CHAPTER TWELVETheory and Practice
IT is as a rule (though not always) when men are not under the observation of others, that they most surely reveal themselves. Word and face and gesture are not then the concealment which at other times they may become; and though when a man talks or gesticulates to himself he is often very far from telling the truth, he is generally near to revealing it.
And that, I suppose, is why writers of fiction have so generally taken the impossible liberty of following their characters into places of solitude and the privacy of their own thoughts; and from this godlike vantage-ground have pulled the strings of their puppets, imposing upon the reader a shoddy romanticism which pretends to be science.
But the gods can very seldom gaze into the secrecy of the things they have made, with so omniscient and cocksure a spirit. Between mortal man and his maker there is a remove which sometimes baffles each alike. Free-will, inside a fixed radius of determined environment, creates an obscurity. The outer integument, the limited viewpoint, the competing interests and motives, which go to make up one of those small self-centred individualities called man, are often obstructive to the larger and more serene intelligence which accompanies the spiritual standpoint; and I confess that in his privacy Mr. Trimblerigg used often to puzzle me.
It was seeing the puzzle at work—putting itself elaborately together, then pulling itself to pieces again—which gave me the clearer view; though it remained a puzzle still. But it was something to discover, suddenly and unexpectedly, that Mr. Trimblerigg had a passion forsincerity—towards himself at any rate—which took him to strange lengths; and though I recount what came under my observation, I do not pretend that I am able to explain it.
It was my privilege, more frequently at this particular point of his career than ever before, to see Mr. Trimblerigg take his bath; a function which, so far as his wife and the outside world knew, took place every morning of his life. It is more accurate to say that he went to the bathroom every morning, and that every morning, to anyone who cared to listen, the sounds of a bath being taken came through the door.
Mr. Trimblerigg had committed himself to the bath-habit with characteristic enthusiasm from the day when, with enlarged means, he found himself in a house containing a bathroom. But the house did not—in the first instance at any rate—contain a hot-water system; except on occasions of special preparation the baths remained cold.
But Mr. Trimblerigg’s tenancy began in the summer quarter, when cold baths are almost as much a pleasure as a virtue. He was young, robust, vigorous, a preacher of the strenuous life; and facilities for the daily cold bath having come his way, he first boldly proclaimed his faith, and then got into it.
His faith carried him on, even when colder weather made it a trial; and often it was beautiful to see, after a timid bird-like hovering on the brink, how boldly he would plunge in, and with pantings and rapid spongings cross the rubicon of agony which leads to the healthy glow of a stimulated circulation.
On these occasions he would be very proud of himself, and standing before the glass gaze with approval on theruddy blush which suffused his body and limbs under the hard rubbings of the towel. But a day came when he quailed and could not bring himself to get in at all; for the bath-habit was not in his blood as it is in the blood of those who have had a public-school training. The hill-side-chapel clan from which he sprang bathed only on the day of its baptism, or medicinally at the order of a doctor; and early habit, or the lack of it, counts with people as they grow older. So now there was controversy between Mr. Trimblerigg and his bath.
He tried it first with his hand, then with his foot: then he drew a breath and said ‘Brrrr!’ loudly and resolutely, and continued saying it as he drove the water up and down the bath with his sponge. He splashed it artfully across the wooden splash-board, and down on to the floor; he dipped his feet and made wet marks on the bath-mat, and all the while he spluttered and panted, and at intervals stirred the bath-water to and fro, and round and round with his sponge. Then he stood in front of the glass and rubbed himself hard with his towel until he felt quite warm, until his body glowed with a similar glow to that which followed an actual bathing. And, as he did so, he looked at himself roguishly in the glass; and shaking his head at himself—‘Naughty boy!’ he said.
He was quite frank about it—to himself; and when he had done the same trick several times, as the mornings remained cold, he gave himself what he called ‘a good talking to.’
‘You are getting fat!’ he said, ‘you are getting self-indulgent; you want whipping!’ And so saying he let out at himself two or three quite hard flicks with the towel—flicks that hurt.
It was a new invention for the establishment of pleasant relations between his comic and his moral sense; and when occasion required he repeated it. That little bit of self-discipline always restored his self-esteem, leaving his conscience without a wound; and he would come out of the bathroom feeling as good as gold, and sometimes would even remark to his wife how fresh a really cold bath on a frosty morning made one feel. And she would assent quite pleasantly, only begging him not to overdo it; whereupon he would explain how constant habit hardens a man even to the extremities of water from an iced cistern. And who, to look at her, would have any suspicion that she did not entirely believe him?
But on more than one occasion on very cold mornings, when Mr. Trimblerigg was safely downstairs, I have seen her go into the bathroom and inspect, with a woman’s eye for details: appraise the amount of moisture left in the towel, and various other minute points for the confirmation of her hope that he was not overdoing it. And when she has quite satisfied herself, I have seen her smile and go on down to breakfast, a good contented soul, full of the comfortable assurances wives often have, that though husbands may be clever in their way, to see through them domestically is not difficult.
Later on, when Mr. Trimblerigg moved to a house efficiently supplied with a hot-water system, his baths were taken daily, but they were not always cold ones; and though he still pretended that they were, the modifications were so various and so habitual, that he left off saying ‘naughty boy!’ when he looked at himself in the glass. Also, when he really did begin to become chubby he left off telling himself that he was getting fat. Sometimes hewould look at himself a little sadly, and in order to avoid the moral conclusion that you cannot have the fat things of life without the adipose tissue, preferred to reflect that he was ‘getting middle-aged,’ which was still ten years away from the truth.
But the sadness was only momentary; he had so good an opinion of himself that he was almost always cheerful, and easy to get on with. And if after he had turned thirty he did begin to become a little ball of a man, he kept the ball rolling with energy. The amount of work he could do, and do happily, was phenomenal; and under his stimulus the foreign mission work of the Free Evangelicals grew and flourished.