The troubles of the young are apt to move the ridicule of the mature, who have long since discovered that even tragedies can be outlived, disasters forgotten, and the worst defeats repaired. That there is a strange and stubborn resilience in life, which enables us to survive a thousand shocks, is indeed a wonderful quality which is needed to explain the persistence of the race. But the final view of life is never the immediate view, and, whatever we may think now of ancient sorrows, unless the memory is quite dulled we know well that they were once real and terrible enough. The child's terror of the dark, his bitter tears over slight or injustice, his first agony of homesickness, his rage against acts of cruelty or tyranny, the wounds inflicted on his tenderness or pride—these things may appear to us now absurd or insignificant episodes in the process by which we adjusted ourselves to the social scheme; but it may be doubted if any tears were bitterer than these, any later sorrow comparable with these young sorrows that left us dumb with fury and astonishment. The years bring healing and forgetfulness—or perhaps it were truer to say, a tougher skin, a less sensitive organism; but, if we care to examine our hearts, most of us would find that the scars of these earliest wounds run deep and are ineffaceable.
How well does the writer recollect a certain mournful morning when he stood at bay in the corner of a large school playground, tormented by the jeers and blows of a jovial crowd of young bullies, who found occasion for fresh mirth in every fresh impotent spasm of rage and grief. Since that day he has wept over open graves, said farewell to so many of those he loved that the unseen world seems less uninhabited than the seen, been betrayed by friends he trusted, been humiliated in a thousand ways by the cruelty or stupidity of men, but he has known no sorrow quite as keen as that sorrow, and no betrayal that seemed quite so cruel as the act by which his parents gave him to the wolves in that brutal playground. He can jest about the story now, but in his own private heart that fatal morning still looms tragic, and there are times when he still wakes out of painful dreams with the old horrible sense of forsakenness that he felt then.
So he finds it impossible to treat lightly Arthur Masterman's first cruel astonishment when the revelation of his father's misdoing was made plain to him. If Arthur had been more observant, he would have learned it by degrees, and so its force would have been broken; if he had not built up for himself an admired image of his father, the shock would have been easier to bear. As it was, the revelation came with a shattering blow which shook his life to the centre. And the blow struck him precisely at the point where he was most sensitive. His father had all but slain Vickars, who was his friend, and he might yet strike down the daughter who was dearer to him than his own life. He had as good as planned their death, for what he did he had done deliberately, well knowing the issue of his deeds. And how many more were there who were his helpless victims? How many graves had he filled? Where would the harvest of disgrace and death end? The doctor was right—the highwayman who took a purse was a reputable citizen compared with the criminal who wilfully sowed the seeds of death among innocent people for a few pounds of illicit gain! And he was the son of the man who had done this; the very clothes he wore, the food he ate, the books he read, were purchased by his father's sin.
To Vickars, slowly recovering from a mortal sickness, he dared not speak, to Elizabeth still less. So he took refuge with Mrs. Bundy, whose bosom was an open hospice for all sorts of vicarious sorrows.
"Well, well!" she said cheerfully, "Didn't I tell you that your father was like the man in the parable, 'an austere man, gathering where he had not strawed'? But it takes all sorts to make a world, laddie, and your father's none so bad as some."
"That's poor comfort," he replied gloomily.
"Poor it may be, but it's not to be forgotten. I mind the time when Bundy was in trouble, and it was your father helped him. Did I ever tell you that?"
"No."
"Well, he did. He lent Bundy what he asked, and did it cheerfully."
"Oh! I don't doubt he can be generous, but that's not the point. It's not what he may do with his money, but how he makes it."
And then he proceeded to pour out all the bitterness of his heart in hot, indignant words. He raged like a man blind with pain, who knows not how or where his blows fall.
"You cannot justify him," he cried. "God knows I've tried hard enough, but I cannot. Dr. Leet said he was a scoundrel, and I, his son, could not contradict him. I have tried to think he did not know, but this is a thing he must have known. It's a hard thing to hear your father called a scoundrel, and be silent. And I was silent, for I knew that it was true."
"Hush, hush, laddie! It's not for you to say that."
"I must say it. There are hundreds of people saying it. And I am his son—the son of a scoundrel."
If Arthur had not been blinded by his anger he would have known why Mrs. Bundy sought to stop the torrent of his words. For, while he was speaking, young Scales had entered the house, and stood in the doorway watching this unusual scene. The Scales family had returned that evening from their holiday, and it had occurred to young Benjamin Scales to call at Mrs. Bundy's, where he would be sure to find some of his acquaintance. Young Benjamin was not a pleasant youth; he had a mean, narrow face, like his father, and wore eye-glasses, not from any defect of vision, but because he imagined that they gave him an air of cleverness, and among his strong antipathies was jealousy of Arthur. So what more natural than that he should seize avidly on Arthur's angry words, and duly report them to his father, who in turn waited his opportunity of reporting them to Archibold Masterman.
The opportunity came a few days later, when Scales went to Brighton to see Masterman upon the Leatham business, which was still undecided. Scales knew very well why it was undecided, and his grudge against Arthur had grown by careful nursing. And now, thanks to Arthur's angry words, he had the means of avenging himself.
Masterman had, of course, read Arthur's report, and was secretly delighted with it. It was an admirable piece of writing, plain and convincing, and it was expressed with a lucidity to which he was not accustomed in similar documents. "The boy has brains," he said, as he read it; "he will go far." It was the first time he had tested those brains on any practical affair, and his pride in his son was great.
"I'm not at all sure Arthur isn't right," he said to Scales, and so he had postponed decision from day to day.
But the time had now come when the decision must be made, and Scales was fully resolved that that decision should be favourable to his own interests.
"I don't deny," he said, "that your son's report is admirably done, but you must recollect that he has no real experience of business. And besides——"
"Besides what?"
"I don't think he will ever understand business."
"Why not?"
"From words he said to me. From words he has said to others."
"What words? Tell me plainly what you mean?"
"I had rather not."
"Now look here, Scales," said Masterman, "either you have said too much or not enough. In a few weeks Arthur will be my partner, and the sooner you begin to think of him in that way the better for our future relations."
"I don't think he will ever be your partner," said Scales quietly.
"Why not?"
"Because he is a wild, impracticable boy," said Scales, throwing away his caution. "Because he told me that business—your business and mine—was, in his opinion, organised theft. Because he has been going about saying that you are a scoundrel——"
"What's that?" cried Masterman, rising to his feet. His face was pale and terrible, and his attitude so menacing that Scales was afraid. But in that mean heart hate was stronger than fear, and it supplied a certain desperate courage.
"I didn't mean to tell you, sir. But you ought to know it. Ask what he has been doing in London this last fortnight. Ask him where he has been. I can tell you. He has been living with Hilary Vickars, he has been making love to his daughter. Vickars is a Socialist. And your son shares his views, and he has said publicly that your methods of business prove you a scoundrel."
"Is that true?" said Masterman.
"It is God's truth. Do you think I would have come between father and son with a lie that was bound to be found out."
"No; I believe if you lied, you'd choose a safe lie, Scales," he said bitterly.
"You are unjust to me, sir. I have never lied to you. I don't lie now."
"That will do," said Masterman.
"But what will you do?"
"That's my affair," he retorted grimly.
"But it's my affair too, sir. I want to know whether your son's report is to go against my experience and yours? whether you will complete this Leatham purchase or not?"
"Ah! I wasn't thinking of that." He turned away, and stood for some moments looking out of the window in silence. Then he walked rapidly to his desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out Arthur's report. "This is my reply," he said. He tore it in pieces, slowly, almost methodically, and trampled it beneath his feet. "Come in an hour," he added. "I will sign the purchase papers. Now go."
"I hope you'll forgive me, sir——"
"What's that?" he roared in sudden rage. "'Go!' I said. Man, can't you see I'm dangerous? Go——"
The door banged behind the retreating Scales, and Archibold Masterman was alone.
So this was the end of all his hopes, his dreams, his ambitious purposes for Arthur! For he did not think of doubting the story Scales had told him. He knew very well that Scales would never have dared to tell the story if it were not true. In a swift moment of agonised apprehension he knew also that there had always been an element of insecurity in those very hopes and purposes on which he had set his heart so eagerly. His son had always stood aloof from him, there had always been some impalpable barrier between them. Yet of late he had been much less conscious of this barrier than he had ever been. Arthur had shown himself willing to meet his father's wishes, and in the Leatham business he had displayed practical faculties for which he had not given him credit. Instinctively Masterman knew that something had happened of which even Scales had not the clue.
If Arthur had been guilty of any of the common indiscretions of youth, he could have forgiven him readily; he would indeed have almost welcomed the opportunity, since it would have destroyed the barrier between them. But this was a different matter. He caught a galling vision of his son as his judge and critic publicly condemning him; no father could condone that. He had been too lenient with him, too generous. He had as good as admitted his superiority, he had even been humble before him. And this was the result—his son forgot all gratitude, all decency even, and denounced him as a scoundrel. The word stung him like a gadfly. His heart began to harden into cold, pitiless anger towards his son.
Yet he must give him a hearing. That was only fair. And he was too proud to seek it. His first instinct was to wire Arthur to come to Brighton at once, but this would be to admit an importance in the situation which he was resolved to ignore. In a day or two the family would be back in London, and then the opportunity would come.
The opportunity came a few days later.
Eagle House was reopened, and the common forms of life were re-established. Dinner was just over. Helen was chattering about the new friends she had made at Brighton, but no one else had anything to say. A heavy restraint rested like a cloud over the family. Mrs. Masterman sat silent as usual, Arthur had not said a word during the meal, Masterman had replied to Helen's ceaseless small talk in curt monosyllables.
Arthur rose quietly to leave the room, when his father's voice arrested him.
"Arthur."
"Yes, father."
"I want to see you."
"Very well, sir."
The words were colourless in themselves, but to one ear in that room they rang like a clash of swords. Mrs. Masterman looked up, her face quivering and eager. Her eyes sought Arthur, and as he passed her chair she pressed his hand. Arthur understood that silent overture, and was grateful for it.
"Come into the office," said Masterman, rising from the table.
Arthur followed obediently. The hour long foreseen had come, and upon the whole he was glad. He was sick of suspense, sick of the deceit of eating his father's bread with bitter resentment in his heart, but not the less he trembled. There was a strangling pressure in his throat, his heart swelled, a vein in his temple throbbed painfully. He had long rehearsed the hour; he had shaped every phrase that he would use to sharpest meaning; but now he felt unaccountably dumb. And, as if memory herself turned traitor, a sudden picture flashed before him of how, years ago, in some childish illness, his father had sat beside his bed, had taken him upon his knee, and had hushed him to sleep upon his bosom. It passed through his thoughts like a strain of music, like the fragrance of incense from an altar, subtly suggestive of a forgotten sacredness in old affections and of their inalienable claim upon his heart. And with it came that old sense of bigness in his father. Strange how that persisted, but it did. This rough mass of man, this big fighting figure, this man of many combats, did he really understand him? And he replied with the sadness of a great pity that he understood him too well, and he saw the gulf between them.
But there was no such touch of grace or tenderness in the father's mind. He also had rehearsed this hour, but with an extraordinary vehemence of rage, which grew by what it fed on. He had come to conceive himself a too generous and indulgent parent wronged by an ungrateful child. And worse still, he had come to conceive of Arthur as a weakling, who refused the battle of life; a fool, who wanted life arranged on a plan of his own; an attitudinising Pharisee, who held himself aloof from realities, and said to the man who grappled them, "Stand aside, I am holier than thou." Well, he would teach him! He would give him a lesson which he would never forget. His only mistake had been that he had not done it long ago.
The moment the door was closed he wheeled round upon him with a formidable gesture.
"I want a word with you," he said, "and I'll thank you not to interrupt till I'm done. It seems I've got a son that doesn't approve me. Well, I could bear that, but what I can't bear is to have a son that is fool enough to go about saying so. It seems I'm not good enough to be the father of this son. I'm a scoundrel, so he says, and he says it with my meat in his belly and my clothes on his back. My father was a hard man, and beat me, but I never told other folk what I thought of him. I never went whining to other folk and called my father names. I bore what I had to bear, and kept my mouth shut. But it seems I've got a son that must be talking. Well, I'm going to take care that he talks where I can't hear him. I thought to take him into my business—the more fool I. Business! Let me tell you business needs commonsense, which it seems you haven't got. And business needs a still tongue, which you'll never get, to say nothing of some kind of decent faith between partners, which you haven't a notion of. Partners! Why, let me tell you, I'd sooner take the most ignorant boy in my office and make him my partner than you! He'd at least have commonsense enough to know which side his bread's buttered, which you'll never know. So that's at an end, and you know my mind."
"But, father, you are unjust to me. You don't understand."
"What don't I understand?"
"What was in my thought."
"It's not a thing I'm at all anxious to understand," he retorted grimly.
"But you must. I won't be condemned unheard."
"But you condemned me unheard."
This was a shaft that drew blood. It was true, Arthur knew it to be true; he had taken the word of other people against his father.
"There were circumstances——" he began.
"Circumstances? Every fool pleads circumstances," Masterman interrupted. "Give it the right name, you that are so honest, and say lying gossip."
"No, it was not gossip, father."
And thereupon he went over the whole story of the illness of Vickars, his visit to Dr. Leet, and the doctor's angry denunciation of the builder of the Lonsdale Road houses as a scoundrel. He spoke with quiet force, and his father listened in perfect silence, but with averted face.
"Have you done?"
"Yes, father."
"Are you sure you've omitted nothing?"
"No, that is all."
"Well, now listen to me. Dr. Leet may be right or wrong in what he says—I don't know, and I don't care. The only thing I know is that when I built those houses I gave the best value I could at the price. I've told you before that if I am paid a cheap price I give cheap work. All the talking in the world can't upset that position—it's plain business."
"But if people die through the cheap work! O father, you can't mean what you say!"
"A good many people have lived in Lonsdale Road and haven't died. Your doctor is an old woman, telling fairy-tales. But even if he were right, I disclaim responsibility. I give the best value I can for the money; if people won't pay for things, they can't have them.Ididn't set the standards of business. They existed before me, and they'll exist after me. If I hadn't built those houses, some one else would have built them, and probably worse."
"But the dishonesty of it!" cried Arthur.
"Dishonest? Well, I'll admit that too, if you like. But whose dishonesty? Find me a business in London that isn't dishonest. It's London itself that is dishonest. It insists on having what it hasn't paid for, and won't pay for. It prefers shoddy because it's cheap. It has no right to complain of what it gets."
Arthur listened in appalled silence; before this brutally lucid exposition of what business meant, it seemed as though all his fine ideals of right and justice were so many burst bubbles. For a long moment it was as though he saw the world streaming past him, like a dark torrent thronged with dead faces, upon whose agonised pale lips was the eternal accusation of things as they are.
"Father, it can't be right!" he cried.
"There's a power of things isn't right in this world, as you'll find out some day. And talking won't put 'em right, either. But that brings me to what I wanted to say. It's about the thing you omitted to mention when you told me your story."
"What was that, father?"
"I'll tell you. You can show me what's wrong in my business, and now I'm going to show you something that's wrong in your conduct. If I told you you'd behaved like a sulky young whelp, you'd say I was unjust, wouldn't you? Well, that's just what you've done."
"Father——"
"Don't interrupt. You've had your say, and I mean now to have mine, and be done with it. If you'd come to me when this thing began to trouble you, I'd have talked it over with you frankly. But what did you do? You kept away from me. You did worse. You went about repeating what Dr. Leet said. You hadn't even the common decency to wait until you'd seen me. You hadn't even the gratitude to recollect that I'd done the best I could for you, and was planning to do more. You behaved just like a bad-hearted little boy who goes about letting folks think that his father is his enemy. That's pretty behaviour in a son, isn't it? But it seems that's the kind of son I've got. And for that I don't forgive you. You've made it clear that you and I can't draw together."
"I never meant anything of the kind."
"Never meant! What kind of excuse is that? It's what every slack-baked youth in the office says when he's played the fool. And when a youth can find nothing better to say than that, I fire him. And I'm going to fire you."
"I am entirely in your hands, father. I can see that I was wrong in not coming to you at once. What more can I say?"
"It's too late to say anything. You can't undo wrong by just saying you are wrong. The plain fact is, I can't trust you. There's only one end for it—you must go your way, and I mine."
There was a rough dignity in Masterman as he uttered these words which was profoundly moving. Had he been only angry, violent, or satirical, Arthur could have borne it. He would have been sustained by the justice of his cause. But now that very justice on which he had relied for strength broke beneath him like a rotten prop. He who had been so keen for justice was himself unjust. He saw himself—an implicit parricide, a child who had taken arms against his father. And he saw with a sudden agonised clearness of perception his father's nature, with its strange blending of rugged virtue and unscrupulous craft, its hard, indomitable fibre shot through by soft veins of tenderness, his public traffic with dishonour almost counterbalanced by his stern reticence under the early cruelties he had endured, and his honourable, stoical silence under their brutal ignominies—he saw all this, and he saw himself as weak, hysteric, foolish, crying out for justice in another, but blind to the folly of his own behaviour.
"I am sorry, father," he said in a broken voice.
"That's the first sensible word you've said to-night. Only, you see, it comes too late. You and me's got to part. Our roads lie different."
"What do you wish me to do, father?"
"I don't know. I want to think things over. You'd better go now."
And then with a sudden savage burst of anger, as Arthur left the room, he shouted after him: "You can take my compliments to Dr. Leet, and tell him he's a confounded interfering fool!"
But there was more of pain than anger in this violent dismissal.
The night had fallen upon Eagle House. Arthur sat alone in his bedroom at the open window. A soft wind talked to itself in the branches of the big mulberry tree on the lawn; a few placid stars shone in the blue-black heavens, then the late moon like a yellow fire; a nested sparrow chirped contentedly beneath the eaves; and, like a solemn wash of waves upon a hidden beach, London moaned and murmured through all its vast circumference. Out of the deep night the Spirit of his own Youth arose, and sat beside him.
"Listen to me," said the Spirit. "I bring with me two swords—Faith and Courage. Gird them on."
But London laughed. A soft derision shook the leaves upon the mulberry tree, and the waves upon the hidden beach were scornful.
"You have your life to live. Live it," said the Spirit.
But the stars, like eyes, turned slowly toward him in despairing irony. "How many millions have we heard say that," they whispered, "and each has been overcome in turn, and has sunk in nameless dust."
"You are not as the nameless millions," said the Spirit. "You are yourself, with your own right and power to live."
And at that the heavens moved, and an infinite procession of scarred brows and sad eyes, passed by, and a multitude of lips whispered, "We said that once, but Life was too strong for us."
"Nevertheless, thou canst conquer Life," said the Spirit.
"Nay, Life will conquer thee," replied the legions of the dead. "Let be. Submit. Why strive when all strife is vain?"
And then, out of the deep well of his misery, a bubble of light swam up, and something in his soul cried, "I will not submit! I will gird on the two swords of Faith and Courage. I will conquer Life!"
*****
He had sat so long in absorbed silence that he was unconscious that the door of the room had opened and shut. The noise of the closing door, gentle as it was, roused him like a clap of thunder. He turned at the sound, and saw his mother.
She was robed in white, a white silk shawl was drawn over her head, and in the dim light she looked like a gentle apparition.
"Mother!" he cried.
She came toward him with outstretched arms.
And then, as by a magic touch, he became a little child again. She sat besides him, drew his head down upon her warm bosom, put her arm round his neck, and whispered, "I know." And beneath her gentle caress, thawed as it were by the mere warmth of contact with her, something hard and cold in his own heart dissolved and drained itself away in delicious tears. He wept unrestrainedly, as a child weeps who is in no haste to cease from weeping, lest the consolation for his tears should cease with the tears themselves. And the chief sweetness of it all lay in the silence of their communion. Neither spoke because there was no need of speech. He knew that he was comprehended, and this is the final ecstasy of all communion. From this faithful bosom he had drawn his life; these hands had been the first to touch him; and as they had long ago bound up his childish bruises, so now their very touch drew the hurt out of his pained heart. He drank life from her again; he was conscious of a warm inflowing flood of strength, of restful power, of quiet blessedness.
When at last he lifted his eyes he saw her transfigured. The frost of silence had melted from her face; he caught in the dim light the sparkle of her eyes, divined rather than discerned the flush of her cheek and the new youth and vehemence of her aspect.
"Mother!" he said again.
She quietly pushed him from her, and gazed deep into his eyes.
"And now let us talk," she whispered.
"You know what has happened?" he said.
"Yes, I know."
"O mother, what am I to do?"
"You must do right, my son."
She was silent for a moment, and he felt her hand tighten as it held his own. Then she said abruptly, "I have my confession to make before I can counsel you."
"Your confession, mother?"
"Can't you see that one is needed? Have you never asked yourself the reason for my silence, my aloofness, and my lack of interest in life? Did you never feel yourself that these things were unnatural, that there must be a reason for them, and that the reason must be tragic? I am going to tell you that reason. I have waited for this hour for years—O my God, what dreary, fearful years! I have watched your growth with terror, Arthur—yes, with terror, because I feared what you might become. Do you know what I feared? God forgive me! I feared you might be like your father. I watched every little seed of thought as it opened in you, fearful of what flower it might bear. I studied every glance, every sign of disposition, every drift of temperament; weighed your words, analysed them endlessly through sleepless nights, gazed into your mind and heart with dread and yearning. No one knows what I suffered when you went to Oxford. There was not a night when I did not lie awake for hours thinking of you. I said, 'Here he will meet the world in all its grossness, and he will succumb to it, as a thousand others have done. He will lose his fineness; he will become like the rest.' Each time when you came home I met you with a kind of terror. I dared scarcely look into your face for fear of the record I might find written there. A mother reads the signs that no one else can read. She knows, as no one else can know, the secret potencies within the nature of her child. And knowing what I did of life, I was terrified; and it was because I feared to look I stood aloof, that I shunned even speech with you, that I have shut myself for years within a wall of ice. Arthur, can you forgive me?"
"O my poor mother! it is I who should ask forgiveness, because I did not understand you better."
She stooped to kiss his forehead, and went on relentlessly: "No; I see now that I was wrong. I denied myself to you. I should have given myself to you all the more because I feared for you. But surely I have been punished—punished by the loss of how many moments like this! And I might have had them! What can ever give me back the kisses I have never kissed?"
"Mother, I will not have you talk like that. I have never doubted that you loved me. And I love you all the more for what you have endured for me. Yes, I knew you suffered—I always understood that."
"I suffered—but I have not yet told you the deepest cause. I must tell you that too."
"I don't want to know, mother. I have no right to know."
"Yes; it is your right to know."
There was anguish in her voice now. The yellow rays of the sinking moon, falling on her face, revealed a white, strained contour, as though flame and marble mingled.
"Listen, Arthur. I must go back through the years to the time when I married your father. I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as lighthearted as a girl could be. Your father had a greatness of his own—never think that I doubt that—and when I first met him I thought him the most wonderful man in all the world. No man was ever better calculated to impress the senses of a young girl. I gave him what was almost adoration, unthinking adoration. Of course I knew that I shared only one part of his life, but what did I care? Women are usually content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the men they trust live when they are away from them. Of the nature of your father's business life I could hardly form a guess. It was not my concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until—until a day came when I had to know.
"I will spare you details, Arthur. I have said enough when I say that the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on merciless chicanery and fraud. I begged him on my knees to alter it. I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread. At first he argued with me, as one might with a foolish child. He told me he was no worse than other people—all businesses were like that; he was as good as circumstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my pretty Puritanism. Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew angry.
"'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried.
"'You shall give me no more,' I answered. 'You have taken from me much more than you gave.'
"'What have I taken?'
"'My belief in you, my belief in life,' I answered. And then, in my hot anger, I told him all that I had learned, and how I abhorred to live softly at the price of cruel suffering in others, and refused to profit by the wages of robbery. He turned pale at that, for he saw that I knew something which went beyond legalised dishonesty.
"From that hour our lives were separate. I never again wore my girlish finery; I ate as little as I could; I lived in solitude. I knew that nothing I could say would influence him. I was condemned to futility. It was in that year of our final quarrel you were born. O my boy, can you understand now with what terror I looked at your little innocent face as it lay upon my bosom? For many, many months I wished you dead for fear of what you might become. I have watched the growth of your father's wealth with far deeper alarm than men have ever watched the coming of poverty. I could discern in it nothing but a threat to you. I have wasted myself in tears and prayers for you, all the time telling myself that prayers were in vain. And now—praise be to the God I have insulted!—I find my prayers miraculously answered. Arthur, my son, you have stood the test. Your soul has overcome the forces of your blood. I live to-night, I live for the first time in twenty years, and God restores to me the years that the locust has eaten."
Her impassioned speech thrilled him like the note of rapture in the voice of a saint. And as she spoke, with that pale moonlight lighting her face like a flame, it was as though the saint's halo rested on her brow; she was the creature of a vision, ineffably pure and tender, clothed in the eternal sacredness of motherhood. He had rested his head upon her bosom while he wept; he knelt now, and laid it on her knees.
"O my son, my son," she cried, "I planned for this long before you were born, but I never thought it would come true. It was for this I chastened myself with tears and fasting, hoping that the life I nourished might be freed from the stain I feared. But I had no faith. I could only bring God my timidity; I could only plead my agony; I had no strength to bring to Him. Yet He heard me, and after all the doubting years He has given me the desire of my heart."
"And I never understood," he whispered.
"But you understand now, and I am repaid in full," she answered. "When I saw you go out with your father to-night into the office, I knew the great battle of your life had come, and something told me you would not fail."
"Yet I did fail, mother. He made me feel that I had wronged him."
"I know. He told me."
"He said I had behaved like a bad-hearted little boy. He humbled me to the dust."
"I know that too. That is why I came to you, my dear. I knew that you would need me."
"I do need you, mother. Everything is dark and perplexed to me. It seems that though I have done right, I have done it in the wrong way."
"The great thing is to have done right. That atones for everything with God, I think."
"But I don't see the next step, mother."
"We never do, till we take it. But I can see it. Shall I tell you what it is?"
"Yes, mother."
"It is the step I did not take—that is why I see it so clearly. You must go away. You must take your life into your own hands. You must begin it all over again. Women cannot do that; men can. Only now and then does a woman claim her own personality, and for her the risk is terrible. But a man can do it; he is meant to do it. That is where he finds his greatness."
"But that will be to leave you, mother. How can I do that, especially now, when I know what your life has been?"
"It is the fate of mothers, dearest, and it is a joyous fate. What matter where you go? I shall still live in you. Don't you see, dear, that my life reaches its height to-night, and through you? I have paid twenty years of loneliness and tears for this hour, and I find the price light. Do you think I grudge a few more years of separation? And they will not be lonely. I have wept my last tears for you. I have triumphed after all, and nothing can rob me of my triumph."
The supreme self-abnegation of that speech was too great to be understood all at once. It came upon him by degrees; perhaps it would be true to say that it was only after many years, when he stood beside his mother's grave, that he understood its full significance. But enough of that significance was felt even now to fill his soul with wonder. He saw only the first page in the sacred gospel of motherhood, but he caught its meaning. To ask nothing, to give everything, to purchase momentary rapture with the grief of years, to toil without reward, to love and be forgotten, to yield flesh and heart for the nurture of the seeds of life in others, to create for them the unparticipated victory—that was the destiny of motherhood, a thing not less sacred than the love that once endured the Cross for man. To find himself so loved was an overwhelming thought. Beneath its weight he lay breathless, in an ecstasy of marvel.
"Yes, you must go away," she continued. "Shall I tell you why?"
"Yes, mother, tell me."
"Because if you stay in London you will never find your freedom. In London the net is drawn so close that individuality is strangled. London insists upon conformity. It grinds men down by slow attrition to a common likeness. I have thought it all over. It is because there are cities like London, full of avarice and pleasure, that the best men grow into criminals without knowing it. Your father might have been a good man if he had never seen London.
"And there is another reason too. Your father, in spite of his anger, will not give you up. He will try to keep you near him, even though you are not his partner in the business. He will bribe you by his generosity, subdue you by his forgiveness. And he is a strong man, remember, who always gets his own way sooner or later. Don't you know that, Arthur?"
"Do you mean that his very love for me is a peril, mother?"
"Yes, that is what I mean, my dear. You don't know what it means to be subject to the constant pressure of a strong man who loves you. But I know. It is that which has reduced my own life to futility. If I had hated your father, my hatred would have given me strength to leave him. But because I loved him, I learned to distinguish between him and his sin. Oh! there have been many times when I have been almost overcome; times when I have said, 'What is the use of struggle?' It were wiser to submit at once, to accept a strong man's love with gratitude, to ask no questions, to become like the rest. I have never really submitted, but I have compromised, and that has meant futility! But you are different. You have your chance to escape, to build your own life. I don't want your life to be futile, as mine has been. It is the torture of all tortures. Arthur, I think I would rather see you dead!"
"But you, mother, how can I leave you?"
"Have I not told you I wish you to go? Do you think I am so selfish, dear, that I would have you stay with me to your loss? That would be my loss too, and a worse loss than any I have yet endured. My heart says, Stay; but see, I pluck the weakness from my heart. Arthur, I command you to go."
She rose as she spoke. The moon had sunk. The first gray gleam of day was in the sky, and suddenly the earliest sunbeam clothed her. In that fuller light he saw her face irradiated.
"I will go," he said.
She drew him to her, and kissed his brow.
"There speaks my own true son," she said.
For some moments a deep silence filled the room. A bird twittered in the dawn-light; London turned like a weary sleeper on a couch of pain; a wind, fresh from the fountains of the day, blew hopefully, with a hint of free seas and far-off lands.
"Promise me one thing, my son."
"What is that, mother?"
"It is that whatever your life may be, it shall be honest. Rich or poor, defeated or successful, accept no gain by violence, win no pleasure by dishonour. O my son, you know why I say this, you know what I mean by it."
"Yes, I know, mother, and I promise."
"And go at once, my dear. I have foreseen this hour and have provided for it. You will not go without money. You need not be ashamed to take it; it is yours. I have saved it, and for you. And now God bless you, my dear, dear son!"
She withdrew herself from his arms and was gone. The full day shone now, and from its shining summits Arthur heard the bugle cry, calling him to distant lands and new life.
If he had been able to earn his living in any conventional and accepted way, he would not have been on his way to join the S.S.Saurianas she lay off the landing-stage at Southampton on that bright September morning. The poor must needs learn a trade, because a trade is necessary to mere existence; but it is the tragedy of the rich and the semi-rich that, when once deprived of the artificial security of riches, they are helpless.
Arthur had plenty of time to do battle with this afflicting thought as he travelled down to Southampton. It accompanied him, like a voice of irony, in the rushing wheels; flashed upon him in the sentinel telegraph posts, each bearing aloft its spark of silent fire; saluted him from a hundred fields where men stood bare-armed beside the loaded wains; mocked him in casual glimpses of firm faces behind the glass of signal-boxes, in hurrying porters at the points of stoppage, in groups of labourers leaning lightly on spade or mattock, as the train thundered past. In all these faces, common as they were, there was a look of proud efficiency. In every sight and sound was the vindication of human toil. These men, each in his several way, had solved the problem of life. Each had learned to do something which the world wanted done. They did the work required of them, undistracted by problems and philosophies; asked no questions concerning the structure of society or the nature of life; were content to add their stone to the cairn, to pass on and be forgotten, and to earn the final simple elegy, "home have gone and ta'en their wages."
But Arthur—what did he know of this primeval life of man, which had gone on from the dawn of the world, unchanged by change of dynasties, by the readjustment of nations, by the birth and death of a hundred intricate philosophies, literatures, reforms, social experiments, social reconstructions? He knew less than the humblest child who followed the reapers in the field, or began the perilous process of existence by earning casual pence in the mine or factory. Like so many youths in an age when all forms of hand-labour have lost their dignity, he had learned a hundred things which lent a false glamour to existence, but not one which supplied its vital needs. He had accumulated accomplishments, but had not developed efficiencies, as though one should adorn and decorate a machine in which the works were lacking.
"Let me reckon up my capital," he thought as the train rushed on; "let me ascertain my authentic stock-in-trade. I have some knowledge of Greek literature and Roman history, but it is probable that in all this train-load of human creatures there are not half a dozen who would attach the least value to my knowledge. I can decipher old French chronicles with fair success; I know enough of music to understand the theory of counterpoint, and enough of poetry to construct a decent sonnet; and, so far as I can see, these are not commodities which possess any marketable value. I have thirty pounds given me by my mother; but if my life depended upon my earning thirty pence, I know no possible method by which I might wrest the most wretched pittance from the world's closed fist. I am, in fact, an incompetent, but through no fault of my own. It seems that I have been elaborately trained to do a great number of things which no one wants done, but not one of the things for which the world makes eager compensation. What were mere pastime to the savage is to me an inaccessible display of effort; left alone with the whole open world for my kingdom, it is doubtful if I could build a house, grow a potato, bake a loaf, or secure the barest means of life. Such is my deplorable condition that it is possible—no, entirely certain, that the poorest emigrant in this rushing freight of men and women would scruple to change places with me. That's a pretty situation for a gentleman of England and an Oxford graduate, isn't it?"
He smiled mirthlessly at the thought. Yet while it humiliated him, youth asserted its right sufficiently to extract from it a certain flavour of exhilaration. He was at all events coming to grips with the reality of living. He had been like a boy swimming upon bladders; the bladders were now removed, and a potent and tremendous sea throbbed beneath him. Since he could depend no more on artificial aids to life, it followed that life must needs develop its own latent forces. There surely must be such forces in himself, an elemental manhood which must justify itself. There recurred to him a saying of Hilary Vickars. They had been discussing one night the infinite and elusive question of wherein lay the wisdom of life, when Vickars had abruptly said, "Practice is the only teacher. You learn to walk by walking, to swim by swimming, to live by living. The child has no theory about walking: he simply walks, at the price of a thousand tears and bruises. In the same way we must make the experiment of living in order to learn how to live. It is the same with religion. We make the experiment of God before we can find God. The particular folly of men to-day is that they think wisdom comes by talking about wisdom. One honest attempt to do something, however blunderingly, is worth a lifetime of discussion about how it should be done."
"Yet Browning held that the great thing planned was better than the little thing achieved," he had responded.
"Browning also was a talker rather than a doer," Vickars had replied. "He misleads men by the very robustness of his talk into the notion that great dreams can take the place of great actions. Don't let him mislead you. Remember what I say, that the great business of life is to live, not to criticise life."
He remembered the words now, and they acquired new significance as he studied the faces of his comrades. There were four men in the carriage with him, one of them middle-aged, the others mere youths. The middle-aged man had a good, plain, country face, with a fringe of gray whisker; two of the youths were clearly country-bred, the third had the alert look and pallor of the city. The middle-aged man sat in stolid silence, with his big knotted hands folded on his knees; the two country youths watched the flying fields with eagerness; the city youth had produced a zither, on which he was strumming hymn-tunes. "Safe in the arms of Jesus," was the tune he strummed.
"Thank you, sir," said the middle-aged man. "It kind of cheers one up a bit to hear that."
"It's the only tune I really know," said the youth apologetically. "You see, I'm only a beginner."
"My little girl used to sing it. Learned it in a Sunday school at Newcastle. She's dead now."
The simple words had the effect of dissolving the reticence of these chance travellers. They began to talk, and very soon each was relating his history. The two country youths had the least to say. They had heard there was work in America with good pay; in that statement their entire history was comprehended. They had not the least idea of the country they were going to; its very geography was as much a mystery to them as the binomial theorem; they were, in fact, staking everything upon a rumour, and Arthur found their very ignorance at once deplorable and wonderful as an expression of the hopeful courage of the human heart. The London youth was more garrulous, and slightly better informed. It seemed he had a relative who had promised him a place in a small business which he managed near Philadelphia.
"I am a clerk, you know. A man who is a good clerk can always get on in any commercial centre. Except in London. There everything's congested, too many people and not enough work to go round. "England," he pronounced oracularly, "is done. Her day's over."
It seemed the younger men endorsed this verdict with surprising unanimity. Each was a fugitive from an unequal battle. Men could not live on the land, because of high rents and exorbitant taxation; neither could they live in cities, because over-population and excessive competition had reduced wages to starvation point; "England was all very well for the rich—let them live in it as they could—but a poor man couldn't, and that was about the size of it."
"But surely you two could live well enough," said Arthur to the country youths.
"Oh, live—yes," said one; "but what is there at the end of it all? Nothing but the workhouse."
"Yes, that's it," said the middle-aged man slowly, "but there's workhouses in the States, too. Don't you be deceiving of yourselves. England ain't no worse than other places."
"And why are you leaving it then, I'd like to know?" said the London youth.
"Because I've had a trouble, young man."
Arthur's heart warmed toward this unwilling exile. The London youth, with his glib denunciation of England, disgusted him; the two country youths could by no stretch of charity be accounted interesting; but this grave, silent man who had "had a trouble" made an instant appeal to his sympathy. He began to talk with him, and little by little drew his history from him. It seemed his name was Vyse; he was a riveter by trade, had worked in the great shipyards of Clydebank, Newcastle, and Belfast, earning excellent wages, and had acquitted himself with industry and honour. Here was a man who had done something tangible and something that endured. Doubtless at that moment the work of his hands was distributed throughout the world; again and again he had stood silent as the vast hull upon which he had toiled trembled on the slips, took the water, and presently disappeared upon the plains of ocean, there to encounter the strangest diversities of fate, to be buffeted by the vast seas of the North Atlantic or the Horn, to be washed with phosphorescent ripples in the heart of the Pacific or among the coral islands of the South Seas, to fight the ice-floes of the Arctic, or sleep upon the waters of the Amazon. Here, thought Arthur, was the very poetry of labour; these disfigured hands held the threads that bound the world together, and round this plain man lay an horizon as wide as the farthest seas. Unconsciously the man's trade had imparted certain elements of largeness to his mind. He spoke of himself and his prospects with a certain plain dignity and confidence. He knew his value to the world; east or west, he was a needed man, one for whom the gate of labour stood wide open.
"I'll find work, never fear," he said. "I'm not like these boys," he added, with a glance at the two stolid country youths and the London clerk, who still strummed his one tune upon the zither. "They think they'll find life easier in America, and that's all they go for. I would think shame upon myself to emigrate upon such a hope as that. I don't hold with folk as run down England. It's my belief that them as runs down their own country won't be of much good in any other country. I tell you I'm sorry enough to leave England, and I wouldn't do it, except that I have a trouble."
Presently it came out what his trouble was. His wife was dead, and his only son had taken to evil ways. The man could have borne the loneliness of loss, but when the boy robbed and insulted him, proving finally intractable, he made up his mind to start life afresh in a new land where his disgrace could not follow him.
"There's years of work in me yet," he said. "But I can't work properly without a peaceful mind. And there's another thing, I've got to pay back what Charlie took from other folk. I couldn't lift my head up if I didn't. That's right, isn't it, sir?"
"Mr. Vyse," said Arthur, "I wish all of us could show as clean a bill of health as you."
The train was running into Southampton. Beside the landing-stage lay the great ship, which was to receive within a few minutes so many histories and destinies. The steerage was already packed with emigrants, many of them Italians, distinguishable by their gay-coloured clothing. Arthur found, to his delight, that Vyse was billeted with him in a four-berth cabin; the two other tenants were an old horse-dealer from the Western States, and a clergyman's son, going out upon a remittance. The cabin was deep down in the bowels of the ship, dark and airless. He hastened from it to the deck, and found himself in the midst of many farewell groups. Among them was the clergyman's son, who stood superciliously smoking a cigar, with his face averted from his father, who pressed upon him final kindnesses and counsels. "All right, father. It's time for you to go, you know," he said sullenly. "May God bless you, my boy!" said the old man. "Oh, I daresay," said the boy indifferently; and it was so they parted. Some one began to sing "Home, Sweet Home," a singularly inappropriate song in such an hour. A woman shrieking for her husband and her two children was put ashore; it seemed the baby in her arms was afflicted with sarcoma, and was expelled the ship. The brown water showed a sudden strake of white; a soft pulse throbbed somewhere beneath the decks; the screw had made the first of those countless revolutions that would not cease for three thousand miles; and the great vessel glided out upon the long path toward the setting sun.
There are few schools in the world where character can be studied at closer quarters, and certain lessons of life learned more rapidly, than on ship-board. The mere contiguity of a great variety of human creatures is itself a lesson in the real values of life. It was, for instance, an admirable incentive to self-reliance for Arthur to find himself for the first time in a position where he was despised. This incentive was administered daily by groups of gentlemen in ulsters and ladies in elaborate travelling-costumes, who gathered at the rail of the deck above like spectators in a gallery, and gazed down with evident commiseration, and sometimes with sarcastic comment, on the second class passengers. Occasionally these groups would leave their lofty gallery and make excursions through the inferior quarters, with the dainty airs of personally-conducted parties investigating slums, commenting openly as they went upon the manners of the lower deck in a spirit of condescending and cheerful vulgarity. The London clerk, with his eternal zither, was much remarked, and appeared proud of the attention he attracted. On the other hand, men like Vyse received these visits in stolid silence, not wholly free from resentment and contempt. "That's what money does," he said bitterly one day, when a group of these excursionists had retired; and Arthur, reflecting on the circumstance, came to see that the old workman was right in his diagnosis, and that it was a diagnosis shameful to human nature. For it was clear that these people owed their eminence neither to manners nor accomplishments; in solid worth and dignity of character Vyse would have been judged their superior in any equitable court; and, taken man for man, it was merely the better coat and not the better breeding that distinguished the upper from the lower deck.
When it came to kindness, which is the flower of all gentility, the virtues of the lower deck were even more strikingly apparent. On the fourth day out stormy weather was encountered; black, foamless seas rolled in perpetual assault from the north-west; there was an hour when the great ship made but five miles; word went round that the lifeboats were cleared and victualled; and the constant noise of hammers audible in the pauses of the tempest was significant of some damage in the iron walls that lay between them and death. It was then that, amid fear and dreadful discomfort, the virtues of the lower deck displayed themselves. Vyse nursed a sick child with the tenderness of a woman; the cattle-dealer spent the day in telling stories, very far from decorous, it must be admitted, to a group of half-frightened lads, who forgot their fears in their laughter; even the London clerk shone conspicuous with his zither and his eternal "Safe in the arms of Jesus." In the dark and narrow alley-ways, pounded by the threshing seas, whose fearful detonations seemed to fill the air with thunder, the clerk found his mission, and trembling voices sang with pathetic desire of conviction the words that express a faith which lifts the soul beyond the terrors of destruction.
"That is what money does," Vyse had said, and the reflection was inevitable that it did very little after all to benefit character, and not a little to emasculate or degrade it. The people with whom Arthur travelled had no monopoly of virtue, as he was bound to admit; the London clerk in his ordinary mood was a creature at once slight and vain, the horse-dealer was coarse; and so he might have gone through the whole list of his acquaintances, remarking plentiful defect in each. But the qualities were more obvious than the defects. There was a general spirit of helpfulness and kindness; many had grievous accusations, only too authentic, to make against the land from which they fled, but these accusations were rarely made in a spirit of bitterness or envy; all had the cardinal grace of courage, and were willing to believe that at the end of a long road of failure and defeat victory awaited them. It was this unquenchable buoyancy of hope in the crowd of fugitives from an unequal battle which struck Arthur as entirely wonderful and, indeed, heroic. There was not one of them unacquainted with failure in some extreme form; not one who had not heard the bugles of retreat on some disastrous field; yet each, after a brief inspection of the ruined architecture of his life, was ready to begin building anew, each believed himself competent for the task, and each had that rarest form of courage which forgets the past. For one reared as he had been, it was a revelation to be made aware of such virtues lying at the base of very ordinary characters, and a revelation for which he thanked God with devout gratitude. It amounted almost to a discovery of human nature. He had known hitherto little more than a human coterie; he had lived in artificial conditions; and he knew the kind of lives that such conditions bred. Now, for the first time, he touched the primeval; he had joined the company of those whose sole defence and worth lay in their authentic manhood, and he dimly saw that what had seemed a fall in life had been an ascent, for the truly ignoble lay, not below him, but above him. Thus insensibly he drew courage from the fortitude of his companions, and caught from them that spirit of adventure which "street-born" men never know—the spirit which has flung forth the Anglo-Saxon race into every quarter of the globe, and has made them the world's great empire-builders.
On the seventh day out the Atlantic storm-belt, with its miserable monotony of vexed and gloomy seas, was left behind. For a wonder there was no fog upon the Banks; the seas were of an indescribable hue of limpid turquoise, the ship seemed to glide across a far-glimmering floor, and the wind had a tonic sweetness and renewing potency. The blood sang in the veins, the eye took a deeper colour, and among all the fugitives of the lower deck there was not one who did not move with a brisker step. Laughter ran along the deck; a child beating a tin cup with a spoon was the object of general admiration; languid faces smiled, and among the women a fresh ribbon on the hair or a glance of innocent coquettishness in the eye marked the advent of a new zest in life.
Arthur stood against a bulk-head, watching with delighted eyes the bright elusive colours of the sea, varying from the clearest bottle-green where the ship's bulk clove the waters to the deepest purple where a cloud drove its shadow like a chariot across the liquid plain. Vyse stood beside him, his rugged face reddened by the fresh wind.
"Looks cheerful, doesn't it?" he remarked. "The sea somehow makes a man think better of himself."
"Yes," said Arthur. "I feel that too. Life seems larger."
"That reminds me of something I wish to say to you," said Vyse. "You and me's been good friends upon the voyage, and if you won't be offended, I'd like to ask you a question."
"You won't offend me. What is it?"
"I've wondered what you might be going to do when you reached New York."
"Well, to tell you the truth, Vyse, I don't know. I have to begin a new life, but I don't in the least know how."
"I guessed something of the sort. Well, what I wanted to say was this. Men as is Englishmen and has travelled together like you and me should stick together, shouldn't they? Now, I'm only a plain man, and you're a gentleman, but maybe I might help you a bit. I'd like to give you my address. A pal of mine gave it me. And if ever you don't know where to go, come to me, and you'll be kindly welcome."
"I believe I shall," said Arthur simply. "And I thank you from my heart."
The kindness of Vyse touched him more deeply than he could say. It was another evidence of that fine courtesy which exists in all simple natures, and he took it as a fresh assurance of that worth of human nature itself which he had discovered on the voyage.
Two days later Fire Island was passed, the long flat shore of Long Island lay like a yellow line drawn across the water, and in the afternoon the screw ceased from its long labour, and the ship lay at rest off Sandy Hook. The harbour with its green bluffs, studded with lawns and white verandahed houses, opened up; the tremendous battlements of New York bulked against the distant skyline; and in the foreground, like a colossal watcher of the gate, strode the Statue of Liberty.
"Look," said Vyse, nudging Arthur's arm and pointing to the bows, where a multitude of emigrants stood at gaze.
And in truth it was a scene not easily forgotten. Yellow-haired Scandinavians, with something of the old Viking stature and clear resoluteness of eye, watched the unfolding scene; Hungarians in embroidered jackets gathered in a separate group; Danes, Germans, and Russians were there, all silent with an emotion which might have been apprehension or anticipation; but in the foreground, the unconscious centre of all eyes, knelt a group of Italian men and women. They were crossing themselves devoutly, their ecstatic eyes raised to the gigantic figure of Liberty with her lamp.
"What are they doing?" said Arthur, and he found himself whispering as though he waited in some dim cathedral for the elevation of the Host.
"They call that there Statue of Liberty the American Madonna, so they tell me," said Vyse.
The reply thrilled him as the whisper of the oracle might have thrilled the worshippers long since beneath the oaks of Dodona. The American Madonna, the calm-faced Mother standing at the gates of empire with impartial welcome, her uplifted torch lighting her new-found children to the path of novel destinies—there was a sacramental virtue in the thought, and it shone through his mind like a heavenly omen.
"Ave Madonna!" cried the kneeling group, each with eyes fixed upon that lofty brow of bronze, as if they expected instantly the face to quicken with a human tenderness, the head to stoop in condescending grace.
Perhaps it did. In that clear and sunny air the face appeared to smile, and from the outstretched hand there came to each humble suppliant the veritable grace of hope.
And then the moment passed; the ship moved on; from a Titanic structure, pierced with many windows, a babel of voices clashed upon the still air, and in another half hour the ship, her long voyage done, swung slowly to her berth.