Victor Stowell had been more than a week in London. Fortune had
favoured him from the first. The Home Secretary (a tall, spare,
elderly man, with a clean-shaven face of rather severe expression)
rose when Stowell entered his room as if a spirit had appeared before
him. "My youth again," the young man thought, but it was a different
matter this time.
"Has anybody ever told you that you resemble your father, Mr.
Stowell?"
It turned out that the old Deemster and the Home Secretary (a
barrister before he became a statesman) had been in chambers together
in the Middle Temple while reading for the bar, and that the
politician had never lost respect for the man who, in spite of
brilliant promise of success in England (he might have become an
English High Court Judge with six times his Manx salary), had
returned to the obscurity of his little island and the service of his
own people.
"You have high traditions to live up to, young man. Sit down."
Then came the subject of the interview. The authorities had
satisfied themselves that on the score of legal capacity the
Governor's recommendation was not unjustified. The only serious
difficulty was Stowell's youth. The principles on which the Crown
selected elderly and even old (sometimes very old) men for the
positions of Judges were simple and sound. First, seniority of
service, and next, maturity of character, so as to avoid the dangers
that come from the temptations, the trials, even the turbulent
emotions of early life, which might easily conflict with the calm of
the judicial office. Still, these principles could be too rigidly
followed--particularly in remote colonies and small dependencies
where the range of suitable selection was limited.
After this came a personal catechism, the old man looking at the
young one over the rims of his tortoise-shell spectacles. Married?
Not yet. Expect to be? Yes, Sir. Soon? Not, not for a long time.
How long? Six weeks at least, Sir.
The ends of the severe mouth rose perceptibly, and in any other face
they might have broken into a smile.
Daughter of the Governor, isn't she? Yes, but that isn't her chief
characteristic, Sir. What is? That she is the loveliest and noblest
woman in the world.
"Oh!"
Again the severe mouth relaxed, and the Home Secretary asked Stowell
where he was staying. Stowell told him (the Inns of Court Hotel,
Holborn) and he made a note of it.
"Remain there until you hear from me again, Mr. Stowell, and meantime
say nothing about this interview to anybody."
"Not anybody whatever, Sir?"
The Home Secretary's stern old face became genial and charming as he
rose and held out his hand.
"Well, that supreme being, perhaps .... Good day!"
"So here I am, my dear Fenella," wrote Stowell, "back in the bedroom
of my hotel, telling you all about it. How long I may have to remain
in London, goodness knows, therefore I propose to tell you something
about my ways of life while I wait.
"Such a change in me! When I was in London last (with Alick Gell,
you remember) I spent my days and nights in the hotels, restaurants,
theatres and music-halls that are the lovely and beloved world of
woman. It is the world of woman still, but quite another realm of it.
"Two nights ago I strolled westward along Oxford Street, and thought
(with a lump in my throat) about De Quincey and his Ann. Then,
cutting through Clare Market to the Temple and finding the gate
closed, I tipped the porter to let me walk through the Brick Court,
and stood a long half hour before a house in the silent little
square, thinking of the day when the women of the town sat on the
stairs while poor Noll (Oliver Goldsmith) lay dead in his rooms
above. And then, coming out into Fleet-street (midnight now) where
the big printing presses were throbbing behind dark buildings, I
tried to think I saw the great old Johnson, God bless him, picking up
the prostitute from the pavement, carrying her home on his back and
laying her on his bed.
"Last night I strolled eastward to look at the outside of the
Settlement in which you used to be Lady Warden (in the unbelievable
days before you came back to Man), and returning by a dark side
street, I came upon a queue of women crouching in the cold before the
doors of a Salvation Shelter. They were waiting for four in the
morning when they would have a fighting chance of one of the beds
(_i.e._, boxes like open coffins lying cheek by jowl on the floor of
a big hall) after the washerwomen who were then asleep in them would
get up and go to work.
"But the climax came this morning (Sunday morning) when I went to
service at the Foundling Hospital. Such a sweet scene--at first
sight at all events. The little women, like little nuns, in their
linen caps and aprons, singing like little angels in their sweet
young voices. But my God, what tragedy lurked behind that picture
also!
"I did not hear much of the sermon for thinking of the mothers of
these 'children of shame' and the conditions under which they must
have given birth to them--sometimes in a garret, in secret, alone,
driven to dementia by a sense of impending shame. How often a poor
miserable girl in the degradation of childbirth (which should be the
crown of a woman's glory) must have been tempted to kill her child in
fear of the fate that awaited both it and her! And to think of the
giant arm of the mighty law coming down on a creature like that to
punish her! Lord, what crimes are committed in the name of Justice!
"There you are now! That's what you've done for me. 'Deed you have
though. It's truth enough, girl. You've opened my ears to the cry
of the voice of suffering woman, and that is the saddest sound,
perhaps, that breaks on the shores of life. And the moral of it all
is that if I do become a Judge (God knows I'm almost afraid to hope
for it) you must be my helper, my inspirer, the tower of my strength.
"Oh, my darling, how much I love you! It seems to me that I lost all
my life until I came to love you. How well I recall the blessed day
when I loved you first! It was the first time I saw you--the first
time really. Don't you remember? In the glen, that glorious autumn
afternoon. The vision has followed me ever since and I wish I could
blot out every day of my life when I have not thought of you.
"There you are again! You see what you've done, ma'am. But I'm not
always on the heights. What do you think? I've bought a motor car,
and every morning I go up to Hampstead with a teacher to learn to
drive.
"It is for our honeymoon. You called me a Viking once, and I'm not
going to be a Viking for nothing. As soon as you are mine, mine
wholly, I am going to pick you up and carry you off to all the
inaccessible places in the island--the bent-strewn plains of Ayre,
where a lighthouse-man lives alone with his wife and nothing else
save the sea for company; the shepherd's hut on Snaefell, where there
is nothing but the sky, and the sandy headlands of the Calf with the
mists of the Atlantic sweeping over them.
"Meantime, think of me in a box of a bedroom five storeys up, with
the roaring tide of London traffic running, like a Canadian river,
sixty feet below, and write--write, write! Tell me what is happening
in the 'lil islan'' which is lying asleep to-night in the Irish Sea.
God bless it, and all the kind and cheery souls in it! God bless it
for evermore!
"STOWELL."