scholiasts or syntax or something.”
“I know I used. But after all if the world is ever going to reach perfection, you have to work up all lines perfectly. And he says that scribes are terrible fellows for scamping their work and making stupid mistakes; they must be shown up.”
“But there are bigger things in the world than scribes and scholiasts, Tom,” said May, half-timidly.
“Yes, dear; but what is a man to do? He cannot work passionately at things he does not feel passionately.”
“But there is one thing which it is every one’s duty to feel passionately. And when a man goes into the church, it seems to me a sort of visible sign that he does feel it passionately.”
“But there are other things in the world,” said Tom. “What is beauty made for, or love, or anything lovely? Surely they are worth giving one’s life for? If there was only meant to be one thing in the world which it is right for men to strive after—I mean the personal direct relation with God—why are all these wonderful and beautiful things given us? Not just to look at and wonder and go by?”
“No. To help us to realize the personal and direct relation with God. We should look on them as signs of His love for us. Do you remember the first present you gave me, that little diamond ring? It was awfully pretty, but I loved it because you gave it me.”
Tom was silent.
“It’s no use talking of it, darling, even with you,” he said at last. “It is your passion, and I have another passion. Neither of us can really conceive that there is another standpoint besides our own. We acquiesce in there being others, but unless one experiences a thing, one cannot feel it.”
“I am not afraid, Tom,” said she. “He will teach us all in the way it is best for us to be taught. Ifwe are willing to receive, He will give us the knowledge of Himself, when it is good that we receive it.”
“And there we are at one,” said Tom. “That I believe with my whole soul.”
They reached home just as evening was falling, but the night came on warm and cloudless. Tom helped May very tenderly out of the carriage, and after tea they walked a little up and down the gravel path above the long terrace. The beds were already odorous with spring blossoms, and white-winged moths hovered noiselessly over the flowers, and glided silently away again like ghosts into the surrounding dusk.
The mist was rising a little from the low-lying fields towards the village, across which two country lads were walking home, one with an empty milk-pail in his hand, the other with a spade over his shoulder, whistling loudly. And in the dusk husband and wife spoke together of the dear event that was coming, and in that human love and longing their souls met and mingled. May thought no more of the barrier which still stood between them even in their almost perfect love and confidence. She, in her clear unquestioning faith, was apt to lose sight too much of the use and value of beauty and love and life, which are as directly gifts from God as faith, and to wonder, with something like anguish, when she thought how completely they had possession of her husband, what the end would be. But now that the fulness and perfection of a woman’s life was promised her, she, too, for a little felt the sweetness and strength of living. She was a woman, and the crown of womanhood wascoming to her; the divine miracle was near its fulfilment. She was alone in the hush of evening, beneath the opening stars, with her husband, and things human and divine seemed so mingled together, that neither failed of their completeness.
The next few days passed very peaceably. May, who had been rather languid and out of spirits in London, soon regained her serene health. She and Tom strolled together in the woods or drove out for an hour or two every day. Ted and his father were with them a good deal, and Tom, who had rather overworked himself in the last few weeks, found a new pleasure in hanging about doing nothing. May insisted on his going long rides or walks, in which she herself could not join, and after spending the morning quietly in the woods with Tom, or paddling about on the lake exploring the little creeks and islands, she would send Tom and Ted off together in the afternoon for a long tramp or a ride over the Surrey downs.
They had spent one of these afternoons, about a week after they had come to Applethorpe, in this manner, and about four o’clock had descended on to a little red-backed village standing in a hollow of the downs, surrounded by hop-gardens and strawberry fields, and having had tea in the country inn, proceeded homewards. Their way lay through the village street with its neat white cottages, and long strips of garden fronting the road. In one were flowering clumps of primroses, and a border of merry daffodils lay underneath the windows. In another a more ambitious show had been planned, and sundrylittle wooden labels, stuck about in beds of young fresh green, not yet in flower, promised a crop of annuals. In another a box hedge, cut into fantastic shapes, gave a genteel privacy, and marked it off from its neighbours. The little Norman church stood at the bottom of the street, and just as they passed the gate a group of mourners came away from a grave which the sexton was filling in. Tom waited for them to pass, and stood a moment watching them ascend the street. They went in, he noticed, at the house with the box hedge. A moment afterwards the clergyman, who knew Tom, came out, and as they stopped to speak to him, Tom asked what the funeral had been.
“A poor woman here,” he said, “who died in childbed two days ago. Poor thing! she leaves her husband, such a nice young fellow, quite alone. They had only been married nine months.”
Tom turned angrily round on the astonished young man.
“How can you say such horrible things?” he said, and walked off, followed by Ted, at five miles an hour.
Ted caught him up in a few moments, and made him abate his pace.
“Poor old boy,” he said, “don’t get in such a state about it!”
They walked on a few moments in silence.
“It’s all too horrible,” broke out Tom at length. “How can such things be? Poor darling! And I have been such a brute to her. Our lives are lived apart really. She thinks the passion of my life is no more than a plaything sent to amuse us, and the passion of hers is unintelligible to me. It is no more than a beautiful unconvincing fable.”
“But what if the fable is true?” asked Ted.
“It may be true, but how can I tell? All I know is that it isn’t convincing to me. It may be so, or it may not. But if it doesn’t convince me, what am I to do? I would give the world to be convinced of it.”
“She is very happy in your love,” said Ted.
“She is the best and sweetest woman on this earth,” said Tom. “I love her more and more every day. But I do love my art too. My life would be incomplete—impossible without either.”
Ted sighed.
“You are very fortunate. Your circle of completeness is widening every day. You are in love with love and life.”
“Teddy, do leave that place,” said Tom earnestly. “It is changing you. You always were narrow, you know, as I often told you, but you are getting narrower. You only care about dead things. You had better care about the worst of living things than the best of dead.”
“So you tell me. But no one can realize any one else’s conviction, as you have also told me. You are playing symphonies to the deaf. It may be so, or it may not be so. How can I tell?”
“But you know it is so,” said Tom.
“Sometimes I think it must be so. I know, at any rate, that you, for instance, get more keen and active happiness out of life than I do. The best emendation doesn’t give me the quality of pleasure which the smell of a spring morning or a hundred other things give you.”
“I told you so. You do know it,” said Tom. “Why don’t you act on it?”
“I can’t. There is no other reason. It is no use to say to myself: ‘You shall care for a spring morning more than you care for Zenobius.’ I don’t care passionately for Zenobius, but I don’t care at all for a spring morning.”
“I agree with you to a certain extent, you know,” said Tom—“more, at any rate, than I used to at Cambridge. I think scholiasts ought to be studied. They are a leaf, or a line in the book of ultimate perfection. But you have got them out of focus. They are too close to your eyes, and conceal everything else. Well, here we are at the vicarage. Good-bye, Teddy! I must go home quickly.”
Tom passed along the village street, and at the church suddenly the words of the clergyman came back to him with a sickening sense of revulsion. He paused at the door a moment, and then by a sudden impulse went in and knelt down in the nearest seat. He was not aware of conscious thought, only of an overmastering need. “Why am I here,” he thought to himself, “I who have no right here?” Then like an overwhelming wave the thought of May came upon him—May, the love of his strong, young life, soon to be in pain, perhaps in danger of death, like the woman in the cottage with the box hedge, with that yet unborn life within her. And the same impulse which had prompted him to come into the church, prompted him to say, “If there is One all-powerful and all-loving, may He be with her now.” And like the old pagans in Homer, he felt inclined to vow a hecatomb of oxen if his prayer was granted.
And thus in his terrible fear and need Tom wasbrought by his love for May to the feet of the unknown God.
He waited a moment before leaving the church, and looked round. There were the old windows he knew so well: a pink Jonah being fitted neatly into a green whale; a yellow-haired, long-legged David standing on the chest of a prostrate Goliath, and with immense difficulty lifting the giant’s sword; a perfect Niagara of dew descending on the fleece of Gideon, Joshua laying violent hands on a red sun and a yellow moon, and the walls of Jericho falling over symmetrically in one piece. The east window consisted of three narrow lancets, still faintly visible in the dusk, and the middle of these showed a figure crowned with thorns, with arms outspread, drawing the whole world unto Him....
He went quickly up over the fields from the village where he and May had walked the first night they came, and along the terrace walk. A little wind stirred in the bushes, and blew across him the faint odour of the flowers. In the house the lamps were already lit, and looking up to May’s bedroom window he saw through the white blind a light burning there. For one moment his heart stood still with fear, and then, regathering courage, he went into the house.
His father was sitting in the library, with a green reading-lamp by him, and he looked up quickly as Tom entered.
“Where is May? Where is May?” he asked.
Mr. Carlingford shut up his book.
“My dear boy, how late you are, and what on earth is the matter with you? Tom, for God’s sakedon’t be hysterical or faint. It’s all right, but it has been very sudden. May’s child was born—a son—just about four o’clock. She is asleep now, and doing very well.”
Tom stood there, perfectly pale, with his mouth slightly open. Then quite suddenly his hat and stick fell from his hand, and he collapsed into a chair.
Mr. Carlingford rang the bell.
“Tom, if you behave like that, I shall disown you. I never saw such an absurd exhibition. Are you going to cry, or die, or what? Here, bring some brandy quickly,” he said to the man who answered the bell.
The brandy revived Tom somewhat, and he stood up, still looking dazed and puzzled.
“I don’t know what happened to me, father,” he said. “I never behaved like that before. I want to see May and—and my son. Say it again. What has happened exactly?”
“My dear Tom, from the way you behave, I should have thought that such a thing as the birth of a child was a unique phenomenon, whereas it is one of the most common exhibitions of the forces of Nature. It occurs, I am told, many times every minute on this earth. You can’t see either of them now.”
“The baby, just fancy!”
Tom picked up his hat and stick, and stood looking into the fire. Even Mr. Carlingford was slightly shaken from the web of cynical observation, out of the meshes of which, like a kind of spider, he culled the weaknesses of mankind, Tom, with his smooth hairless face, looked so boyish himself, and for amoment the old man’s memory went back with a sudden feeling of tenderness to the time when Tom had been a soft helpless atom like that which was lying upstairs now at its mother’s breast.
“Tom, old boy, I’m so awfully pleased,” he said. “I always had an absurd wish—I don’t know why—to see you with a baby sitting on your knee. You are a good boy; you chose the wife I would have had you choose, and she has behaved as a wife should behave.”
Tom turned round to his father with a beaming face.
“Then we are all satisfied, father,” he said, “and now I’m going upstairs very quietly to see if I can see her—them. Them!”
May was asleep, and he was told to delay any further visit till the morning. If she woke she had better not be disturbed; but she should be told that Tom had come in, and that he had been up to see her.
Next day was Sunday, and Tom awoke very early in that most delicious way of all, slowly, with a vague growing consciousness of utter happiness. The window was open, and he lay a few minutes letting the cool breeze ruffle his hair before he stirred. Then rising and putting on a dressing-gown, he went to make inquiries as to whether May was awake, and whether he might see her. The nurse answered both questions affirmatively, and he went in. She was lying propped up by pillows, and by the bed was a little pink-and-white cot, in which Tom could just see a little crumpled red face.
May welcomed him with a smile, and laid her finger on her lips.
“Hush, Tom, he’s asleep,” she whispered, “but you may look at him.”
Tom availed himself of the permission.
“What a queer little thing it is!” he said.
“Queer! It!” objected May. “It’s him, and he’s beautiful.”
Tom knelt down by the bed.
“My darling, my darling!” he whispered. “I didn’t know how happy I could be till I woke this morning. And it’s all real and true. I was almost afraid till I saw you that it was a dream or a wish of mine.”
He raised himself and bent over her, and their lips met in a long kiss of passion purified by tenderness.
He stood there for a moment, till the son and heir awoke and began to howl, bringing the nurse into the room, who incontinently dismissed Tom.
He went back to his room and drew up the blind, letting a yellow splash of sunlight on to the floor. In the bushes below the window a thrush sang out of the fulness of his heart the wonderful repeated song which he always knew, and which no one else will ever learn. Through the soft air swept the first swallows of the new summer, flying high over the shrubs and trees in the garden. Tom looked out for some minutes, sniffing in the clear morning air, when from the village began the church bell for early communion. A sudden impulse, an irresistible need to thank some one for his happiness, as strong and urgent as his need the night before of commending May to some protection stronger than man, made him dress quickly and walk down to the church.
It was almost empty. Ted and his father were atthe altar, and a few parishioners were kneeling in the body of the church. The Ante-communion Service was nearly over, and Mr. Markham was reading the Prayer for the Church Militant as Tom entered. He went to the pew where he had knelt the night before, and soon the blessed command fell on his ears—
“Draw near with faith, and take this holy sacrament to your comfort.”
What did it mean? How could he draw near with faith? What was faith? And the grave, solemn voice from the altar answered him, that faith was to know that God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son.
Was this, then, the answer to his strange unformulated desire to thank some one for his happiness? Did it all come from this, from the quiet, still church, from the memory of that sacrifice which sanctified love and all that is beautiful?
He had wanted to vow a hecatomb of oxen the night before; he had longed to be able to promise something to any power which would give him what he had seen in May’s room that morning, and instead of that he himself was bidden to the feast, and with the others he went up and knelt at the table of Christ.
Tom waited outside the church for Ted and his father, in order to give them news of May, and then turned homewards again. The desire to seek aid which had prompted him to come to the church the night before had given place to the desire to give thanks. He had come one step nearer to the unknown God; he approached Him, not as a power, but as a benefactor. The words of the greatthanksgiving had thrilled him through and through. “We praise Thee, we bless Thee.”
That desire of the human creature, constant through all centuries, to seek for that which is outside itself, and stronger than itself, and passes understanding, had come to him. Some hand had knocked, so he thought, on the door of his soul, and wakened it from its sleep of indifference. Was it perhaps, after all, only the result of this sudden change from his deathly fears of the night before to the embracing happiness of this morning? He could not tell; he scarcely cared to ask himself.
After breakfast he saw May again, and when the nurse put an end to their interview he went out under the cedar, filled with the double thought. The bell for eleven o’clock church was ringing, but Tom had no intention of going. The sacredness of the morning demanded solitude. He watched the servants going down to church in their Sunday clothes, and marked two footmen stealing away towards the woods, and by degrees the house grew still. Tom went in and found a Bible with some little difficulty, and brought it out. He wanted to know more of that wonderful Life that had died, and had risen again for ever in men’s hearts, and he turned to the Gospel of the Apostle of Love. There he could learn all that a man need know, all that he had missed all his life.
But how to get at it? How to know that those words were spoken for him? All he did know was that words and sentences which he had often heard before were meaningless no longer, that somethingwhich was very real and sacred to others had a sudden interest for him. He had never had doubts on such subjects; simply the belief in which he had been scantily brought up had faded and died a natural death, as leaves die in autumn when the sap no longer feeds them. So now the simple Gospel narrative struck him as so probable, so convincingly literal, that there was no question of sifting or examination possible. He remembered vaguely, and with some contempt, a book he had read not long before which seemed to deny the fundamental truths of Christianity because the writer could not bring himself to believe that Balaam’s ass really spoke. Even the literal truth of the Gospel did not seem to matter; the conception was divine; it was the best life that could have been lived: it was perfection, no less, and that which is perfect is not man, but God.
Socrates warns us of the inutility of an unexamined belief, a statement which is not universally true. For a man who is gifted or saddled—for it is a dangerous bequest—with a critical nature the remark is profoundly true. To deliberately refuse to look a doubt in the face is an act of cowardice, a sacrifice and a stifling of our intellectual capacities. But there are many natures, highly developed intellectually, which are not critical, and to such religion is a matter of either indifference or conviction. Whether there ever was a Garden of Eden with a tree in the middle of it, round which was coiled a serpent, is a question which has no interest for them. If pressed they may say that some things are not meant to be taken literally, and dismiss the subject from their minds.The critical mind finds some slight but spurious consolation in shrugging its shoulders and labelling them as fools, but its consolations end there, for there is no doubt which is the happier of the two, and that an uncritical mind is synonymous with a foolish one is not the case.
There is a certain experiment known to chemists as the solidification of a supersaturated solution. Some fluid is heated, and while hot there are dissolved in it large quantities of salt or alum. Now, a liquid when hot can hold more substance in solution than when it is cold, and when this surcharged liquid is allowed to cool quietly it actually holds more salt than it is theoretically capable of holding, and as long as it is left still it can do so. But if an atom of the same salt is put into it, the whole mass solidifies. Tom’s spiritual fluid had been subjected to a somewhat analogous experience. It had been surcharged with the salts of love and life, and then came the atom as momentous as the straw which breaks the camel’s back—the birth of the baby and the safety of May. It was necessary for him to have something to which he could refer, and from which he might derive his happiness; there must be for him a Superior Being. He did not wish to argue about it, to examine reasons for granting the existence of a first cause, or to split hairs over the precise way in which God became incarnate in man. Simply his happiness was too great for him to bear alone; his nature held more happiness than it could hold by itself, and he had to refer it to something outside his nature.
Tomwent back to London about a fortnight after the baby’s birth, and plunged into his work with more vigour and earnestness than ever. His new interest in religious matters was a thing apart from his work, just as was his love for May, and it did not get between him and his models, or interpose angular substances between his hand and eye. His religion was not fanatical or aggressive: it had come to him as the explanation of his human love, and inasmuch as the white heat of that had burned out of his life all that was sordid or impure, the conduct of his life was left unchanged. According to moralists, all sin partakes of the nature of decay, and Tom’s nature was very vital. And as his religion was not fanatical, it did not fill him with any half self-conscious and wholly morbid convictions of sin, either in himself or others, and he pursued his cleanly honest life much as he had done before.
But as the days went on, and May got steadily stronger again, a doubt began to look him in the face. He remembered the Revivalist meeting at Cambridge, and his own rejection of the idea that one moment, one flash of seeming revelation could change any one. He himself had faced an anxietyblacker than death, had felt a relief purer than heaven. Did not that perhaps account for it all? Was not his own case as intelligible as that of the greengrocer who became a teetotaler? And because he was honest with himself he put himself a straightforward question: “Would he feel another and a fiercer anguish if he again got to believe that Christ was merely the best man who had ever lived and no more?” The question haunted him, but he was unwilling to answer it.
To his surprise Tom found Manvers waiting for him at home one evening when he came back from some party about a week after his arrival in London. The latter was sitting in the smoking-room consuming cigarettes until Tom returned.
“I hear there are three to theménagenow,” he said. “I am delighted, of course. I should so like to have a baby. There can be nothing more interesting than to see a helpless thing with nothing it can call its own, except the tendencies it inherits from oneself, slowly acquiring intelligence.”
“It’s a great responsibility,” said Tom, throwing himself into a chair and scratching his head with an air of wisdom.
Manvers stared at him incredulously.
“My dear fellow, the man who thinks about responsibilities is no longer a responsible being. It is a sign of mania or extreme old age. The age of responsibility begins at eighty-three or eighty-four, and I once knew a man of eighty-five who was still irresponsible. You are upset and excited. Go to Paris for a week. Paris is strangely regenerative, I always find.”
Tom laughed.
“Talking of Paris, why aren’t you there?”
“I am staying with the Chathams,” said Manvers. “They were in Paris just before Easter, and they asked me to come to London and see them for a week or two, and as I had nothing to do I came. I always have a great success with middle-aged gentlemen. There is something peculiarly seductive about me to the mature male.”
“I don’t care for mature males much,” said Tom.
“Oh! that is a mistake. They make one feel so young. It is so easy to be seductive to them. You have to be very deferential, but imply at the same time that it is a very great compliment, and give them the impression that you yourself have vast stores of experience at your back, but prefer that they should produce theirs.”
“Did you come here simply to make yourself seductive to Lord Chatham?”
“No, I can’t say that was my object. My coming was only the effect of my having done so. I came to see other people.”
“How is Maud? I haven’t seen her lately.”
“As charming as ever,” said Manvers with some finality.
“May is down in the country still,” said Tom, after a pause, “with my father and the baby.”
“And are you ridiculously happy still?”
“Quite ridiculously. But why still?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We are limited, and so are our emotions. I have a natural tendency myself to get tired of the things I like.”
“But you said just now that Maud was as charming as ever.”
“Obviously then she is an exception.”
He rose to go.
“I must be off,” he said. “You came in so late, and I wanted to talk to you—but it’s after twelve, and they will all think it most unseductive of me to wake the house up at nameless hours. I suppose I shall see you again soon?”
“Yes, I dare say I shall come to the Chathams’ at tea-time to-morrow. I haven’t seen them for an age.”
In the thirty-two years of his life Manvers had been amused at many people, had liked a rather smaller proportion, was totally indifferent to most, and had loved none. It was consequently almost distressing to him to find that Maud Wrexham was losing none of her preponderance in his thoughts. He remembered how at Athens the thought that she was in love with Tom had galled him, but left him dumb, and he had been enormously relieved and pleased to hear of Tom’s marriage. He had not much experience of the ways of girls in the upper classes, but he supposed that in such well-regulated institutions a man who married went into a different orbit, and, ceasing to be a legitimate object of affection to all the world but one, naturally ceased being an object of affection at all. He gave himself not undeserved credit for having behaved really very well. He had made it quite clear to Tom that in his opinion Maud Wrexham was approachable, and Tom had rejected the notion theoretically then, and practically a short time afterby marrying May. He had done all that could be expected or demanded of him by the most Lycurgan codes of friendship and honour. Those claims were satisfied, and Maud was still free. His work had kept him in Paris during the year after Tom’s marriage, and he had himself felt that it would be wise to keep away for a time. He suspected that Maud had some private business to transact with her own emotions, and that, while she was doing that, she would not perhaps wish to be interrupted. She might, in fact, declare that she would not be interrupted. Manvers, who was essentially a reasonable being, had considered that a year was time enough for her to clear off her private business, and the year was now over. He disliked waiting very much, but he summoned to his aid that admirable common-sense which had stood him in such good stead at Athens, and had worked harder than ever.
During the past week his intimacy with Maud had advanced a good deal. She evidently found considerable pleasure in his society, and he made himself uniformly entertaining and agreeable. Lady Chatham also, in the intervals of what she called “the whirl of London life,” when her genius was not devoted to ordering carriages, and picking up people with mathematical inaccuracy at street corners, found time to talk to him, and make vague arrangements for him. Consequently next morning, after her orders had been sent to the stables, and she needed a little relaxation, when she found him alone in the library, reading papers, she sat down and began to talk.
“My husband tells me you have to leave us onSaturday,” she said. “I suppose you are going back to Paris. What day of the month will that be?”
“Saturday is the 26th, I think,” said Manvers.
“No, I am sure you are wrong. Saturday is the 25th. Well then, as you meant to go on the 26th, you can stop here till Sunday. We shall be able to send you to the station.”
“It’s very good of you,” said Manvers, “but I am afraid it is the day of the week that matters, and not the day of the month. I have to be in Paris on Saturday night.”
“And what do you do then? You ought to be settling down, you know.”
“I am afraid I shan’t settle down more than I have done already. I work very hard, you must know. But this holiday has been delightful.”
“It must be very widening to live about from country to country as you do,” said Lady Chatham appreciatively, “but you ought to give us the benefit of your increasing width!”
Manvers laughed.
“In what way?”
“You might write a book about the comparative tendencies of English and foreign life. Something useful—not like those little scrappy books that describe mimosa trees and amber necklaces and the Soudan, but something that really helped one to understand the difference between one nation and another, the influence of climate—climate has a great deal to do with character. Food too—the meat we eat in a day would last an Italian for a week. That must makea difference. And, as I said, you ought to settle down and marry, and become the centre of a little circle.”
“Tom always fills me with the envy for married life,” said he; “he really is ridiculously happy. But as regards the other, I don’t think I am made for a centre. I prefer circling myself.”
Lady Chatham rose to go.
“Well, it is five minutes to eleven,” she said, “and I must be off. You must think over all I have said.”
“I will think it over very seriously,” he replied.
Lord Chatham was dining at the House that night, and Maud sent a note to Tom asking him to make the fourth with Manvers and her mother. There was no one else coming, and little coats and black ties were the order of the evening.
The night was beautifully warm, and after dinner they all sat on the little terrace outside the drawing-room window.
Tom was in rather a sombre mood. His account of himself was that he had unaccountably stuck in his work and had been unable to get on. Manvers administered consolation.
“That is one of the chiefest pleasures of being an artist,” he said: “one has the sort of feeling that one is really a channel through which inspiration flows. Now a solicitor or a clerk can go on copying briefs or making a digest or aprécisin any mood. He is a mere machine. No doubt his work is more distasteful at one time than it is at another, but it goes on just the same. Nothing comes between him and it except death or very severe toothache, which shows he works without conviction, and is consequently avery feeble sort of animal. It is the same with all mankind except artists and clergymen.”
“But what is one to do in the meanwhile?” asked Tom. “I don’t find these intervals, when some one cuts off the inspiration, at all inspiriting.”
“Why, do nothing,” said Manvers; “don’t think about it. You can’t force a mood. The mood forces you.”
“I can’t acquiesce in that,” said Tom. “I am not going to be ordered about by my own temperament.”
“Ah, my dear fellow, what are you going to be ordered about by if you are not to be ordered about by your temperament? The temperament is the only thing that can order one about. In everything else, if one wants a thing enough one gets it.”
Maud leaned forward.
“I don’t believe that. At least it is not true for all people. Some pass their whole lives in failing to do what they want. But they have a consolation; for they are exactly the people who for the most part give other people what they want. Personally I hardly ever get what I want, and that is why I have a passion for making other people like me.”
At the least hint of anything so superlunary as the mildest metaphysics, Lady Chatham always recorded a protest.
“Maud dear,” she said deprecatingly.
But “Maud dear” was interested, and so to judge by his face was Manvers. His dark eyes had lost their look of slight amusement, and he leaned forward eagerly to hear what Maud had to say next.
“It is the old story,” she said; “half the world is active, and the other half passive.”
“But you exert yourself to be passive.”
“Oh, certainly; one is simply nothing if one doesn’t exert one’s self. My mission, I am sure, is to be material for the active people.”
“But you told me once you wanted to take the world into your hand,” said Tom, “and make its heart beat fast or slow as you wished.”
“I know I did, but I have changed.”
“Radically, completely?”
Maud lifted her eyes for a moment and looked at Tom, then dropped them again.
“My desire has not changed, but I now know I can’t do it. It’s not my line at all.”
Tom looked up.
“Do you mean you acquiesce in defeat?” he asked. “Can you contemplate wanting a thing and not getting it?”
“He is monarch of all he surveys,” remarked Manvers.
“Of course I am,” said Tom, “so is everybody.”
“Oh, but we can’t all be monarchs of all we survey,” said Maud.
“But we can,” replied Tom, “simply because we survey so very little. All our horizons are limited. As a matter of fact, of course we are terribly limited, all of us, but we have a beautiful gift of not believing that. We can be monarchs of all we understand, which is what I mean by survey, and that is why people marry. Two people understand each other, and so as they are both monarchs of each other, it isa law of nature that they should then be no longer two, but one.”
This remarkable statement was received in silence.
“Then what do you make of people who are failures—real failures?” said Maud at length.
“God help them!” replied Tom; “they have tried to get what they did not understand. There is nothing so pathetic as that.”
“Why did you acquiesce, Miss Wrexham?” asked Manvers.
Maud hesitated a moment, but assuming with perfect good faith that neither Tom nor Manvers could possibly guess what she meant, replied—
“Because I could not get a thing I wanted, and therefore I assumed that I was not made to get what I wanted.”
“That is a hasty generalization,” said Tom; “perhaps you did not understand it.”
“Well, I thought I did, and either I am not meant to get what I want, or I am one of those pathetic figures you alluded to.”
Tom laughed.
“I don’t think of you as a pathetic figure,” he said.
“Oh, one can’t appear as a pathetic figure in public,” she said. “Don’t let us forget that it is a comedy we are all acting.”
She spoke bitterly, and Tom was astonished at the hard ring of her voice. But before the pause became awkward Manvers broke it.
“There is nothing more serious than taking things seriously,” he said. “I never took anything seriously yet.”
“What a frightfully risky thing to say!” exclaimed Maud. “It’s as dangerous as saying you never had the toothache!”
Tom got up from his chair and perched himself on the edge of the balcony, and at that moment there came into Manvers’ mind the evening at Athens, when Tom had sat on the edge of the balcony, and the flash of lightning had illuminated Maud’s face. For the first moment he thought it was only one of those strange throbs of double consciousness which we all know so well, but the moment afterwards he recollected the prototype of the scene. And as if to confirm it in his mind, Maud went on—
“My acquiescence came quite suddenly, as suddenly as a flash of lightning.”
“When did it come?” asked Tom, innocently.
Manvers waited, in the act of flicking the ash off his cigar, for the reply, and Maud looking up saw he was watching her.
“Lord Byron woke one morning and found himself famous,” she said, “but I doubt whether a year afterwards he could have told you whether it was a Monday or a Tuesday.”
“But the occasion,” persisted Tom: “he could have told one that.”
“One occasion doesn’t change one,” said Maud, fencing; “it is always a whole string of things, half of which one forgets afterwards. It is so untrue to speak of a crisis being the effect of one moment.”
Lady Chatham rose.
“How terribly metaphysical you young people are!” she said. “I must go in and write two notes,and then I think I shall go to the House in the carriage which is to fetch Chatham. Maud dear, you look rather tired. Go to bed early.”
Lady Chatham said good night and went indoors.
“That is quite true about crises,” said Tom, after a pause. “I have had one, two, three in my life, and though they all seemed the results of single moments, they were only the culmination of what had been going on before.”
“But the apex of a pyramid remains the highest point. There would be no pyramid without it,” objected Manvers.
“But still less would an apex be a pyramid by itself!”
“It’s your turn, Tom,” said Maud. “I’ve been talking about myself, and now you shall talk about yourself. Begin at the beginning. What were your crises?”
“The first was when I saw the Hermes at Olympia,” began Tom.
“And a most disastrous crisis it was,” observed Manvers. “I hope they weren’t all as cheerless as that.”
“Be quiet, Mr. Manvers,” said Maud. “It’s his turn.”
“Of course that seemed to me the whole crisis,” said Tom, “but it wasn’t. It was only the apex of the effect Athens had on me.”
“Yes, I think that’s reasonable,” said Maud. “Go on to the next.”
“The next was when I was standing in a bramble bush waiting for pigeons to come over, and saw Maywalking down the path. She looked as if she had just stepped out from among the gods and goddesses on the Parthenon frieze. You see the first crisis was really part of the second.”
Maud said nothing, so Manvers took up the part of catechist.
“And the third?”
“Oh, about that I can’t talk. But I know now that the whole of my life from the time of the second crisis, since I fell in love with May, was part of the third.”
“Oh, but do tell us,” said Maud. “I believe you have forgotten what it was.”
“It was when I first thought I was a Christian,” said Tom simply. “But——” He stopped.
If Tom had said that it was when he first began to hate May, he could not have startled them more. Manvers felt very keenly the indecency of being serious. Maud sat still for a moment. Her knack of turning awkward conversation on to safer lines seemed to have entirely deserted her.
“No wonder you are perfectly happy,” she said at length, and stopped. They sat there for a few minutes in silence, and Tom fidgeted.
“It was a crisis no doubt,” he went on; “for the time it made a most wonderful difference to me, but somehow it has faded. Why are we all so damnably limited, or rather why are we cursed with that horrible sense of proportion, which makes us realize how limited we are? The happiest moment of my life was that on the morning after the baby had been born, when I went to early celebration. It was thebest moment I have ever had, and I was even content. I had been horribly anxious and frightened the day before, and the relief and the joy were so immense that for the moment I was forced, so I thought then, to believe. Unhappily, common-sense is for ever telling me that it was relief and not belief that I experienced. Yet it was a crisis, for I now believe in the possibility of such convictions some day becoming mine, for for a little while they were mine, and what has happened to me temporarily may happen to me permanently. And now,” he added, “I have committed what Manvers considers the one unpardonable breach of manners. I have been serious!”
Again there was silence, and neither Maud nor Manvers saw exactly how to break it. But a neighbouring clock striking eleven gave Tom an opportunity.
“It is time for me to go,” he said; “I had no idea how late it was. May comes up to-morrow, I hope.”
The other two sat where they were till the wheels of Tom’s retreating hansom had merged themselves in the distant muffled roar of the further streets. To Maud it suddenly seemed that malignant hands were building up again in front of her that blank wall she had been at such pains to demolish, and that her work of the autumn was all undone. Tom’s presence, mingled with his absolute unconsciousness of its effect, had again reasserted its unreasonable power over her. She felt again as she had begun to feel at Athens, that she was miserable in his presence and incomplete in his absence. But her efforts at self-control had become with her a habit, and though she was dullyconscious that her blank wall had rebuilt itself, she did not dash at it with dumb unavailing hands. It had to be picked down again stone by stone from the top to the bottom. The prospect was not a cheering one. She was also more than half conscious that Manvers was standing, as it were, on the other side of the wall, hidden from her by its intervening mass, and she dreaded that he would call to her, and assure her of it. That he was in love with her she could not but know, and she was quite aware that she liked him almost to any extent; but the limitations of the human race forbid us to love two people at once. Nature has provided us with two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, two hands, in case some accident happens to one of them, but her wise precaution has not gone so far as to provide us with two people to love simultaneously, in case one of them gets married.
She was sitting in the chair Tom had left, and Manvers, who had been sitting a little way off, moved up and took the chair next her. She had one mad impulse to ask him not to speak, for she saw he meant to. However, if the scene was to come, it was to come, and he had the right, as a man, to know his fate. But though she knew it was to come, she wanted to put it off if only for a minute or two. She rose from her chair again, and leant on the balustrade of the balcony.
“I feel depressed and worried and strung up and run down to-night,” she said. “Do you remember that admirably sensible American girl at Athens, who said that all such feelings were stomach? I expect it is quite true, but I don’t see how it helps one. I don’t feel sure of myself. Tom very often makes me feel like that. He’s so wonderfully sure of himself.”
Manvers’ hands fidgeted with the arms of his chair, and he lit a cigarette, and threw it away. This sort of experience was new to him.
“And now as we’ve finished talking about Tom,” he said at length, “it is time that we should talk about me.”
Maud rushed for the loophole. She might as well have hoped to have stopped an express by stretching a piece of string across the line.
“I should like to talk a little more about him,” she said. “I was so surprised at that third crisis.”
“Tom is so honest with his crises,” said Manvers, “he faces them like a man.”
“Well, it’s no use running away from a crisis,” said Maud; “you might as well run away from a flash of lightning.”
“And I too think it is best to face a crisis,” said he, “and ... and ... my crisis has come.”
Maud sat still, waiting for the inevitable.
“It is this,” he said suddenly, “that I love you. That I would die for you, or live for you: that I offer you myself to take into your hand.”
Maud stood up. The crisis had come, and she knew what she was going to say. It was best to leave no misunderstanding.
“It is impossible,” she said, “absolutely impossible. I will not give you any hope. I can’t encourage you by telling you to wait. It can never be. Stop, don’t speak yet. I am sorry for you, more sorry than I can say; but I am perfectly certain of it.”
Manvers stood up too.
“How can you be certain?” he said. “I will take my answer like a gentleman, and not hope to win you by making myself importunate; but how is there no hope?”
“It is quite impossible,” said Maud again.
For the moment he had forgotten about the existence of Tom and all the world, but as Maud repeated “It is quite impossible,” the cruelty of her position and of his stung him intolerably, and forced from him an involuntary protest, as sudden physical pain forces a cry from the most stoical.
“Ah, God help us both!” he said.
Maud turned and looked at him. She was standing with her back to the street, and he was opposite her, so that her face was in darkness, his in light. And in his face she saw pity, love, tenderness and the knowledge of her secret mingled together.
She had one moment of furious indignation with him for even letting her know that he knew all. But he came a step nearer and held out both hands to her.
“Oh, you poor dear! you poor dear!” he said. “Without a thought of any possible gain, I would give my right hand to spare you this. It is much worse for you than for me.”
The shadow of convention which had stood between them sank away into nothingness, for convention is born of the head, not of the heart, and when heart meets heart, there is no place for head. Maud took his two outstretched hands and pressed them.
“You are a man,” she said, “and that is the highestpraise of all. I have tried very hard to be a woman, but I have not succeeded so well.”
“You have succeeded very well,” he said. “No one has guessed it.”
Pride is not a dominant emotion, and is driven off the field as soon as the greater magnates appear.
“After all,” she thought wearily, “what does it matter?” And then because her passion was strong and she was young, she broke down utterly. “My God, what shall I do?” she cried, “and what are you to think of me? I have thrown overboard self-respect, and reticence, and decency. I have nothing left but the hope that he knows nothing of it.”
Manvers lied bravely.
“I am sure he has never had an inkling of it,” he said. “It has been hard for you.”
“And all the time there is the horrible consciousness that one may break down.”
“You will not break down. When one has great physical pain, one thinks one cannot endure it a moment longer. But as a matter of fact one can and does. One endures it until it stops.”
“But who is to assure me of that? Not you, of all men, who have guessed my secret.”
“It was no fault of yours that I guessed it. It was because I fell in love with you myself.”
His voice assumed its usual tone of gentler cynicism.
“And love,” he added, “which is usually considered blind, is on the contrary extremely clear sighted. Man is a wonderful creature, as one of Tom’s Greek poets says, and we are beautifully adapted for bearing things without breaking. There is no last straw forus. We go on hoping that each straw is going to be the last, that we shall break, but we can always bear some more. And there usually are some more.”
“Don’t say bitter things, Mr. Manvers. One may say bitter things to strangers, but never to friends. There’s father’s carriage; I must go upstairs. I told mother I should go to bed early. You leave us to-morrow, don’t you? I needn’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“You are very good to me,” said poor Manvers.
“I am intensely sorry for you. Spare a little sorrow for me. And you have behaved admirably. Good night.”
Manvers heard the front door close, and a few minutes afterwards the voices of Lord and Lady Chatham as they went upstairs. A servant came in to put out the lamps; but, seeing Manvers there, would have retreated. He told the man to leave him a candle, and put the lamps out; he needn’t wait up.
The house grew still, and even the noise in the streets sank to a lower murmur in those three hours which precede the summer dawn. It was already after twelve when the Chathams returned, and Manvers sat on in the low chair in the balcony smoking endless cigarettes and reviewing events.
He really was not cut out, he thought, for a man of sentiment. He cursed himself for ever having let himself be led into this horrible situation. He had been so happy to the full capacities of his nature in these last thoughtless successful years. He had lived for the hour in all the branches of his nature; his art was of the hour, his pleasures were of the hour, hisaims were of the hour. But now he had acquired a new power—he had found he was capable of loving; and a new limitation—he was incapable of not doing so. And where did it all lead to? Tom stood full in his road, with his careless happy face, forbidding him, or rather unconsciously making it impossible for him to pass.
The city turned in its sleep, and a strange nestful of street noises hatched, clacked, and were silent again. The short summer night was drawing to a close. A wavering hint of dawn flickered across the pale faces of the houses opposite, and faded out again, and the deeper blackness of the half hour before the real dawn came on in layers over the sky. Manvers rose and leaned over the balcony looking down into the street.
Why not leave all this behind and go back to Paris as it was? The hours were still hours, minutes in which to live and enjoy. But it seemed impossible. Some change had come. He was puzzled and bewildered with himself. He had always thought he knew himself as well as he knew his modelling tools, but he had given himself a great surprise. Time would heal everything, would it? He would go back to Paris and get over it by degrees, and become what he had been before, thanks to Time! But for that he thought not the better of Time and of himself, but the worse.
And what of Tom? He would sit here again and again, talking to Maud with intimate freedom, amusing himself, laying down the law about art with a big A, and she would sit opposite him with her uncommunicated incommunicable secret, longing, loving, rejecting. Why had he gone to Athens, whyhad that series of a hundred trivial events happened, which had forged together this double iron chain, pulling two ways, yielding in neither? Damn Tom!
There was no conclusion. To-morrow he went to Paris. He was going to a little dinner given by one of the cleverest and most realistic artists of the day, to celebrate the admission of a picture to the Luxembourg. He had promised himself an amusing evening. Paris was the only place fit to dine in. Then he had to set to work again. He congratulated himself that his work sprang from the head, not the heart. It was summer in Paris by now. Thecaféswould have their rows of little tables in the street, and their green tubs of oleanders. There would be the smell of asphalt in the boulevards. The new advertisements of the year would be out. Chéret had done two at least, which were quite admirable: one was a Parisienne of the Parisiennes in a long black boa, and balloon sleeves in the new mode; the other a woman in a yellow dress carrying a red lamp. How stupid and distasteful it all seemed!
One by one the stars paled, as the first colourless light of dawn crept from the east over the sky. It was morning already. There came the sound of heavy wheels, and a string of vans passed eastwards with their loads of flowers and fruit to Covent Garden. They left behind them in the still air a vague perfume of flowers and ripe fruit and vegetables, which floated even up to where he was sitting. How very short, how infinitely long the night had been! It was impossible to go to bed; he would go out. He went to his room, and put on a grey coat instead of hisdining-jacket, and let himself silently out of the house.
It was exactly at that hour when night and morning meet; cabs and carriages went westwards with women in ball dresses yawning dismally, while eastwards trailed the vans and carts. A woman at the street corner accosted him. Manvers gave her ten shillings, and told her to get home for God’s sake. Then he fairly laughed at himself. He was giving himself all sorts of surprises. But he could not bear the thought that one of the sex to which the one woman belonged should stand there.
And in the cool temperate dawn he faced his life and himself temperately. His old life was impossible for reasons which he could not grasp. He had no feeling that it was wrong or immoral; he approached it from a different side. His taste simply revolted against it. He had said once that he could not possibly feel the least liking for a man who ate cheese with his knife. The two were on the same footing. The old life was out of the question, but where was the new? And for that he had no answer ready.
He walked eastwards for an hour or so and then turned back, and as he reached the door the pitiless day had broken in a flood of yellow sunshine over the drowsy town.