The next morning Masterman wrote a letter to the overjoyed trustees of the Orchard Green Church, offering to make good without cost all defects of workmanship in the building which might be justly charged to him. He was careful to explain that while they had no legal claim on him, he regarded this work as a debt of honour.
He had just finished the letter when Arthur came into the office. Arthur's manner was constrained and almost timid. Masterman, on the contrary, was in his most jovial mood. He had just performed an act which was not only good in itself, but wise and politic; for, of course, he knew that his action toward the Orchard Green trustees would become public, and would be quoted to his credit.
"Well," he began, "getting a bit tired of doing nothing? Not that I grudge you your liberty, you know. I promised you a year to look around, before you settle to your life-work, and I shall stick to my bargain. But I confess it will be a glad day for me when I write 'Masterman & Son' over my doors."
"I'm very far from doing nothing, sir," he answered. "Oxford is one world, and London quite another. I am learning every day a lot of things Oxford never taught me."
"Of course you are. London's a big world, and the things it has to teach are the things that count. Not that Oxford isn't worth while too. It gives a man a start in life nothing else can give. That's why I sent you there, you know."
"Yes, I know, father, and I am grateful to you."
"Nothing to be grateful for, my boy. I owed it to you." His face softened with a musing look very unusual with him. "I got no kind of start myself, you know," he continued. "At fifteen I was working in a brickfield. When I went home at night, my father used to beat me. I don't think I ever hated any one as I hated my father. One day I struck back, and ran away from home. Queer thing—I was always sorry for that blow. I used to lie awake at nights for weeks after, wondering if I really hurt the old man. From that day to this I never saw him any more. But I'm still sorry for that blow. Sons shouldn't hit their parents, anyway. I ought to have let him go on beating me; he'd got the habit, and I could have stood it all right. Well, well, it's such a long time ago that I can hardly believe it ever happened."
He stopped suddenly, with a lift of the shoulders, as if he shook off the burden of that squalid past. But the rude words had left the son inexpressibly touched. A swift picture passed before his mind of a gaunt boy toiling over heavy tasks, ill-paid, cruelly used, wandering out into the world lonely and unguided, and a strong passion of pity and of wonder shook his heart. Above all, those artless words, "Sons shouldn't hit their fathers, anyway," fell upon him with the weight of a reproach. Had he not already condemned his father in his thoughts? He had known very well to whom Clark alluded in his sermon, and yet he had approved. He had entered the office that morning with the fixed intent of endorsing Clark's tacit accusation of his father. And now he found himself suddenly disarmed. That old sense of something big about his father came back to him with redoubled force. To start like that, shovelling clay in a brickyard for twelve hours a day, and to become what he was—oh! it needed a big man to do that, an Esau who was scarcely to be judged by the standards of smooth-skinned, home-staying Jacobs.
"I didn't know you had suffered all that, father. You never told me that before."
"There's a sight of things I've suffered that I wouldn't like you to know. But they were all in the day's work, and I don't complain. And that's one thing I want to say to you, and I may as well say it now. You've got a start I never had, and you won't suffer what I suffered, but I want you to know that the world's a pretty hard place to live in anyway. You can't go through it without being badly hurt somewhere. You've got to take what you want, or you won't get it. Talking isn't going to mend things: life's a big strong beast, and it isn't words but a bit and bridle and a whip a man needs who is going to succeed. Now you're at the talking stage, and I don't complain. You admire talkers like Clark, and you think they are doing no end of good, don't you? Well, you'll learn better presently. You'll find that the world goes on much the same as it ever did, in spite of the talkers. I want you to digest that fact just as soon as you can, and then you'll be ready to step down into the thick of life where I am, and help me do the things I want to do."
"But, father, is what Clark said concerning you true?"
"Do you want to discuss it with me?"
"No; I have no right to ask that."
"Yes, you have. I want you to join in the business when you're ready, and you've a right to know what kind of business it is, and, if you like to put it so, what kind of person your partner is."
"He is my father, and I love him. That is enough," said Arthur proudly.
"No, it isn't enough. I had a father, and I didn't love him. But as to this business of Clark's. He found out something against me, and instead of coming to me about it, he preached a sermon on it, and for that I don't forgive him. Well, what was it he found out? No more than this—that ten years ago I had to do a cheap job, and I did it cheaply. My work has held together ten years, which is about all that could be expected at the price. Now I'll tell you what I've done. I've agreed to do the work over again for nothing. There's the letter which I've just written. You had better read it."
Arthur took the letter, and read it slowly. His father had risen from his desk, and stood watching him narrowly. Perhaps until that moment he had never quite realised how much his heart was set on having his son in the business with him. And he wanted above all things to win the son's approval. Perhaps there was some underlying thought of this kind in his mind when he wrote the letter. Not that he meant to alter all the methods of his business to suit his son. Once in the business, Arthur would learn what these were by imperceptible degrees, and would grow accustomed to them. But just now the father's heart was wholly set upon concession and conciliation. He remembered, with a rush of tenderness, how he had long ago taught the boy to swim. He could still see the slight, childish form shivering on the rock above the swimming-pool. He had begun with threats, but had soon found them useless. Then he had used persuasion and cajolery, until at last the boy had slipt into the pool, and in a week was swimming with the best of them. Well, it was like that now. If he could but cajole him into the deep stream of life, that was enough; when the deep water heaved beneath his feet, he would have to do what the others did in pure self-defence.
"Well?" he said at last.
Arthur laid down the letter and turned a shining face upon his father.
"It is a noble letter, father. Forgive me that I misjudged you."
"That's all right, then."
"You have taught me a lesson. I shall not forget it."
"Oh! don't take it too seriously, my boy. It is only a small affair, after all."
But each knew that it was not a small affair. In that moment these two opposite natures were nearer together than they had ever been before, and, although neither knew it, nearer than they would ever be again.
Arthur left his father with a strong sense of exaltation. The cloud of misgiving concerning his father's methods of business had miraculously dissolved. In the quick rebound of feeling he was inclined to judge himself intolerant and unjust, and his father's image glowed before his mind, endued with heroic virtues. He shuddered when he thought of his father's youth, with its dreadful disabilities; he kindled with admiring ardour when the thought of his father's triumph over a weight of circumstance which would have crushed a weaker man. If some of the mire of the pit yet clung to him, if in many things he was crude, violent, narrow, it was not surprising; the marvel was that his faults were not more numerous and more unpardonable. As Arthur went to his room, he caught a vision of himself in the mirror of his wardrobe—a slight figure admirably clothed, a face fresh and unlined, with white forehead and close curling hair, the picture of youth delicately nurtured, upon whom the winds of life had not blown roughly—and he was filled with compunction at the contrast afforded by that other picture of a poor drudging boy toiling in a brickfield and beaten by a drunken parent. In spite of all his superficial superiorities, he seemed a creature of small significance beside this Titanic father of his.
It was an exquisite spring morning, one of those mornings when London draws her first fresh, unimpeded breath after the long, choking fogs of winter. The lawn lay green beneath the window, presided over by a busy thrush, who flirted his wings in the strong sunlight, and stopped at intervals to address a long mellow note of rapture to the blue sky; the japonica had hung the garden wall with crimson blossoms; the poplars took the light upon their slender spires, till each burned with yellow flame. Nature, unconquered by the gross antipathy of man, was invading the brick Babylon, flinging brocades of light upon the beaten ways, and filling them with the music of the pipes of Pan. Arthur could not resist the call.
He felt a need of solitude. He had many thoughts that cried aloud for readjustment. He stepped out in the blither air, and took his way to Hampstead Heath. Soon the narrow streets were left behind, the long hill rose above him, and his feet trod the furze-clad slopes, little altered since the day when Roman legions camped upon their crests, and eighteenth-century highwaymen concealed themselves among their hollows. He walked far and fast, meditating much on life. It seemed a wonderful thing to be alive, where so many generations of men had fought and perished, to be for a little time sole possessor of a world that had cast off such myriads of tenants; and there came to him, with an almost painful wonder, the sense of the richness of his opportunity. He would make his own life something worthy. It was true, as his father had said, that he started at a point of vantage not given to every one. By so much that he started higher, he must soar higher, go farther. But in the midst of all his exultant thoughts there intruded his father's terse picture of life as a big strong beast only to be mastered by bit and whip and bridle. And at that thought the tide of exaltation began to leave him. He walked more slowly, became listless, was conscious of weariness. It no longer seemed an easy and a rapturous thing to live; life rose before him as a menace.
In the early afternoon he came to the Spaniards' Inn, and entered it. Coming from the brilliant air into the dim room of the inn, he did not at first recognise a man already seated there, finishing a frugal meal of bread and cheese and ale. The man was tall, with somewhat stooping shoulders; his face was long and bearded, his forehead high, with thin dark hair, his eyes dark and penetrating. He wore a flannel shirt with a silk tie of some indeterminate colour akin to dull crimson. He held a book in one hand, and read as he ate.
As Arthur entered the room he looked up.
"You don't know me, I suppose," he said genially. "But I know you by sight at least. My name is Hilary Vickars."
So this was Hilary Vickars, of whom he had heard Scales speaking at the deacon's tea. Now that he looked at him more closely he recognised him at once. Among the crowd of ordinary faces in the church, that face had stood out with a singular distinctness. It was a face at once grave and composed, sad and humorous; the face of a man who had striven much and suffered much, but had retained through all a certain vivacity, which was distinct from gaiety while including it. And all these qualities seemed to rest upon a deeper quality of composure, so that the final impression was of a man who through suffering had won his way to some secret knowledge which gave him an air of gentle authority.
"I have often wished to know you," said Arthur.
"And I you."
"Why should you wish to know me?"
"Oh! a fancy of mine. It is my business to study people. And you do not look like the run of folk in Highbourne Gardens. Most of the folk in Highbourne Gardens are dear, good, comfortable folk, but stodgy. They are as alike as peas. I could tell you their exact method of life, even to what they have for breakfast. They are products of manufacture, all turned out just alike to the last hair, and all doing just the same things every day, without the least variation. That is what stodginess means."
"And I am not stodgy?" Arthur laughed.
"No; you are fluid. You have not hardened into shape yet. You are a problem."
Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness for the man. It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford. The church young men he had found distasteful to him. They were good young men for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes; but they had no mental horizons. They were also inclined to be a little shy of him, as a rich man's son with a superior education; a little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that intercourse with them had not been easy. But here was a man who spoke another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once asserts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible.
Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in conversation. Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses—a trick which lent emphasis to what he said. It was as though he fumbled for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch. Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not pronounce a word in the way common among educated men. The variation was slight; it could scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency of early training. Perhaps the boy's face betrayed his surprise too ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly:
"I envy you. It was my dream to go to Oxford. I didn't dream true in that case."
"Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur generously.
"No, I have never cherished that—delusion. Deprivations in middle life don't matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made up." He paused a moment, and then added. "I was a gardener before I became an author."
Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.
"Oh! I assure you," he said, "even gardeners have their dreams. Mine, as I said, was Oxford, for I spent my youth within sight of her spires, within sound of her bells. I believed I could become a scholar; indeed, I still believe my old belief not quite foolish. I spent all my money on grammars and dictionaries which I did not know were obsolete, got to know the classics in a crude fashion, and went on imagining that some day I might enter the University. Of course it was all an absurd dream; you do not need to be told that. My first real discovery in life was that learning is the privilege of wealth. That led me to some other discoveries of the same nature, the sum of which was that the great mass of mankind are born disinherited, and that I was one of them. It hurt me dreadfully at the time, but in the long run it was the making of me. It set me studying life as it is, not as it once was in ancient times. And the more I studied it, the more I came to admire common men and women, until at last I was glad that I belonged to them. It is a great thing to know just to whom you belong; no man does any kind of good work till he knows that."
"But you are not a common man," Arthur interrupted. "You are a writer."
"Oh! I have some aptitudes that are not common, no doubt; I am immodest enough to think that. But if I am a writer, I write of common people. It is common life that interests me, the virtues, vices, trials, heroisms, debasements, and nobilities of plain people. But I did not mean to talk about myself, and you must forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive. What you say deeply interests me. My father said a thing to-day about life which has been in my thoughts a good deal, and you make me recall it. By the way, do you know my father?"
"Yes, I know him."
He spoke the words with a certain caustic accent which did not pass unnoticed.
"You mean you do not like him," Arthur replied with a flash of anger.
"No, I don't say that. I know him merely as a type. But what did he say?"
"He said life was a hard business, in which one was sure to be hurt; that it was a big strong beast which could only be subdued by whip and bridle."
"An excellent definition. Life is strong and cruel and hard. Men who really live soon discover that."
"Have you found it so?"
"Yes. And I've seen the big strong beast tread thousands down—the people who haven't got the whip and bridle."
He spoke the words with remarkable intensity. They were flashed from him rather than spoken. Then, as if ashamed of his display of feeling, he rose from the table, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "The evening is coming on. I must be going."
They went out of the inn together. The long gray road with its groups of trees and dim houses lay before them; and, as the darkness deepened, the distant lights of London flung a yellow conflagration on the sky. "That's where the big strong beast lies," said Vickars. "You can hear his mighty hooves at work." And, as he spoke, from that great caldron of life, that lay packed and mist-swathed to the eastward of the road, there did come up a sound as of waves upon a groaning beach, a sound of crashing and rending, mingled with the dull thud of wheels and the demoniac shriek of engine and of factory whistles.
But he did not recur to the theme. The talk became trivial, commonplace; once only did it touch a theme of interest, when Vickars recalled how Coleridge and Keats and Haydon and Leigh Hunt had trodden that same road, each with his own separate vision of what life meant, and what man was meant to do in it.
It was nearly dark when they reached the neighbourhood of Highbourne Gardens. Presently Vickars stopped before a small house, one of many, in a long gravelled street. The houses were all alike; each had its strip of garden, its bow-window, its door with glass panels, its aspect of decent mediocrity. There was still enough light to see that though the houses were comparatively new, a kind of premature decay had overtaken them. The iron garden-gates sagged upon their hinges, and the bricks appeared to be joined with sand, which errand-boys had picked out in deep grooves while waiting in the porch for orders. The dilapidation of age may be respectable and even romantic, but in this dilapidation of newness there was something inexpressibly depressing.
"This is where I live," said Vickars.
"I don't think I was ever in this street before," said Arthur. "It must have been built while I was at Oxford."
"It was," said Vickars. "Your father built it."
They said good-night and parted.
A few days after Arthur's memorable conversation with his father, Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom. He went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till long past midnight. The causes of his silence were, as usual, inscrutable. Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding, wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence never came. Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won. But in Masterman's nature there was a curious element of perversity, which often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest. It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions could be predicated from any precedent experience.
Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever. I'll tell you when I want you," and the boy said no more. His sister had gone away to spend some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.
It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to the society of such friends as were available. Among these was Hilary Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking. He walked with him occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the house. Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly, cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman. She was a person of extraordinary slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that she cheerfully shouldered other people's burdens as a kind of right. Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and optimistic friend. Over such youths she exercised a directorship as complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.
"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious land-ladies. Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours. But to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.
Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy's view of life was not unlike theirs. Her whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o'-the-wisp of sudden fortune. He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned in wrong directions. At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal, nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment's notice to wander off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil which he soon contrived to lose again. Most women would have tired of these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy's faith in her husband never faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not disconcert her. When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it lasted. When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy. He always came back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his return was sometimes dramatic—as, for instance, when he appeared at midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid in her pocket a county-court summons for a year's milk bills which she could not pay.
"Come in wi' you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a duchess introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the Bundy star was in eclipse. And then she would sit down and tell him wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes he had had of being a multimillionaire. Just now, it appeared, he was engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as England. And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter, which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her with a clouded brow.
"It's small good staying in England these days, if you want to prosper," she would remark. "What wi' all the ships upon the sea and all the new lands that lie beyond, it's a shame for a youth to sit at home. You don't get any fun out of life that way."
Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her lot that he never said it. On the contrary, there was sown in his mind a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.
She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of palmistry, and ended by saying, "You'll have your adventures before long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot through his veins at the prophecy.
"You've got a hand like Bundy's," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.
"Bundy's had his bad times," she retorted, "but he's had his good times too. But if you asked him, I don't think he'd regret anything, and he'd live the same life again if he had the choice. And so would I, for that matter."
And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as something to be greatly envied.
He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he learned to love her. She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.
One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father's plans for him.
"He wants me to enter the business," he said.
"And why not, laddie?"
"Frankly, I don't like it."
"That's neither here nor there. You've got to live, and as long as a business is honest, one business is as good as another."
"But is it honest?"
He had not meant to ask the question. It came from him unawares. It was a long-silent, long-concealed thought, suddenly become audible.
"What is dishonest in it?"
"I can't quite tell. But I do know that my father buys land for speculative building, and puts up houses that are built of the rottenest material, and sells them to ignorant people."
"Aye, laddie, your father's like the man in the parable, 'an austere man, gathering where he has not strawed.' But he's a strong man, is your father. There's few stronger men than Archibold Masterman.
"Strong, but is he good? I mean, is his way of life right?"
"I canna' tell about that, laddie. But if I was you, I think I wouldn't ask that question about my father. There's a lot of goodness in men, and my conviction is that most men are about as good as they know how to be. There's many people wouldn't call Bundy good, because he's what they call a speculator, and has to live with wild men, and doesn't go to church when he's home; but I know he's got a heart of gold. He never cheated any man knowingly. He's lost himself much more than men have lost by him. And he'd always give away his last penny to the poor."
"Ah, but that's not the point. I know my father is good in that way. Why, only the other day he rebuilt a church entirely at his own expense for people who had no legal claim at all on him. But it's his business, it's the method of it. And I must find an answer, for I must join him in the business or refuse it."
"Well, if you feel like that, refuse it, laddie. Not that I'll say you're wise, nor even right. Fathers have some claims on their sons after all, and these claims ought to come before your own tastes. Only if you know you couldn't draw together with your father, and would only make him and yourself unhappy trying to, then the best thing is to say so at once."
"I suppose you are right," he said in a lugubrious voice. And then he added, "There's another trouble, too. How am I to get my living?"
"You'll find that out fast enough when you become acquainted with hunger," she said with a laugh.
"But if I don't go into my father's business, God only knows what I can do. I don't seem to be fitted for anything in particular."
"I wouldn't worry about that, either," she replied. "There's very few men do the things they think they're fitted for; but they find out how to do other things that are just as important. There's Bundy, now; you'll never guess what he thought himself fitted for when I married him."
"Well, what?"
"A clergyman."
Arthur laughed profanely. The thought of the nefarious Bundy, whose life had been spent in the promotion of companies of a singular collapsibility, as a clergyman was too ridiculous.
"Ah! you may laugh, but let me tell you he'd have made a first-rate parson if he'd gone to college, and started fair."
She spoke with heat, which immediately passed into laughter, as she caught a glimpse of the whimsicality of the thing.
"Ye canna' say Bundy has not a fine flow of language when he chooses, and he can look as solemn as a bishop, and I'm sure he would have had a fine bedside manner," she continued. "But my belief is that a man who can do one thing well can do any other thing just as well."
"That's a consoling faith, at any rate."
"It isn't a faith, it's a fact. It's just a question of ability. The worst of you London-bred lads is that you all want a place made for you, and you don't see that the strong man makes a place for himself."
Arthur did not quite like that, and he liked it the less because he knew that it was true. For was not he London bred? Had not his path been made easy for him? And how could that happen without some emasculation of nature? To grow up in streets, carefully paved and graded, punctually lit at night; to live in houses where a hundred conveniences sprang up to meet the idle hand, to be guarded from offence, provided for without exertion—ah, how different that life from the primitive life of man, familiar with rain and tempest, with a hundred rude and moving accidents, always poised upon the edge of peril, and existing instant by instant by an indomitable exercise of will and strength! For the first time he caught a vital glimpse of the primeval life of man, and recognised its self-sufficing dignity. For the first time he realised that the essence of all true living lay in daring. It was a truth which neither London nor Oxford had imparted to him. He had not even learned it through his own father, whom he knew conventionally rather than really. Strangely enough, it came to him now through the talk of Mrs. Bundy, wise with a wisdom which vicissitude alone could teach, and through the somewhat sorry epic of her husband's hazardous adventures.
"The strong man makes a place for himself"—it was sound doctrine and indubitable fact as well; but was he one of the strong? The question hung upon the confines of his mind, a whispered interrogation, which disturbed and sometimes tortured him. Youth is always a little ludicrous, often pathetically ludicrous, and in nothing so much as in its capacity for taking itself seriously. Life seems such an immensely solemn business at one-and-twenty. Later on we discover that the decisions on which we supposed angels waited are of scant interest to any one but ourselves, and that the world goes on much the same whatever we do or say.
Yet youth is right, even in its crude vanity and egoism, for the history of the world would be poor reading if it recorded nothing better than the commonsense and commonplace performances of middle-age. Mrs. Bundy, from her fifty years' coign of vantage, saw life as Arthur could not see it; above all, she saw its width, which was a great vision to attain.
"No man really enjoys life," she said to him one day, "unless he starts poor."
"How do you make that out?"
"Because the poor are the only people capable of adventures," she replied. "As long as a man is poor, anything may happen to him; but after he becomes rich, nothing happens."
"But you would like to be rich, wouldn't you?"
"Not rich enough to want for nothing," she replied.
As usual she fell back upon her own experience for wisdom, and drew a shrewd and humorous sketch of one of her episodic emergences into wealth.
"Bundy was really rich that time," she remarked. "He'd struck oil in Texas, and had only to sit still and let the oil work for him. It was good fun at first. We took a big house at Kensington, and Bundy spent his time getting cheated over horses, and I spent mine being cheated over sham Sheraton furniture, and when we tired of that we bought pictures, until at last the house was so full of things we couldn't get another stick into it. 'What shall we do now?' says Bundy. 'Let us try being fashionable,' says I." [She uttered the word "fash-ee-on-abell," with an indescribable drawling accent of contempt.] "So we tried that, too, and drove in the Park, and gave dinner-parties, and Bundy had to wear dress-clothes, though he never could make out how to tie his white tie, and made more fuss than enough of it. We got plenty of folk to eat our dinners, but a duller lot I never met. The men all wanted to talk oil, and the women couldn't talk of anything but dress, and men and women alike hung round Bundy, and let him know as plainly as they dared that all they came for was to see if they could get any oil-shares out of him. After a time we grew tired of being fashionable, and Bundy says, 'I think we'll have a yacht.' So we bought a yacht, though neither of us liked the sea, and we made out a summer that way. And all the while the oil was pouring out of those wells in Texas, and the money was pouring in, and we saw no end to it. Then Bundy tried being a philanthropist, and that was really interesting while it lasted. There wasn't a crank in London—nor, one would suppose, in Europe, from the look of his mail-bag—that didn't find him out. They sat upon his doorstep to catch him coming out, and hunted him down the street, and all the men he'd ever known anywhere claimed him as an old friend, so that the poor man lived the life of a partridge on the mountains, as the saying is. He grew quite old-looking, and lost his sleep, and after a time he didn't even read what the papers said about him, which is a pretty bad sign in a man."
"Poor Mr. Bundy!" said Arthur, in mock commiseration.
"Ah! you may well say it, laddie, and poor Mrs. Bundy, too, for I'd never been so miserable in my life. You see, it was the dullness of the thing that made us miserable. When you can get everything you want, you don't want anything after a time."
"And how did it end?"
"Well, one morning I lay a-bed late, for there was nothing particular to get up for, and I could hear Bundy in his dressing-room, opening and shutting drawers, as though he couldn't make up his mind what clothes he wanted to wear. There came a knock on the outer door, and I heard a crumpling of paper, and then he whistled.
"'What is it?' I called out.
"He didn't answer, but I heard him rampaging round. So I jumped out of bed, and ran into the dressing-room, and there stood Bundy laughing to himself, and upon my word he looked happier than I had seen him for twelve months or more.
"'What is it?' I says again.
"And then he looked at me mighty solemn and queer, and says, 'Can ye bear it?'
"'Bear what?' says I.
"'Oh! nothing much,' says he, 'only we're bust. The oil's given out.'
"'Then we're poor?' says I.
"'Poor we are,' says he—'poor as Job. For, you see, I've been spending everything as it came, thinking that that oil would last for ever, and now we're bust.'
"'Hallelujah!' says I. 'That's the best news I've heard a long time.'
"He looked at me a minute, kind of doubtful, and then he burst out laughing, and says, 'I rather think I feel that way myself.'
"'I knew you would,' says I. And then I put my arms round him, and we danced round the room, and I give you my word that was the happiest hour I ever spent in that big house at Kensington. You see, we'd both been dying of dullness, though neither of us liked to say it. We'd got where there weren't any adventures; and that's why life didn't seem worth living."
She looked at Arthur with humorous eyes, in which also there was the gleam of motherly affection and solicitude.
"You're dreadfully afraid of being poor, aren't you, my dear?" she concluded. "London makes men feel like that. And it's because men get afraid of life that they take the first comfortable groove that offers, and then all the fun is over for them. Well, don't you be like that. If I was you, I'd live my life, and let the question of getting a living shift for itself. And remember what I say, for it's true—the only people who really enjoy life are the poor, because they're the only people who have lots to look forward to."
Coming home one night along the Lonsdale Road, Arthur found Hilary Vickars standing at his garden gate, taking the air. It was June, that most exquisite of all months in London, when the perfume of summer finds its way into the narrowest streets, and the imprisoned people thrill with a new sense of freedom and deliverance. In the soft twilight even Lonsdale Road was touched with the idyllic; its impudence of newness was concealed under a faint wash of mauve, and its tiny gardens were fresh with the scent of mown grass.
Hilary Vickars himself seemed softened with the hour; when he spoke to Arthur there was a new kindness in his voice. Perhaps he could not have explained his mood; few of us can explain these sudden softenings that come to us, sometimes through the influence of external things, sometimes from the welling up in us of founts of tenderness which we had thought for ever sealed. A gust of wind among the trees, a bird's song in the dusk, a girl's voice at her piano, in its first fresh, unrestrained sweetness—who of us cannot recall how things as slight as these have had a strange power to provoke some crisis of emotion, which perhaps has coloured all our after-life? Hilary Vickars had been listening that night to his daughter as she sang. She had sung a song her mother had been fond of, and in the mind of the widowed man all the past had leapt into agonised distinctness. And from that he had passed to the perception of the daughter's likeness to her mother, and to the pathos of her youth. Her voice yet lingered in the air, as he stole out of the room, and stood bareheaded at the garden gate. And then he saw Arthur coming up the road, and as his eye rested on the slim, graceful figure he again realised this infinite pathos of youth.
"He wants help, and I ought to help him," was his instant thought.
Hitherto a kind of pride had imposed a barrier of reserve between himself and Arthur. He had seen him as a rich man's son, the member of a class for which he had only scorn and anger. But now he saw him simply as a youth launching his frail bark upon the perilous sea of life, and he loved him. So Nature wrought within him, using his softened mood for her own ends, and with Nature came Destiny, casting the first threads of her inscrutable design upon the loom of life.
He held his hand with a lingering pressure, and then said, as if obeying a resolve imposed upon his own will rather than suggested by it, "Won't you come in?"
He led the way into the house, and Arthur followed with a glad alacrity.
The narrow hall-way opened upon a room at the back of the house, which served both as living-room and library. The only light in the room came from two candles on the piano brackets. Between them sat a young girl, her fingers still upon the keys, her face, rayed with the nimbus of the candlelight, turned upward with a charming air of expectation and surprise.
She was not beautiful, judged by the canons of exacting art; yet there was no artist who could have been indifferent to her, for she possessed an element of charm much more rare than beauty. The hair, dark and abundant, was very simply dressed above a low white forehead; the face was beautifully moulded, and expressed a delicate fatigue; the mouth, too large for beauty, was mobile and eager; the eyes were a stag's eyes, brown and full and limpid. It was in these that her charm was concentrated. They held depth beyond depth, eyes into which the gaze sank, fathomless as water in a well.
She rose as her father and his guest entered the room.
"My daughter, Elizabeth," he said.
She bowed, and turned toward Arthur the regard of her unfathomable eyes. Arthur stood transfixed. For a long moment his gaze clung to hers, and a new, strange, pleasurable heat thrilled his blood. A subtle, undecipherable telegraphy was in that clinging gaze. It was as though soul challenged soul; the citadel of sentience in each awoke to sudden life, and quivered at the shock of contact, with an emotion half alarm and half delight. Then the veil fell between them, and the soul of each receded into secrecy.
It was a relief to each when Vickars lit the gas, and began to speak in accents of conventional courtesy.
"This is my work-room," he said.
And indeed the room told its own tale. Bookshelves, closely packed, covered each wall; the books lay in heaps upon the floor; and in their midst stood a wide table piled with manuscripts, proofs, and notebooks. There was not a single picture in the room, not an ornament of any kind. Near the window stood a typewriter and a small table, and on the other side of the window the piano.
"I suppose there are few rooms in London that know more about brain-toil than this room—that is, if rooms can receive impressions, as I sometimes think they can," he continued. "Certainly none in Lonsdale Road," he added with a smile. "Ah! that reminds me of a story. When I first came to live here, there was the greatest curiosity to know what I did for a living. Lonsdale Road could not account for any man who did not go to the city every day, and therefore refused to accept his credentials of respectability. I never knew how far this aversion went till one day our little servant told us with tears that she must leave us. It took a long time to draw from her her reason. You would never guess it. At last she said, 'Mother say she thinks you are a burglar.' And then I found that our neighbours had actually woven this ingenious romance about us, and I am not sure that they have discarded it even yet."
He spoke lightly, and yet with an accent of resentment and of hurt pride. To Arthur the story was a revelation of the social loneliness of Vickars's life. But he was thinking less of the father than the daughter. Once more his eyes sought that fair face, and he was surprised to find no laughter in it; it was evident the story had pained her.
"Elizabeth does not like that story," said her father, noticing her silence.
"No, father, I do not. It makes me hate the world to think it treats you unjustly."
"Oh! the world's very well, little girl," he replied. "One doesn't expect justice from it. One should be content if the world merely allows him to live."
"Yet you are always fighting for justice. You know you are, father."
"Ah! justice for other people—that's a different thing. But the condition of such a fight as that is to be indifferent to the question of justice to one's self. That is a very small matter indeed."
"That is how he always talks," she answered, with a charming friendliness of appeal to Arthur. "He never thinks about himself."
"There, there! we're getting very serious, little girl," Vickars replied. "Suppose we change the subject. We don't often have a guest. Don't you think a little supper and some music afterwards might fit the occasion?"
"How forgetful of me!" she said. She rose and left the room.
"You mustn't take my fine sentiments too seriously, so I give you due warning," he remarked. "Men who write books get into the way of talking their own books. You'll find, as you come to know me better, that there's a good deal of—of the artificial in me. The only merit I have above other men is that I am conscious of it."
"I have read your last book," said Arthur, "and I found nothing artificial in it. I thought it a great book."
"Have you? Well, I'm glad." His pale face was illumined for an instant by the boy's ingenuous praise. "No, Arthur," he added, "it's not great. It is merely true. And I think I can say this with real sincerity—I care much more for its truth than for its greatness."
"Are they not the same?" said Arthur.
"Not for this generation. This is the age of 'best sellers,' and the book that is called great is usually the book that has least to say about the truth of life."
"I was not thinking of contemporary opinion."
"Contemporary opinion is the only court of appeal we have. A book must justify itself to the generation in which it is written, or be sure of it no other generation will know anything about it. Yet I do sometimes think that truth must make itself heard. I cherish the belief, in spite of history and experience."
He spoke with an accent of infinite dejection. Arthur could find no words of reply. If, an hour before, he had been asked what kind of life came nearest his ideal, perhaps he would have replied, "The literary life," and he would have instanced Vickars. Now, as he looked at the writer's tired face, it was as though the naked realities of such a life lay before him, stripped of all delusive trappings. To drain one's life-blood into books that no one read, to prophesy to deaf ears and undiscerning eyes, ah! surely there must be a better way of life than this; and on the instant he knew what that way was. That warmth which still pierced his veins spoke to him more clearly than any voice. To love—that was life. To live the lyric life of love—that was better than to write of it. And straightway there came to him a vision of wide plains and deep forests, dotted with the homes of men, beneath whose roofs lip met lip in faithful kisses, and heart beat to heart through long nights of sleep, and all the primeval life of man went on in birth and death, as it had done since the gates of Eden closed. Ah! infinite desirable delight of love, strong, and natural, and enduring, on which the great seal of God had always rested! In that moment he ceased to be a boy; his manhood rushed upon him; he blushed, and in his heart a voice cried, "Elizabeth!"
She re-entered the room at that moment, carrying a supper-tray, and Arthur could not but observe the supple poise and grace of her young figure. She moved easily, with a soft gliding motion; she was dressed wholly in white, and conveyed an impression of a creature inimitably virginal. The face had not lost its look of delicate fatigue, but it was clear that this fatigue was of the mind rather than the body, and owed itself to no physical defect. Both he and Vickars rose together to clear a place upon the littered writing-table for the supper-tray, and in performing this act his hand touched hers. It was but a feather's touch, but it thrilled him, and his very flesh seemed to dissolve in a fire of rapture. Again he sought her eyes, but now they were averted. The moment passed like a chord of music that left the air vibrating. It seemed to him that all the world must know what had happened.
Then the current of his life ran back into its normal channels, and he found himself talking with excited eagerness. The meal was as simple as a meal could be, but for him it had ambrosial flavours. She sat quite silent, listening, apparently unaware that he talked for her alone. Vickars caught the gaiety of his good spirits, and talked as eagerly as he. The conversation soon found its accustomed grooves—books, and London, and the interminable comedy and tragedy of man. Presently Vickars happened to mention a young poet who had lately died, and Arthur asked if he had known him.
"Yes, he came here once. It was in his last days, when he had finally discovered that the world had rejected him. But he never knew why he was rejected."
"Why was he rejected?"
"Because he could only sing of the past. He had no vision of the modern world. He despised it, and his contempt blinded him to its real significance.
"I do not think that is quite just, father," said Elizabeth.
"Ah! I forgot to say," said Vickars, with an admiring glance at his daughter, "that Elizabeth is a much better critic than I. She is a better critic because she is a kinder."
"No, it's not that, father. My criticism, such as it is, is only feeling, and I felt that poor Lawson was just finding his way to the right method when he died. Don't you remember those lines on London in his last sonnet?—
O Calvaries of the poor, dim hills of pain,Whose utmost anguish is not nail or thorn,The beaten blood-smeared brow, the soft flesh torn,But this, that ye are crucified in vain.
The man who wrote those lines surely saw the modern world, and realised its significance."
She recited the lines slowly, in a low fluty voice which would have imparted dignity and music to much worse lines. Arthur listened entranced. Surely there was magic in this summer's night, a magic of the soul as well as of the flesh. His hand had touched hers, but now her mind revealed itself, and thrilled his with a subtler contact. In one swift glimpse he understood her exquisite sensitiveness, her pitifulness and tenderness, her strength and goodness; it was as though the Madonna's halo rested for an instant on that fair brow, and awed him into worship. He drew a long breath, and now, when his eyes sought hers, her gaze was not averted. She accepted the challenge of his eyes with complete sincerity, and with a frankness which was the last effect of complete innocence and modesty.
The voice of Vickars broke the spell.
"Yes, you are right," he said; "you usually are." And then, turning to Arthur with a whimsical smile, "Do you know Elizabeth writes my books for me?"
"Typewrites, he means. That is all, I assure you," she said.
"And corrects my blunders, which are many."
"Only the spelling. Father never could spell, and when he is in difficulties he makes a hieroglyphic with his pen, and leaves me to decipher it."
"I am afraid the critics find it hieroglyphic too," said Vickars, with a return to his dejected manner. "I sometimes wish we had Grub Street back again, with all its tribe of famished hacks; they at least would understand a book that deals with poverty. But who are the critics to-day? They are gentlemen with settled incomes who write in comfortable armchairs, and know as little about real life as the tadpole knows of the ocean. The result is they simply cannot understand the things I write about. They persuade themselves that such things don't exist. What can one say of them but the accusation which is as old as time—'having eyes they see not, and ears they hear not, and hearts they do not understand'?"
"They will surely understand one day," said Arthur.
"Ah! one day—but when? When the common people have forced them to see and understand. For there is my real hope, after all—the common people. They know what they want, and don't go to the critics for their opinions. A venomous review may do much to injure a young author; but if he goes on writing undismayed, the time comes when reviews, whether bad or good, don't affect him. If he can justify himself to the common people, he is certain to triumph in the long run. But there, we are getting too serious again. Let us forget books, and have some music. One can find solace for any kind of disappointment in music. It is the only art that makes a universal appeal."
Elizabeth rose and went to the piano, stooping as she went to kiss her father's brow.
She played nothing that was not familiar, but it seemed to Arthur that all she played was the expression of her own personality. She played on and on, wandering at will from Chopin to Tchaikowsky, and in the profound melodies of the great Russian her whole spirit spoke. And it seemed to Arthur that the Spirit of the World spoke too—a romantic and enchanted world, and yet a world of infinite yearning and pain, of love and battle and heroism, till he saw, as it were, the weird procession of human life, with white faces strained in final kisses, hands that rose above encroaching waves to touch and part, hearts that broke in ecstasies of love and joy and sorrow. The cool night breeze came in at the open window, the leaves whispered as it passed, and at intervals the deep voice of London ran like an undertone inwoven with the music. O wonderful, various, inscrutable world, what, bliss to be alive in it, even though it be for the briefest moment! But there was a bliss beyond bliss, unspeakable, unimaginable, not to live alone, but to love as the greatest hearts have loved, and surely that was the final message of this magic hour! Time, and the years, and all the centuries, and all events and histories, seemed to concentrate themselves in one fair girl, from whose slender fingers came this music of the world; she alone was important; she was the race itself in its final flower of love and loveliness. So ran the incoherent thoughts of youth, songs rather than thoughts, the wordless musical out-cries of a heart waking to a knowledge of itself, and finding all outer objects lit with the glamour of the magic hour.
The music ceased abruptly. There was a dull repeated thud upon the wall.
"What on earth is that?" cried Arthur.
"Oh, merely our neighbours," said Vickars. "Poor souls! they rise early and work hard, and I suppose they want to go to bed."
"Why, I shouldn't have thought they could have heard as plainly as that."
"That's because you don't live in Lonsdale Road," said Vickars with a smile. "Why, I can hear the children sneeze next door. And there's a crack in the party wall, big enough for light to shine through, and I know when the light appears that they are going to bed. My dear fellow, I honestly believe it's only the paper that holds the walls together at all."
Arthur blushed furiously, for he had remembered what Vickars had forgotten, that the house was the work of Archibold Masterman. It was a horrible irruption of the commonplace upon the magic hour.
Vickars, recognising his mistake, turned the conversation into ordinary channels. Arthur still clung to the vanishing skirts of his romance. Once more he thrilled as he touched Elizabeth's hand in farewell, but as he went out into the cool dusk it seemed as though Life strode beside him, a dark and menacing figure, no longer lyrical and friendly.
"What can they think of my father?" he thought, as he walked home. And behind this lay another thought: "If they think ill of my father, as they have a right to, can they think well of me?"