Gedge not only assented eagerly--one way _was_ quite enough if it were the
right one--but repeated it, after this conversation, at odd moments,
several times over to his wife. "There can only be one way, one way," he
continued to remark--though indeed much as if it were a joke; till she
asked him how many more he supposed she wanted. He failed to answer this
question, but resorted to another repetition. "There are the facts, the
facts," which perhaps, however, he kept a little more to himself, sounding
it at intervals in different parts of the house. Mrs. Gedge was full of
comment on their clever introductress, though not restrictively save in the
matter of her speech, "Me and mother," and a general tone--which certainly
was not their sort of thing. "I don't know," he said, "perhaps it comes
with the place, since speaking in immortal verse doesn't seem to come. It
must be, one seems to see, one thing or the other. I daresay that in a few
months I shall also be at it--'me and the wife.'"
"Why not 'me and the missus' at once?" Mrs. Gedge resentfully inquired. "I
don't think," she observed at another time, "that I quite know what's the
matter with you."
"It's only that I'm excited, awfully excited--as I don't see how one can't
be. You wouldn't have a fellow drop into this berth as into an appointment
at the Post Office. Here on the spot it goes to my head--how can that be
helped? But we shall live into it, and perhaps," he said with an
implication of the other possibility that was doubtless but part of his
fine ecstasy, "we shall live through it." The place acted on his
imagination--how, surely, shouldn't it? And his imagination acted on his
nerves, and these things together, with the general vividness and the new
and complete immersion, made rest for him almost impossible, so that he
could scarce go to bed at night and even during the first week more than
once rose in the small hours to move about, up and down, with his
lamp--standing, sitting, listening, wondering, in the stillness, as if
positively to recover some echo, to surprise some secret, of the _genius
loci_. He couldn't have explained it--and didn't in fact need to explain
it, at least to himself, since the impulse simply held him and shook him;
but the time after closing, the time above all after the people--Them, as
he felt himself on the way habitually to put it, predominant, insistent,
all in the foreground--brought him, or ought to have brought him, he seemed
to see, nearer to the enshrined Presence, enlarging the opportunity for
communion and intensifying the sense of it. These nightly prowls, as he
called them, were disquieting to his wife, who had no disposition to share
in them, speaking with decision of the whole place as just the place to be
forbidding after dark. She rejoiced in the distinctness, contiguous though
it was, of their own little residence, where she trimmed the lamp and
stirred the fire and heard the kettle sing, repairing the while the
omissions of the small domestic who slept out; she foresaw her self, with
some promptness, drawing rather sharply the line between her own precinct
and that in which the great spirit might walk. It would be with them, the
great spirit, all day--even if indeed on her making that remark, and in
just that form, to her husband, he replied with a queer "But will he
though?" And she vaguely imaged the development of a domestic antidote
after a while, precisely, in the shape of curtains more markedly drawn and
everything most modern and lively, tea, "patterns," the newspapers, the
female fiction itself that they had reacted against at Blackport, quite
defiantly cultivated.
These possibilities, however, were all right, as her companion said it was,
all the first autumn--they had arrived at summer's end; and he might have
been more than content with a special set of his own that he had access to
from behind, passing out of their low door for the few steps between it and
the Birthplace. With his lamp ever so carefully guarded and his nursed keys
that made him free of treasures, he crossed the dusky interval so often
that she began to qualify it as a habit that "grew." She spoke of it almost
as if he had taken to drink, and he humoured that view of it by allowing
the cup to be strong. This had been in truth altogether his immediate sense
of it; strange and deep for him the spell of silent sessions before
familiarity and, to some small extent, disappointment had set in. The
exhibitional side of the establishment had struck him, even on arrival, as
qualifying too much its character; he scarce knew what he might best have
looked for, but the three or four rooms bristled overmuch, in the garish
light of day, with busts and relics, not even ostensibly always _His_, old
prints and old editions, old objects fashioned in His likeness, furniture
"of the time" and autographs of celebrated worshippers. In the quiet hours
and the deep dusk, none the less, under the play of the shifted lamp and
that of his own emotion, these things too recovered their advantage,
ministered to the mystery, or at all events to the impression, seemed
consciously to offer themselves as personal to the poet. Not one of them
was really or unchallengeably so, but they had somehow, through long
association, got, as Gedge always phrased it, into the secret, and it was
about the secret he asked them while he restlessly wandered. It wasn't till
months had elapsed that he found how little they had to tell him, and he
was quite at his ease with them when he knew they were by no means where
his sensibility had first placed them. They were as out of it as he; only,
to do them justice, they had made him immensely feel. And still, too, it
was not they who had done that most, since his sentiment had gradually
cleared itself to deep, to deeper refinements.
The Holy of Holies of the Birthplace was the low, the sublime Chamber of
Birth, sublime because, as the Americans usually said--unlike the natives
they mostly found words--it was so pathetic; and pathetic because it
was--well, really nothing else in the world that one could name, number or
measure. It was as empty as a shell of which the kernel has withered, and
contained neither busts nor prints nor early copies; it contained only the
Fact--_the_ Fact itself--which, as he stood sentient there at midnight, our
friend, holding his breath, allowed to sink into him. He _had_ to take it
as the place where the spirit would most walk and where He would therefore
be most to be met, with possibilities of recognition and reciprocity. He
hadn't, most probably--_He_ hadn't--much inhabited the room, as men weren't
apt, as a rule, to convert to their later use and involve in their wider
fortune the scene itself of their nativity. But as there were moments when,
in the conflict of theories, the sole certainty surviving for the critic
threatened to be that He had not--unlike other successful men--_not_ been
born, so Gedge, though little of a critic, clung to the square feet of
space that connected themselves, however feebly, with the positive
appearance. He was little of a critic--he was nothing of one; he hadn't
pretended to the character before coming, nor come to pretend to it; also,
luckily for him, he was seeing day by day how little use he could possibly
have for it. It would be to him, the attitude of a high expert, distinctly
a stumbling-block, and that he rejoiced, as the winter waned, in his
ignorance, was one of the propositions he betook himself, in his odd
manner, to enunciating to his wife. She denied it, for hadn't she in the
first place been present, wasn't she still present, at his pious, his
tireless study of everything connected with the subject?--so present that
she had herself learned more about it than had ever seemed likely. Then in
the second place he wasn't to proclaim on the house-tops any point at which
he might be weak, for who knew, if it should get abroad that they were
ignorant, what effect might be produced----?
"On the attraction"--he took her up--"of the Show?"
He had fallen into the harmless habit of speaking of the place as the
"Show"; but she didn't mind this so much as to be diverted by it. "No; on
the attitude of the Body. You know they're pleased with us, and I don't see
why you should want to spoil it. We got in by a tight squeeze--you know
we've had evidence of that, and that it was about as much as our backers
could manage. But we're proving a comfort to them, and it's absurd of you
to question your suitability to people who were content with the Putchins."
"I don't, my dear," he returned, "question any thing; but if I should do so
it would be precisely because of the greater advantage constituted for the
Putchins by the simplicity of their spirit. They were kept straight by the
quality of their ignorance--which was denser even than mine. It was a
mistake in us from the first to have attempted to correct or to disguise
ours. We should have waited simply to become good parrots, to learn our
lesson--all on the spot here, so little of it is wanted--and squawk it
off."
"Ah 'squawk,' love--what a word to use about Him!"
"It isn't about Him--nothing's about Him. None of Them care tuppence about
Him. The only thing They care about is this empty shell--or rather, for it
isn't empty, the extraneous preposterous stuffing of it."
"Preposterous?"--he made her stare with this as he hadn't yet done.
At sight of her look, however--the gleam, as it might have been, of a queer
suspicion--he bent to her kindly and tapped her cheek. "Oh it's all right.
We _must_ fall back on the Putchins. Do you remember what she
said?--'They've made it so pretty now.' They _have_ made it pretty, and
it's a first-rate show. It's a first-rate show and a first-rate billet, and
He was a first-rate poet, and you're a first-rate woman--to put up so
sweetly, I mean, with my nonsense."
She appreciated his domestic charm and she justified that part of his
tribute which concerned herself. "I don't care how much of your nonsense
you talk to me, so long as you _keep_ it all for me and don't treat _Them_
to it."
"The pilgrims? No," he conceded--"it isn't fair to Them. They mean well."
"What complaint have we after all to make of Them so long as They don't
break off bits--as They used, Miss Putchin told us, so awfully--in order to
conceal them about Their Persons? She broke Them at least of that."
"Yes," Gedge mused again; "I wish awfully she hadn't!"
"You'd like the relics destroyed, removed? That's all that's wanted!"
"There _are_ no relics."
"There won't be any _soon_--unless you take care." But he was already
laughing, and the talk wasn't dropped without his having patted her once
more. An impression or two nevertheless remained with her from it, as he
saw from a question she asked him on the morrow. "What did you mean
yesterday about Miss Putchin's simplicity--its keeping her 'straight'? Do
you mean mentally?"
Her "mentally" was rather portentous, but he practically confessed. "Well,
it kept her up. I mean," he amended, laughing, "it kept her down."
It was really as if she had been a little uneasy. "You consider there's a
danger of your being affected? You know what I mean--of its going to your
head. You do know," she insisted as he said nothing. "Through your caring
for him so. You'd certainly be right in that case about its having been a
mistake for you to plunge so deep." And then as his listening without
reply, though with his look a little sad for her, might have denoted that,
allowing for extravagance of statement, he saw there was something in it:
"Give up your prowls. Keep it for daylight. Keep it for _Them_."
"Ah," he smiled, "if one could! My prowls," he added, "are what I most
enjoy. They're the only time, as I've told you before, that I'm really with
_Him_. Then I don't see the place. He isn't the place."
"I don't care for what you 'don't see,'" she returned with vivacity; "the
question is of what you do see."
Well, if it was, he waited before meeting it. "Do you know what I sometimes
do?" And then as she waited too: "In the Birthroom there, when I look in
late, I often put out my light. That makes it better."
"Makes what----?"
"Everything."
"What is it then you see in the dark?"
"Nothing!" said Morris Gedge.
"And what's the pleasure of that?"
"Well, what the American ladies say. It's so fascinating!"