1922
I
It seemed to them at first, the offer, too good to be true, and their
friend's letter, addressed to them to feel, as he said, the ground, to
sound them as to inclinations and possibilities, had almost the effect of a
brave joke at their expense. Their friend, Mr. Grant-Jackson, a highly
preponderant pushing person, great in discussion and arrangement, abrupt in
overture, unexpected, if not perverse, in attitude, and almost equally
acclaimed and objected to in the wide midland region to which he had
taught, as the phrase was, the size of his foot--their friend had launched
his bolt quite out of the blue and had thereby so shaken them as to make
them fear almost more than hope. The place had fallen vacant by the death
of one of the two ladies, mother and daughter, who had discharged its
duties for fifteen years; the daughter was staying on alone, to
accommodate, but had found, though extremely mature, an opportunity of
marriage that involved retirement, and the question of the new incumbents
was not a little pressing. The want thus determined was of a united couple
of some sort, of the right sort, a pair of educated and competent sisters
possibly preferred, but a married pair having its advantages if other
qualifications were marked. Applicants, candidates, besiegers of the door
of every one supposed to have a voice in the matter, were already beyond
counting, and Mr. Grant-Jackson, who was in his way diplomatic and whose
voice, though not perhaps of the loudest, possessed notes of insistence,
had found his preference fixing itself on some person or brace of persons
who had been decent and dumb. The Gedges appeared to have struck him as
waiting in silence--though absolutely, as happened, no busy body had
brought them, far away in the North, a hint either of bliss or of danger;
and the happy spell, for the rest, had obviously been wrought in him by a
remembrance which, though now scarcely fresh, had never before borne any
such fruit.
Morris Gedge had for a few years, as a young man, carried on a small
private school of the order known as preparatory, and had happened then to
receive under his roof the small son of the great man, who was not at that
time so great. The little boy, during an absence of his parents from
England, had been dangerously ill, so dangerously that they had been
recalled in haste, though with inevitable delays, from a far country--they
had gone to America, with the whole continent and the great sea to cross
again--and had got back to find the child saved, but saved, as couldn't
help coming to light, by the extreme devotion and perfect judgement of Mrs.
Gedge. Without children of her own she had particularly attached herself to
this tiniest and tenderest of her husband's pupils, and they had both
dreaded as a dire disaster the injury to their little enterprise that would
be caused by their losing him. Nervous anxious sensitive persons, with a
pride--as they were for that matter well aware--above their position,
never, at the best, to be anything but dingy, they had nursed him in terror
and had brought him through in exhaustion. Exhaustion, as befell, had thus
overtaken them early and had for one reason and another managed to assert
itself as their permanent portion. The little boy's death would, as they
said, have done for them, yet his recovery hadn't saved them; with which it
was doubtless also part of a shy but stiff candour in them that they didn't
regard themselves as having in a more indirect manner laid up treasure.
Treasure was not to be, in any form whatever, of their dreams or of their
waking sense; and the years that followed had limped under their weight,
had now and then rather grievously stumbled, had even barely escaped laying
them in the dust. The school hadn't prospered, had but dwindled to a close.
Gedge's health had failed and still more every sign in him of a capacity to
publish himself as practical. He had tried several things, he had tried
many, but the final appearance was of their having tried him not less. They
mostly, at the time I speak of, were trying his successors, while he found
himself, with an effect of dull felicity that had come in this case from
the mere postponement of change, in charge of the grey town-library of
Blackport-on-Dwindle, all granite, fog and female fiction. This was a
situation in which his general intelligence--admittedly his strong
point--was doubtless imaged, around him, as feeling less of a strain than
that mastery of particulars in which he was recognised as weak.
It was at Blackport-on-Dwindle that the silver shaft reached and pierced
him; it was as an alternative to dispensing dog's-eared volumes the very
titles of which, on the lips of innumerable glib girls, were a challenge to
his nerves, that the wardenship of so different a temple presented itself.
The stipend named exceeded little the slim wage at present paid him, but
even had it been less the interest and the honour would have struck him as
determinant. The shrine at which he was to preside--though he had always
lacked occasion to approach it--figured to him as the most sacred known to
the steps of men, the early home of the supreme poet, the Mecca of the
English-speaking race. The tears came into his eyes sooner still than into
his wife's while he looked about with her at their actual narrow prison, so
grim with enlightenment, so ugly with industry, so turned away from any
dream, so intolerable to any taste. He felt as if a window had opened into
a great green woodland, a woodland that had a name all glorious, immortal,
that was peopled with vivid figures, each of them renowned, and that gave
out a murmur, deep as the sound of the sea, which was the rustle in forest
shade of all the poetry, the beauty, the colour of life. It would be
prodigious that of this transfigured world _he_ should keep the key. No--he
couldn't believe it, not even when Isabel, at sight of his face, came and
helpfully kissed him. He shook his head with a strange smile. "We shan't
get it. Why should we? It's perfect."
"If we don't he'll simply have been cruel; which is impossible when he has
waited all this time to be kind." Mrs. Gedge did believe--she _would_;
since the wide doors of the world of poetry had suddenly pushed back for
them it was in the form of poetic justice that they were first to know it.
She had her faith in their patron; it was sudden, but now complete. "He
remembers--that's all; and that's our strength."
"And what's _his_?" Gedge asked. "He may want to put us through, but that's
a different thing from being able. What are our special advantages?"
"Well, that we're just the thing." Her knowledge of the needs of the case
was as yet, thanks to scant information, of the vaguest, and she had never,
more than her husband, stood on the sacred spot; but she saw herself waving
a nicely-gloved hand over a collection of remarkable objects and saying to
a compact crowd of gaping awestruck persons: "And now, please, _this_ way."
She even heard herself meeting with promptness and decision an occasional
inquiry from a visitor in whom audacity had prevailed over awe. She had
once been with a cousin, years before, to a great northern castle, and that
was the way the housekeeper had taken them round. And it was not moreover,
either, that she thought of herself as a housekeeper: she was well above
that, and the wave of her hand wouldn't fail to be such as to show it. This
and much else she summed up as she answered her mate. "Our special
advantages are that you're a gentleman."
"Oh!" said Gedge as if he had never thought of it, and yet as if too it
were scarce worth thinking of.
"I see it all," she went on; "they've _had_ the vulgar--they find they
don't do. We're poor and we're modest, but any one can see what we are."
Gedge wondered. "Do you mean----?" More modest than she, he didn't know quite
what she meant.
"We're refined. We know how to speak."
"Do we?"--he still, suddenly, wondered.
But she was from the first surer of everything than he; so that when a few
weeks more had elapsed and the shade of uncertainty--though it was only a
shade--had grown almost to sicken him, her triumph was to come with the
news that they were fairly named. "We're on poor pay, though we
manage"--she had at the present juncture contended for her point. "But
we're highly cultivated, and for them to get _that_, don't you see? without
getting too much with it in the way of pretensions and demands, must be
precisely their dream. We've no social position, but we don't _mind_ that
we haven't, do we? a bit; which is because we know the difference between
realities and shams. We hold to reality, and that gives us common sense,
which the vulgar have less than anything and which yet must be wanted
there, after all, as well as anywhere else."
Her companion followed her, but musingly, as if his horizon had within a
few moments grown so great that he was almost lost in it and required a new
orientation. The shining spaces surrounded him; the association alone gave
a nobler arch to the sky. "Allow that we hold also a little to the romance.
It seems to me that that's the beauty. We've missed it all our life, and
now it's come. We shall be at headquarters for it. We shall have our fill
of it."
She looked at his face, at the effect in it of these prospects, and her own
lighted as if he had suddenly grown handsome. "Certainly--we shall live as
in a fairy-tale. But what I mean is that we shall give, in a way--and so
gladly--quite as much as we get. With all the rest of it we're for instance
neat." Their letter had come to them at breakfast, and she picked a fly out
of the butter-dish. "It's the way we'll _keep_ the place"--with which she
removed from the sofa to the top of the cottage-piano a tin of biscuits
that had refused to squeeze into the cupboard. At Blackport they were in
lodgings--of the lowest description, she had been known to declare with a
freedom felt by Blackport to be slightly invidious. The Birthplace--and
that itself, after such a life, was exaltation--wouldn't be lodgings, since
a house close beside it was set apart for the warden, a house joining on to
it as a sweet old parsonage is often annexed to a quaint old church. It
would all together be their home, and such a home as would make a little
world that they would never want to leave. She dwelt on the gain, for that
matter, to their income; as obviously, though the salary was not a change
for the better, the house given them would make all the difference. He
assented to this, but absently, and she was almost impatient at the range
of his thoughts. It was as if something for him--the very swarm of
them--veiled the view; and he presently of himself showed what it was.
"What I can't get over is its being such a man--!" He almost, from inward
emotion, broke down.
"Such a man----?"
"Him, _him_, HIM----!" It was too much.
"Grant-Jackson? Yes, it's a surprise, but one sees how he has been meaning,
all the while, the right thing by us."
"I mean _Him_," Gedge returned more coldly; "our becoming familiar and
intimate--for that's what it will come to. We shall just live with Him."
"Of course--it _is_ the beauty." And she added quite gaily: "The more we do
the more we shall love Him."
"No doubt--but it's rather awful. The more we _know_ Him," Gedge reflected,
"the more we shall love Him. We don't as yet, you see, know Him so very
tremendously."
"We do so quite as well, I imagine, as the sort of people they've had. And
that probably isn't--unless you care, as we do--so awfully necessary. For
there are the facts."
"Yes--there are the facts."
"I mean the principal ones. They're all that the people--the people who
come--want."
"Yes--they must be all _they_ want."
"So that they're all that those who've been in charge have needed to know."
"Ah," he said as if it were a question of honour, "we must know
everything."
She cheerfully acceded: she had the merit, he felt, of keeping the case
within bounds. "Everything. But about him personally," she added, "there
isn't, is there? so very very much."
"More, I believe, than there used to be. They've made discoveries."