As he hurried from his brougham through the sombre hall to his study, leaving his secretary far in the rear, he had already composed the first sentence of his address to the United Chambers of Commerce of the Five Towns; his mind was full of it; he sat down at once to his vast desk, impatient to begin dictating. Then it was that he perceived the letter, lodged prominently against the gold and onyx inkstand given to him on his marriage by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The envelope was imperfectly fastened, or not fastened at all, and the flap came apart as he fingered it nervously.
"Dear Cloud,—This is to say good-bye, finally—"
He stopped. Fear took him at the heart, as though he had been suddenly told by a physician that he must submit to an operation endangering his life. And he skipped feverishly over the four pages to the signature, "Yours sincerely, Gertrude."
The secretary entered.
"I must write one or two private letters first," he said to the secretary. "Leave me. I'll ring."
"Yes, sir. Shall I take your overcoat?"
"No, no."
A discreet closing of the door.
"—finally. I can't stand it any longer. Cloud, I'm gone to Italy. I shall use the villa at Florence, and trust you to leave me alone. You must tell our friends. You can start with the Bargraves to-night. I'm sure they'll agree with me it's for the best—"
It seemed to him that this letter was very like the sort of letter that gets read in the Divorce Court and printed in the papers afterwards; and he felt sick.
"—for the best. Everybody will know in a day or two, and then in another day or two the affair will be forgotten. It's difficult to write naturally under the circumstances, so all I'll say is that we aren't suited to each other, Cloud. Ten years of marriage has amply proved that, though I knew it six—seven—years ago. You haven't guessed that you've been killing me all these years; but it is so—"
Killing her! He flushed with anger, with indignation, with innocence, with guilt—with Heaven knew what!
"—it is so.You'vebeen livingyourlife. But what about me? In five more years I shall be old, and I haven't begun to live. I can'tstandit any longer. I can't stand this awful Five Towns district—"
Had he not urged her many a time to run up to South Audley Street for a change, and leave him to continue his work? Nobody wanted her to be always in Staffordshire!
"—and I can't standyou. That's the brutal truth. You've got on my nerves, my poor boy, with your hurry, and your philanthropy, and your commerce, and your seriousness. My poor nerves! And you've been too busy to notice it. You fancied I should be content if you made love to me absent-mindedly,en passant, between a political dinner and a bishop's breakfast."
He flinched. She had stung him.
"I sting you—"
No! And he straightened himself, biting his lips!
"—I sting you! I'm rude! I'm inexcusable! People don't say these things, not even hysterical wives to impeccable husbands, eh? I admit it. But I was bound to tell you. You're a serious person, Cloud, and I'm not. Still, we were both born as we are, and I've just as much right to be unserious as you have to be serious. That's what you've never realized. You aren't better than me; you're only different from me. It is unfortunate that there are some aspects of the truth that you are incapable of grasping. However, after this morning's scene—"
Scene? What scene? He remembered no scene, except that he had asked her not to interrupt him while he was reading his letters, had asked her quite politely, and she had left the breakfast-table. He thought she had left because she had finished. He hadn't a notion—what nonsense!
"—this morning's scene, I decided not to 'interrupt' you any more—"
Yes. There was the word he had used—how childish she was!
"—any more in the contemplation of those aspects of the truth which youarecapable of grasping. Good-bye! You're an honest man, and a straight man, and very conscientious, and very clever, and I expect you're doing a lot of good in the world. But your responsibilities are too much for you. I relieve you of one, quite a minor one—your wife. You don't want a wife. What you want is a doll that you can wind up once a fortnight to say 'Good-morning, dear,' and 'Good-night, dear.' I think I can manage without a husband for a very long time. I'm not so bitter as you might guess from this letter, Cloud. But I want you thoroughly to comprehend that it's finished between us. You can do what you like. People can say what they like. I've had enough. I'll pay any price for freedom. Good luck. Best wishes. I would write this letter afresh if I thought I could do a better one.—Yours sincerely, Gertrude."
He dropped the letter, picked it up and read it again and then folded it in his accustomed tidy manner and replaced it in the envelope. He sat down and propped the letter against the inkstand and stared at the address in her careless hand: "The Right Honourable Sir Cloud Malpas, Baronet." She had written the address in full like that as a last stroke of sarcasm. And she had not even put "Private."
He was dizzy, nearly stunned; his head rang.
Then he rose and went to the window. The high hill on which stood Malpas Manor—the famous Rat Edge—fell away gradually to the south, and in the distance below him, miles off, the black smoke of the Five Towns loomed above the yellow fires of blast-furnaces. He was the demi-god of the district, a greater landowner than even the Earl of Chell, a model landlord, a model employer of four thousand men, a model proprietor of seven pits and two iron foundries, a philanthropist, a religionist, the ornamental mayor of Knype, chairman of a Board of Guardians, governor of hospitals, president of Football Association—in short, Sir Cloud, son of Sir Cloud and grandson of Sir Cloud.
He stared dreamily at his dominion. Scandal, then, was to touch him with her smirching finger, him the spotless! Gertrude had fled. He had ruined Gertrude's life! Had he? With his heavy and severe conscientiousness he asked himself whether he was to blame in her regard. Yes, he thought he was to blame. It stood to reason that he was to blame. Women, especially such as Gertrude, proud, passionate, reserved, don't do these things for nothing.
With a sigh he passed into his dressing-room and dropped on to a sofa.
She would be inflexible—he knew her. His mind dwelt on the beautiful first days of their marriage, the tenderness and the dream! And now—!
He heard footsteps in the study; the door was opened! It was Gertrude! He could see her in the dusk. She had returned! Why? She tripped to the desk, leaned forward and snatched at the letter. Evidently she did not know that he was in the house and had read it.
The tension was too painful. A sigh broke from him, as it were of physical torture.
"Who's there?" she cried, in a startled voice. "Is that you, Cloud?"
"Yes," he breathed.
"But you're home very early!" Her voice shook.
"I'm not well, Gertrude," he replied. "I'm tired. I came in here to lie down. Can't you do something for my head? I must have a holiday."
He heard her crunch up the letter, and then she hastened to him in the dressing-room.
"My poor Cloud!" she said, bending over him in the mature elegance of her thirty years. He noticed her travelling costume. "Some eau de Cologne?"
He nodded weakly.
"We'll go away for a holiday," he said, later, as she bathed his forehead.
The touch of her hands on his temples reminded him of forgotten caresses. And he did really feel as though, within a quarter of an hour, he had been through a long and dreadful illness and was now convalescent.
"Then you think that after starting she thought better of it?" said Lord Bargrave after dinner that night. "And came back?"
Lord Bargrave was Gertrude's cousin, and he and his wife sometimes came over from Shropshire for a week-end. He sat with Sir Cloud in the smoking-room; a man with greying hair and a youngish, equable face.
"Yes, Harry, that was it. You see, I'd just happened to put the letter exactly where I found it. She's no notion that I've seen it."
"She's a thundering good actress!" observed Lord Bargrave, sipping some whisky. "I knew something was up at dinner, but I didn't know it fromher: I knew it from you."
Sir Cloud smiled sadly.
"Well, you see, I'm supposed to be ill—at least, to be not well."
"You'd best take her away at once," said Lord Bargrave. "And don't do it clumsily. Say you'll go away for a few days, and then gradually lengthen it out. She mentioned Italy, you say. Well, let it be Italy. Clear out for six months."
"But my work here?"
"D—n your work here!" said Lord Bargrave. "Do you suppose you're indispensable here? Do you suppose the Five Towns can't manage without you? Our caste is decayed, my boy, and silly fools like you try to lengthen out the miserable last days of its importance by giving yourselves airs in industrial districts! Your conscience tells you that what the demagogues say is true—wearerotters on the face of the earth, wearemediæval; and you try to drown your conscience in the noise of philanthropic speeches. There isn't a sensible working-man in the Five Towns who doesn't, at the bottom of his heart, assess you at your true value—as nothing but a man with a hobby, and plenty of time and money to ride it."
"I do not agree with you," Sir Cloud said stiffly.
"Yes, you do," said Lord Bargrave. "At the same time I admire you, Cloud. I'm not built the same way myself, but I admire you—except in the matter of Gertrude. There you've been wrong—of course from the highest motives: which makes it all the worse. A man oughtn't to put hobbies above the wife of his bosom. And, besides, she's one ofus. So take her away and stay away and make love to her."
"Suppose I do? Suppose I try? I must tell her!"
"Tell her what?"
"That I read the letter. I acted a lie to her this afternoon. I can't let that lie stand between us. It would not be right."
Lord Bargrave sprang up.
"Cloud," he cried. "For heaven's sake, don't be an infernal ass. Here you've escaped a domestic catastrophe of the first magnitude by a miracle. You've made a sort of peace with Gertrude. She's come to her senses. And now you want to mess up the whole show by the act of an idiot! What if you did act a lie to her this afternoon? A very good thing! The most sensible thing you've done for years! Let the lie stand between you. Look at it carefully every morning when you awake. It will help you to avoid repeating in the future the high-minded errors of the past. See?"
And in Lady Bargrave's dressing-room that night Gertrude was confiding in Lady Bargrave.
"Yes," she said, "Cloud must have come in within five minutes of my leaving—two hours earlier than he was expected. Fortunately he went straight to his dressing-room. Or was it unfortunately? I was half-way to the station when it occurred to me that I hadn't fastened the envelope! You see, I was naturally in an awfully nervous state, Minnie. So I told Collins to turn back. Fuge, our new butler, is of an extremely curious disposition, and I couldn't bear the idea of him prying about and perhaps reading that letter before Cloud got it. And just as I was picking up the letter to fasten it I heard Cloud in the next room. Oh! I never felt so queer in all my life! The poor boy was quite unwell. I screwed up the letter and went to him. What else could I do? And really he was so tired and white—well, it moved me! It moved me. And when he spoke about going away I suddenly thought: 'Why not try to make a new start with him?' After all ..."
There was a pause.
"What did you say in the letter?" Lady Bargrave demanded. "How did you put it?"
"I'll read it to you," said Gertrude, and she took the letter from her corsage and began to read it. She got as far as "I can't stand this awful Five Towns district," and then she stopped.
"Well, go on," Lady Bargrave encouraged her.
"No," said Gertrude, and she put the letter in the fire. "The fact is," she said, going to Lady Bargrave's chair, "it was too cruel. I hadn't realized.... I must have been very worked-up.... One does work oneself up.... Things seem a little different now...." She glanced at her companion.
"Why, Gertrude, you're crying, dearest!"
"What a chance it was!" murmured Gertrude, in her tears. "What a chance! Because, you know, if hehadonce read it I would never have gone back on it. I'm that sort of woman. But as it is, there's a sort of hope of a sort of happiness, isn't there?"
"Gertrude!" It was Sir Cloud's voice, gentle and tender, outside the door.
"Mercy on us!" exclaimed Lady Bargrave. "It's half-past one. Bargrave will have been asleep long since."
Gertrude kissed her in silence, opened the door, and left her.
When I was dying I had no fear. I was simply indifferent, partly, no doubt, through exhaustion caused by my long illness. It was a warm evening in August. We ought to have been at Blackpool, of course, but we were in my house in Trafalgar Road, and the tramcars between Hanley and Bursley were shaking the house just as usual. Perhaps not quite as usual; for during my illness I had noticed that a sort of tiredness, a soft, nice feeling, seems to come over everything at sunset of a hot summer's day. This universal change affected even the tramcars, so that they rolled up and down the hill more gently. Or it may have been merely my imagination. Through the open windows I could see, dimly, the smoke of the Cauldon Bar Iron Works slowly crossing the sky in front of the sunset. Margaret sat in my grandfather's oak chair by the gas-stove. There was only Margaret, besides the servant, in the house; the nurse had been obliged to go back to Pirehill Infirmary for the night. I don't know why. Moreover, it didn't matter.
I began running my extraordinarily white fingers along the edge of the sheet. I was doing this quite mechanically when I noticed a look of alarm in Margaret's face, and I vaguely remembered that playing with the edge of the sheet was supposed to be a trick of the dying. So I stopped, more for Margaret's sake than for anything else. I could not move my head much, in fact scarcely at all; hence it was difficult for me to keep my eyes on objects that were not in my line of vision as I lay straight on my pillows. Thus my eyes soon left Margaret's. I forgot her. I thought about nothing. Then she came over to the bed, and looked at me, and I smiled at her, very feebly. She smiled in return. She appeared to me to be exceedingly strong and healthy. Six weeks before I had been the strong and healthy one—I was in my prime, forty, and had a tremendous appetite for business—and I had always regarded her as fragile and delicate; and now she could have crushed me without effort! I had an unreasonable, instinctive feeling of shame at being so weak compared to her. I knew that I was leaving her badly off; we were both good spenders, and all my spare profits had gone into the manufactory; but I did not trouble about that. I was almost quite callous about that. I thought to myself, in a confused way: "Anyhow, I shan't be here to see it, and she'll worry through somehow!" Nor did I object to dying. It may be imagined that I resented death at so early an age, and being cut off in my career, and prevented from getting the full benefit of the new china-firing oven that I had patented. Not at all! It may be imagined that I was preoccupied with a future life, and thinking that possibly we had given up going to chapel without sufficient reason. No! I just lay there, submitting like a person without will or desires to the nursing of my wife, which was all of it accurately timed by the clock.
I just lay there and watched the gradual changing of the sky, and, faintly, heard clocks striking and the quiet swish of my wife's dress. Once my ear would have caught the ticking of our black marble clock on the mantelpiece; but not now—it was lost to me. I watched the gradual changing of the sky, until the blue of the sky had darkened so that the blackness of the smoke was merged in it. But to the left there appeared a faint reddish glare, which showed where the furnaces were; this glare had been invisible in daylight. I watched all that, and I waited patiently for the last trace of silver to vanish from a high part of the sky above where the sunset had been—and it would not. I would shut my eyes for an age, and then open them again, and the silver was always in the sky. The cars kept rumbling up the hill and bumping down the hill. And there was still that soft, languid feeling over everything. And all the heat of the day remained. Sometimes a waft of hot air moved the white curtains. Margaret ate something off a plate. The servant stole in. Margaret gave a gesture as though to indicate that I was asleep. But I was not asleep. The servant went off. Twice I restrained my thin, moist hands from playing with the edge of the sheet. Then I closed my eyes with a kind of definite closing, as if finally admitting that I was too exhausted to keep them open.
Difficult to describe my next conscious sensations, when I found I was not in the bed! I have never described them before. You will understand why I've never described them to my wife. I meant never to describe them to anyone. But as you came all the way from London, Mr Myers, and seem to understand all this sort of thing, I've made up my mind to tell you for what it's worth. Yes, what you say about the difficulty of sticking to the exact truth is quite correct. I feel it. Still, I don't think I over-flatter myself in saying that I am a more than ordinarily truthful man.
Well, I was looking at the bed. I was not in the bed. I can't be precisely sure where I was standing, but I think it was between the two windows, half behind the crimson curtains. Anyhow, I must have been near the windows, or I couldn't have seen the foot of the bed and the couch that is there. I could most distinctly hear Cauldon Church clock, more than two miles away, strike two. I was cold. Margaret was leaning over the bed, and staring at a face that lay on the pillows. At first it did not occur to me that this face on the pillows was my face. I had to reason out that fact. When I had reasoned it out I tried to speak to Margaret and tell her that she was making a mistake, gazing at that thing there on the pillows, and that the real one was standing in the cold by the windows. I could not speak. Then I tried to attract her attention in other ways; but I could do nothing. Once she turned sharply, as if startled, and looked straight at me. I strove more frantically than ever to make signs to her; but no, I could not. Seemingly she did not see.
Then I thought: "I'm dead! This is being dead! I've died!"
Margaret ran to the dressing-table and picked up her hand-mirror. She rubbed it carefully on the counterpane, and then held it to the mouth and nostrils of that face on the pillows, and then examined it under the gas. She was very agitated; the whole of her demeanour had changed; I scarcely recognized her. I could not help thinking that she was mad. She put down the mirror, glanced at the clock, even glanced out of the window (she was much closer to me than I am now to you), and then flew back to the bed. She seized the scissors that were hanging from her girdle, and cut a hole in the top pillow, and drew from it a flock of down, which she carefully placed on the lips of that face. The down did not even tremble. Then she bared the breast of the body on the bed, and laid her ear upon the region of the heart; I could see her eyes blinking as she listened intensely. After she had listened some time she raised her head, with a little sob, and frantically pulled the bell-rope. I could hear the bell; we could both hear it. There was no response; nothing but a fearful silence. Margaret, catching her breath, rushed out of the room. I was sick with the most awful disgust that I could not force her to see where I was. I had been helpless before, when I lay in the bed, but I was far more completely helpless now. Talk about the babe unborn!
She came back with the servant, and the two women stood on either side of the bed, gazing at that body. The servant whispered:
"They do say that if you put a full glass of water on the chest you can tell for sure."
Margaret hesitated. However, the servant began to fill a glass of water on the washstand, and they poised it on the chest of that body. Not the slightest vibration troubled its surface. I was—not angry; no, tremendously disgusted is the only term I can use—at all this flummery with that body on the bed. It was shocking to me that they should confuse that body with me. I thought them silly, wilfully silly. I thought their behaviour monstrously blind. There was I, the master of the house, standing chilled between the windows, and neither Margaret nor the servant would take the least notice of me!
The servant said:
"I'd better run for the doctor, ma'am." And she lifted off the glass.
"What use can the doctor be?" Margaret asked. "Only spoil the poor man's night for nothing. And he's had a lot of bad nights lately. He told me to be—prepared."
The servant said:
"Yes, mum.. But I'd better run for him. That's what doctors is for."
As soon as the front-door banged on the excited servant, my wife fell on that body with a loud cry, and stroked it passionately, and I could see her tears dropping on it. She wept without any restraint. She loved me very much; I knew that. But the fact that she loved me only increased my horror that she should be caressing that body, which was not me at all, which had nothing whatever to do with me, which was loathsome, vile, and as insensible as a log to the expressions of her love. She was not weeping over me. She was weeping over an abomination. She was all wrong, all tragically wrong, and I could not set her right. Her woe desolated me. We had been happy together for sixteen years. Her error desolated me, as a painful farce. But a slow, horrible change in my own consciousness made me forget her grief in my own increasing misery.
I do not suppose that the feeling which came over me is capable of being described in human language. It can only be hinted at, not truly conveyed. If I say that I was utterly overcome by the sensation of beingcut off from everything, I shall perhaps not impress you very much with a notion of my terror. But I do not see how I can better express myself. No one who has not been through what I have been through—it is a pretty awful thought that all who die do probably go through it—can possibly understand the feeling of acute and frightful loneliness that possessed me as I stood near the windows, that wrapped me up and enveloped me, as it were, in an icy sheet. A few people in England are possibly in my case—they havebeen, and they have returned, like me. They will understand, and only they. I was solitary in the universe. I was invisible, and I was forgotten. There was my poor wife lavishing her immense sorrow on that body on the bed, which had ceased to have any connection with me, which was emphatically not me, and to which I felt the strongest repugnance. I was even jealous of that lifeless, unresponsive, decaying mass. You cannot guess how I tried to yell to my wife to come to me and warm me with her companionship and her sympathy—and I could accomplish nothing, not the faintest whisper.
I had no home, no shelter, no place in the world, no share in life. I was cast out. The changeless purposes of nature had ejected me from humanity. It was as though humanity had been a fortified city and the gates had been shut on me, and I was wandering round and round the unscalable smooth walls, and beating against their stone with my hands. That is a good simile, except that I could not move. Of course if I could have moved I should have gone to my wife. But I could not move. To be quite exact, I could move very slightly, perhaps about an inch or two inches, and in any direction, up or down, to left or right, backwards or forwards; this by a great straining, fatiguing effort. I was stuck there on the surface of the world, desolate and undone. It was the most cruel situation that you can imagine; far worse, I think, than any conceivable physical torture. I am perfectly sure that I would have exchanged my state, then, for the state of no matter what human being, the most agonized martyr, the foulest criminal. I would have given anything, made any sacrifice, to be once more within the human pale, to feel once more that human life was not going on without me.
There was a knocking below. My wife left that body on the bed, and came to the window and put her head out into the nocturnal, gas-lit silence of Trafalgar Road. She was within a foot of me—and I could do nothing.
She whispered: "Is that you, Mary?"
The voice of the servant came: "Yes, mum. The doctor's been called away to a case. He's not likely to be back before five o'clock."
My wife said, with sad indifference: "It doesn't matter now. I'll let you in."
She went from the room. I heard the opening and shutting of the door. Then both women returned into the room, and talked in low voices.
My wife said: "As soon as it's light you must ..." She stopped and corrected herself. "No, the nurse will be back at seven o'clock. She said she would. She will attend to all that. Mary, go and get a little rest, if you can."
"Aren't you going to put the pennies on his eyes, mum?" the servant asked.
"Ought I?" said my wife. "I don't know much about these things."
"Oh, yes, mum. And tie his jaw up," the servant said.
Hiseyes!Hisjaw! I was terribly angry, in my desolation. But it was a futile anger, though it raged through me like a storm. Could they not understand, would they never understand, that they were grotesquely deceived? How much longer would they continue to fuss over that body on the bed while I,I, the person whom they were supposed to be sorry for, suffered and trembled in dire need just behind them?
A ridiculous bother over pennies! There was only one penny in the house, they decided, after searching. I knew the exact whereabouts of two shillings worth of copper, rolled in paper in my desk in the dining-room. It had been there for many weeks; I had brought it home one day from the works. But they did not know. I wanted to tell them, so as to end the awful exacerbation of my nerves. But of course I could not. In spite of Mary's superstitious protest, my wife put a penny on one eye and half-a-crown on the other. Mary seemed to regard this as a desecration, or at best as unlucky. Then they bound up the jaw of that body with one of my handkerchiefs. I thought I had never seen anything more wantonly absurd. Their trouble in straightening the arms—the legs were quite straight—infuriated me. I wanted to weep in my tragic vexation. It seemed as though tears would ease me. But I could not weep.
The servant said: "You'd better come away now, mum, and rest on the sofa in the drawing-room."
Margaret, with red-bordered, glittering eyes, answered, staring all the while at that body: "No, Mary. It's no use. I can't leave him. I won't leave him!"
But she wasn't thinking about me at all. There I was, neglected and shivering, near the windows; and she would not look at me!
After an interminable palaver Margaret induced the servant to leave the room. And she sat down on the chair nearest the bed, and began to cry again, not troubling to wipe her eyes. She sobbed, more and more loudly, and kept touching that body. She seized my gold watch, which hung over the bed, and which she wound up every night, and kissed it and put it back. Her sobs continued to increase. Then the door opened quietly, and the servant, half-undressed, crept in, and without saying a word gently led Margaret out of the room. Margaret's last glance was at that body. In a moment the servant returned and extinguished the gas, and departed again, very carefully closing the door. I was now utterly abandoned.
All that had happened to me up to now was strange; but what followed was still more strange and still less capable of being described in human language.
I became aware that I was gradually losing the sensation of being cut off from intercourse, at any-rate that the sensation was losing its painfulness. I didn't seem to care, now, whether I was neglected or not. And to be cast out from humanity grew into a matter of indifference to me. I became aware, too, of the approach of a mysterious freedom. I was not free, I could still move only an inch or so in any direction; but I felt that a process of dissolving of bonds had begun. What manner of bonds? I don't know. I felt—that was all. My indifference slowly passed into a sad and deep pity for the world. The world seemed to me so pathetic, so awry, so obstinate in its honest illusions, so silly in its dishonest pretences. "Have I been content withthat?" I thought, staggered. And I was sorry for what I had been. I perceived that the ideals of my life were tawdry, that even the best were poor little things. And I perceived that it was the same with everyone, and that even the greatest men, those men that I had so profoundly admired as of another clay than mine, were as like the worst as one sheep was like another sheep. Weep—because nature had ejected me from that petty little world, with its ridiculous and conceited wrongness? What an idea! Why, I said to myself, that world spends nearly the whole of its time in moving physical things from one place to another. Change the position of matter—that is all it does, all it thinks of. I remembered a statesman who had referred to the London and North-Western Railway as being one of the glories of England! Parcels! Parcels! Parcels, human, brute, insensate! Nothing but parcel-moving! I smiled. And then I perceived that I could understand and solve problems which had defied thousands of years of human philosophy, problems which we on earth called fundamental. And lo! They were not in the least fundamental, but were trifles, as simple as Euclid. It was surprising that the solution of them had not presented itself to me before! I thought: With one word, one single word, I could enlighten the human race beyond all that it has ever learned. Feeble-bodied, feeble-minded humanity!
And then I had a glimpse.... I was in the bedroom, near the windows, all the time, but nevertheless I was nowhere, nowhere in space. I could feel the roll of the earth as it turned lumberingly on its axis—a faint shaking which did not affect me. Still, I was in the bedroom, near the windows. And I had a glimpse.... The heralds of a new vitality swept trumpeting through me, and a calm, intense, ineffable joy followed in their train. I had a glimpse.... And my eyes were not dazzled. I yearned and strained towards what I saw, towards the exceeding brightness of undreamt companionships, hopes, perceptions, activities, and sorrows. Yes, sorrows! But what noble sorrows they were that I felt awaited me there! I strained at my mysterious bonds. It seemed that they were about to break and that I should be winged away into other dimensions....
And then, I knew that they were tightening again, and the brightness very slowly faded, and I lost faith in the gift of vision which momentarily had enabled me to see the illusions and the littleness of the world. And I was slowly, slowly drawn away from the window.... And then I felt heavy weights on my eyes, and I could not move my jaw. I shuddered convulsively, and a coin struck the floor and ran till it fell flat. And the door swiftly opened....
Yes, my whole character is changed, within; though externally it may seem the same. Externally I may seem to have resumed the affections and the interests which occupied me before my illness and my remarkable recovery. Yet I am different. Certainly I have lost again the strange transcendental knowledge which was mine for a few instants. Certainly I have descended again to the earthly level. All those magic things have slipped away, except hope. In a sure hope, in a positive faith, I am waiting. I am waiting for all that magic to happen to me again. I know that the pain of loneliness, when again I shall see my own body from the outside, will be exquisite, but—the reward! The reward! That is what is always at the back of my mind, the source of the calm joy in which I wait. Externally I am the successful earthenware manufacturer, happily married, getting rich on a china-firing oven, employing a couple of hundred workmen, etcetera, who was once given up for dead. But I am more than that. I have seen God.
Note:
[A]
Some years ago the editor ofBlack and Whitecommissioned me to write a story for his Christmas Number. I wrote this story. He expressed a deep personal admiration for it, but said positively that he would not dare to offer it to his readers. I withdrew the story, and gave him instead a frolic tale about a dentist. (Seepage 136.) Afterwards, I was glad that I had withdrawn the story, for I perceived that its theme could only be treated adequately in a novel, I accordingly wrote the novel, which was duly published under the same title.—A.B.
Some years ago the editor ofBlack and Whitecommissioned me to write a story for his Christmas Number. I wrote this story. He expressed a deep personal admiration for it, but said positively that he would not dare to offer it to his readers. I withdrew the story, and gave him instead a frolic tale about a dentist. (Seepage 136.) Afterwards, I was glad that I had withdrawn the story, for I perceived that its theme could only be treated adequately in a novel, I accordingly wrote the novel, which was duly published under the same title.—A.B.
All this happened at a Martinmas Fair in Bursley, long ago in the fifties, when everybody throughout the Five Towns pronounced Bursley "Bosley" as a matter of course; in the tedious and tragic old times, before it had been discovered that hell was a myth, and before the invention of pleasure or even of half-holidays. Martinmas was in those days a very important moment in the annual life of the town, for it was at Martinmas that potters' wages were fixed for twelve months ahead, and potters hired themselves out for that term at the best rate they could get. Even to the present day the housewives reckon chronology by Martinmas. They say, "It'll be seven years come Martinmas that Sal's babby died o' convulsions." Or, "It was that year as it rained and hailed all Martinmas." And many of them have no idea why it is Martinmas, and not Midsummer or Whitsun, that is always on the tips of their tongues.
The Fair was one of the two great drunken sprees of the year, the other being the Wakes. And it was meet that it should be so, for intoxication was a powerful aid to the signing of contracts. A sot would put his name to anything, gloriously; and when he had signed he had signed. Thus the beaver-hatted employers smiled at Martinmas drunkenness, and smacked it familiarly on the back; and little boys swilled themselves into the gutter with their elders, and felt intensely proud of the feat. These heroic old times have gone by, never to return.
It was on the Friday before Martinmas, at dusk. In the centre of the town, on the waste ground to the north of the "Shambles" (as the stone-built meat market was called), and in the space between the Shambles and the as yet unfinished new Town Hall, the showmen and the showgirls and the showboys were titivating their booths, and cooking their teas, and watering their horses, and polishing the brass rails of their vans, and brushing their fancy costumes, and hammering fresh tent-pegs into the hard ground, and lighting the first flares of the evening, and yarning, and quarrelling, and washing—all under the sombre purple sky, for the diversion of a small crowd of loafers, big and little, who stood obstinately with their hands in their pockets or in their sleeves, missing naught of the promising spectacle.
Now, in the midst of what in less than twenty-four hours would be the Fair, was to be seen a strange and piquant sight—namely, a group of three white-tied, broad-brimmed dissenting ministers in earnest converse with fat Mr Snaggs, the proprietor of Snaggs's—Snaggs's being the town theatre, a wooden erection, generally called by patrons the "Blood Tub," on account of its sanguinary programmes. On this occasion Mr Snaggs and the dissenting ministers were for once in a way agreed. They all objected to a certain feature of the Fair. It was not the roundabouts, so crude that even an infant of to-day would despise them. It was not the shooting-galleries, nor the cocoanut shies. It was not the arrangements of the beersellers, which were formidably Bacchic. It was not the boxing-booths, where adventurous youths could have teeth knocked out and eyes smashed in free of charge. It was not the monstrosity-booths, where misshapen and maimed creatures of both sexes were displayed all alive and nearly nude to anybody with a penny to spare. What Mr Snaggs and the ministers of religion objected to was the theatre-booths, in which the mirror, more or less cracked and tarnished, was held up to nature.
Mr Snaggs's objection was professional. He considered that he alone was authorized to purvey drama to the town; he considered that among all purveyors of drama he alone was respectable, the rest being upstarts, poachers, and lewd fellows. And as the dissenting ministers gazed at Mr Snaggs's superb moleskin waistcoat, and listened to his positive brazen voice, they were almost convinced that the hated institution of the theatre could be made respectable and that Mr Snaggs had so made it. At any rate, by comparison with these flashy and flimsy booths, the Blood Tub, rooted in the antiquity of thirty years, had a dignified, even a reputable air—and did not Mr Snaggs give frequent performances of Cruickshanks'The Bottle, a sermon against intemperance more impressive than any sermon delivered from a pulpit in a chapel? The dissenting ministers listened with deference as Mr Snaggs explained to them exactly what they ought to have done, and what they had failed to do, in order to ensure the success of their campaign against play-acting in the Fair; a campaign which now for several years past had been abortive—largely (it was rumoured) owing to the secret jealousy of the Church of England.
"If ony on ye had had any gumption," Mr Snaggs was saying fearlessly to the parsons, "ye'd ha' gone straight to th' Chief Bailiff and ye'd ha'—Houch!" He made the peculiar exclamatory noise roughly indicated by the last word, and spat in disgust; and without the slightest ceremony of adieu walked ponderously away up the slope, leaving his sentence unfinished.
"It is remarkable how Mr Snaggs flees from before my face," said a neat, alert, pleasant voice from behind the three parsons. "And yet save that in my unregenerate day I once knocked him off a stool in front of his own theayter, I never did him harm nor wished him anything but good.... Gentlemen!"
A rather small, slight man of about forty, with tiny feet and hands, and "very quick on his pins," saluted the three parsons gravely.
"Mr Smith!" one parson stiffly inclined.
"Mr Smith!" from the second.
"Brother Smith!" from the third, who was Jock Smith's own parson, being in charge of the Bethesda in Trafalgar Road where Jock Smith worshipped and where he had recently begun to preach as a local preacher.
Jock Smith, herbalist, shook hands with vivacity but also with self-consciousness. He was self-conscious because he knew himself to be one of the chief characters and attractions of the town, because he was well aware that wherever he went people stared at him and pointed him out to each other. And he was half proud and half ashamed of his notoriety.
Even now a little band of ragged children had wandered after him, and, undeterred by the presence of the parsons, were repeating among themselves, in a low audacious monotone:
"Jock-at-a-Venture! Jock-at-a-Venture!"
He was the youngest of fourteen children, and when he was a month old his mother took him to church to be christened. The rector was the celebrated Rappey, sportsman, who (it is said) once pawned the church Bible in order to get up a bear-baiting. Rappey asked the name of the child, and was told by the mother that she had come to the end of her knowledge of names, and would be obliged for a suggestion. Whereupon Rappey began to cite all the most ludicrous names in the Bible, such as Aholibamah, Kenaz, Iram, Baalhanan, Abiasaph, Amram, Mushi, Libni, Nepheg, Abihu. And the mother laughed, shaking her head. And Rappey went on: Shimi, Carmi, Jochebed. And at Jochebed the mother became hysterical with laughter. "Jock-at-a-Venture," she had sniggered, and Rappey, mischievously taking her at her word, christened the infant Jock-at-a-Venture before she could protest; and the infant was stamped for ever as peculiar.
He lived up to his name. He ran away twice, and after having been both a sailor and a soldier, he returned home with the accomplishment of flourishing a razor, and settled in Bursley as a barber. Immediately he became the most notorious barber in the Five Towns, on account of his gab and his fisticuffs. It was he who shaved the left side of the face of an insulting lieutenant of dragoons (after the great riots of '45, which two thousand military had not quelled), and then pitched him out of the shop, soapsuds and all, and fought him to a finish in the Cock Yard and flung him through the archway into the market-place with just half a magnificent beard and moustache. It was he who introduced hair-dyeing into Bursley. Hair-dyeing might have grown popular in the town if one night, owing to some confusion with red ink, the Chairman of the Bursley Burial Board had not emerged from Jock-at-a-Venture's with a vermilion top-knot and been greeted on the pavement by his waiting wife with the bitter words: "Thou foo!"
A little later Jock-at-a-Venture abandoned barbering and took up music, for which he had always shown a mighty gift. He was really musical and performed on both the piano and the cornet, not merely with his hands and mouth, but with the whole of his agile expressive body. He made a good living out of public-houses and tea-meetings, for none could play the piano like Jock, were it hymns or were it jigs. His cornet was employed in a band at Moorthorne, the mining village to the east of Bursley, and on his nocturnal journeys to and from Moorthorne with the beloved instrument he had had many a set-to with the marauding colliers who made the road dangerous for cowards. One result of this connection with Moorthorne was that a boxing club had been formed in Bursley, with Jock as chief, for the upholding of Bursley's honour against visiting Moorthorne colliers in Bursley's market-place.
Then came Jock's conversion to religion, a blazing affair, and his abandonment of public-houses. As tea-meetings alone would not keep him, he had started again in life, for the fifth or sixth time—as a herbalist now. It was a vocation which suited his delicate hands and his enthusiasm for humanity. At last, and quite lately, he had risen to be a local preacher. His first two sermons had impassioned the congregations, though there were critics to accuse him of theatricality. Accidents happened to him sometimes. On this very afternoon of the Friday before Martinmas an accident had happened to him. He had been playing the piano at the rehearsal of the Grand Annual Evening Concert of the Bursley Male Glee-Singers. The Bursley Male Glee-Singers, determined to beat records, had got a soprano with a foreign name down from Manchester. On seeing the shabby perky little man who was to accompany her songs the soprano had had a moment of terrible misgiving. But as soon as Jock, with a careful-careless glance at the music, which he had never seen before, had played the first chords (with a "How's that for time, missis?"), she was reassured. At the end of the song her enthusiasm for the musical gifts of the local artist was such that she had sprung from the platform and simply but cordially kissed him. She was a stout, feverish lady. He liked a lady to be stout; and the kiss was pleasant and the compliment enormous. But what a calamity for a local preacher with a naughty past to be kissed in full rehearsal by a soprano from Manchester! He knew that he had to live that kiss down, and to live down also the charge of theatricality.
Here was a reason, and a very good one, why he deliberately sought the company of parsons in the middle of the Fair-ground. He had to protect himself against tongues.