If the sweetness of the preliminary months had been great, great too,
though almost excessive as agitation, was the wonder of fairly being housed
with Him, of treading day and night in the footsteps He had worn, of
touching the objects, or at all events the surfaces, the substances, over
which His hands had played, which His arms, His shoulders had rubbed, of
breathing the air--or something not too unlike it--in which His voice had
sounded. They had had a little at first their bewilderments, their
disconcertedness; the place was both humbler and grander than they had
exactly prefigured, more at once of a cottage and of a museum, a little
more archaically bare and yet a little more richly official. But the sense
was strong with them that the point of view, for the inevitable ease of the
connexion, patiently, indulgently awaited them; in addition to which, from
the first evening, after closing-hour, when the last blank pilgrim had
gone, the mere spell, the mystic presence--as if they had had it quite to
themselves--were all they could have desired. They had received, at
Grant-Jackson's behest and in addition to a table of instructions and
admonitions by the number and in some particulars by the nature of which
they found themselves slightly depressed, various little guides, manuals,
travellers' tributes, literary memorials and other catch-penny
publications; which, however, were to be for the moment swallowed up in the
interesting episode of the induction or initiation appointed for them in
advance at the hands of several persons whose relation to the establishment
was, as superior to their own, still more official, and at those in
especial of one of the ladies who had for so many years borne the brunt.
About the instructions from above, about the shilling books and the
well-known facts and the full-blown legend, the supervision, the
subjection, the submission, the view as of a cage in which he should
circulate and a groove in which he should slide, Gedge had preserved a
certain play of mind; but all power of reaction appeared suddenly to desert
him in the presence of his so visibly competent predecessor and as an
effect of her good offices. He had not the resource, enjoyed by his wife,
of seeing himself, with impatience, attired in black silk of a make
characterised by just the right shade of austerity; so that this firm
smooth expert and consummately respectable middle-aged person had him
somehow, on the whole ground, completely at her mercy.
It was evidently something of a rueful moment when, as a lesson--she being
for the day or two still in the field--he accepted Miss Putchin's
suggestion of "going round" with her and with the successive squads of
visitors she was there to deal with. He appreciated her method--he saw
there had to be one; he admired her as succinct and definite; for there
were the facts, as his wife had said at Blackport, and they were to be
disposed of in the time; yet he felt a very little boy as he dangled, more
than once, with Mrs. Gedge, at the tail of the human comet. The idea had
been that they should by this attendance more fully embrace the possible
accidents and incidents, so to put it, of the relation to the great public
in which they were to find themselves; and the poor man's excited
perception of the great public rapidly became such as to resist any
diversion meaner than that of the admirable manner of their guide. It
wandered from his gaping companions to that of the priestess in black silk,
whom he kept asking himself if either he or Isabel could hope by any
possibility ever remotely to resemble; then it bounded restlessly back to
the numerous persons who revealed to him as it had never yet been revealed
the happy power of the simple to hang upon the lips of the wise. The great
thing seemed to be--and quite surprisingly--that the business was easy and
the strain, which as a strain they had feared, moderate; so that he might
have been puzzled, had he fairly caught himself in the act, by his
recognising as the last effect of the impression an odd absence of the
power really to rest in it, an agitation deep within him that vaguely
threatened to grow. "It isn't, you see, so very complicated," the black
silk lady seemed to throw off, with everything else, in her neat crisp
cheerful way; in spite of which he already, the very first time--that is
after several parties had been in and out and up and down--went so far as
to wonder if there weren't more in it than she imagined. She was, so to
speak, kindness itself--was all encouragement and reassurance; but it was
just her slightly coarse redolence of these very things that, on
repetition, before they parted, dimmed a little, as he felt, the light of
his acknowledging smile. This again she took for a symptom of some pleading
weakness in him--he could never be as brave as she; so that she wound up
with a few pleasant words from the very depth of her experience. "You'll
get into it, never fear--it will _come_; and then you'll feel as if you had
never done anything else." He was afterwards to know that, on the spot, at
this moment, he must have begun to wince a little at such a menace; that he
might come to feel as if he had never done anything but what Miss Putchin
did loomed for him, in germ, as a penalty to pay. The support she offered,
none the less, continued to strike him; she put the whole thing on so sound
a basis when she said: "You see they're so nice about it--they take such an
interest. And they never do a thing they shouldn't. That was always every
thing to mother and me." "They," Gedge had already noticed, referred
constantly and hugely, in the good woman's talk, to the millions who
shuffled through the house; the pronoun in question was for ever on her
lips, the hordes it represented filled her consciousness, the addition of
their numbers ministered to her glory. Mrs. Gedge promptly fell in. "It
must be indeed delightful to see the effect on so many and to feel that one
may perhaps do something to make it--well, permanent." But he was kept
silent by his becoming more sharply aware that this was a new view, for
him, of the reference made, that he had never thought of the quality of the
place as derived from Them, but from Somebody Else, and that They, in
short, seemed to have got into the way of crowding Him out. He found
himself even a little resenting this for Him--which perhaps had something
to do with the slightly invidious cast of his next inquiry.
"And are They always, as one might say--a--stupid?"
"Stupid!" She stared, looking as if no one _could_ be such a thing in such
a connexion. No one had ever been anything but neat and cheerful and
fluent, except to be attentive and unobjectionable and, so far as was
possible, American.
"What I mean is," he explained, "is there any perceptible proportion that
take an interest in Him?"
His wife stepped on his toe; she deprecated levity.
But his mistake fortunately was lost on their friend.
"That's just why they come, that they take such an interest. I sometimes
think they take more than about anything else in the world." With which
Miss Putchin looked about at the place. "It _is_ pretty, don't you think,
the way they've got it now?" This, Gedge saw, was a different "They"; it
applied to the powers that were--the people who had appointed him, the
governing, visiting Body, in respect to which he was afterwards to remark
to Mrs. Gedge that a fellow--it was the difficulty--didn't know "where to
have her." His wife, at a loss, questioned at that moment the necessity of
having her anywhere, and he said, good-humouredly, "Of course; it's all
right." He was in fact content enough with the last touches their friend
had given the picture. "There are many who know all about it when they
come, and the Americans often are tremendously up. Mother and me really
enjoyed"--it was her only slip--"the interest of the Americans. We've
sometimes had ninety a day, and all wanting to see and hear everything. But
you'll work them off; you'll see the way--it's all experience." She came
back for his comfort to that. She came back also to other things: she did
justice to the considerable class who arrived positive and primed. "There
are those who know more about it than you do. But _that_ only comes from
their interest."
"Who know more about what?" Gedge inquired.
"Why about the place. I mean they have their ideas--of what everything is,
and _where_ it is, and what it isn't and where it _should_ be. They do ask
questions," she said, yet not so much in warning as in the complacency of
being herself seasoned and sound; "and they're down on you when they think
you go wrong. As if you ever could! You know too much," she astutely
smiled; "or you _will_."
"Oh you mustn't know _too_ much, must you?" And Gedge now smiled as well. He
knew, he thought, what he meant.
"Well, you must know as much as anybody else. I claim at any rate that I
do," Miss Putchin declared. "They never really caught me out."
"I'm very certain of _that_"--and Mrs. Gedge had an elation almost
personal.
"Surely," he said, "I don't want to be caught out." She rejoined that in
such a case he would have _Them_ down on him, and he saw that this time she
meant the powers above. It quickened his sense of all the elements that
were to reckon with, yet he felt at the same time that the powers above
were not what he should most fear. "I'm glad," he observed, "that they ever
ask questions; but I happened to notice, you know, that no one did to-day."
"Then you missed several--and no loss. There were three or four put to me
too silly to remember. But of course they mostly _are_ silly."
"You mean the questions?"