The autumn was brisk, as Miss Putchin had told them it would be, but
business naturally fell off with the winter months and the short days.
There was rarely an hour indeed without a call of some sort, and they were
never allowed to forget that they kept the shop in all the world, as they
might say, where custom was least fluctuating. The seasons told on it, as
they tell on travel, but no other influence, consideration or convulsion to
which the population of the globe is exposed. This population, never
exactly in simultaneous hordes, but in a full swift and steady stream,
passed through the smoothly-working mill and went, in its variety of
degrees duly impressed and edified, on its artless way. Gedge gave himself
up, with much ingenuity of spirit, to trying to keep in relation with it;
having even at moments, in the early time, glimpses of the chance that the
impressions gathered from so rare an opportunity for contact with the
general mind might prove as interesting as anything else in the connexion.
Types, classes, nationalities, manners, diversities of behaviour, modes of
seeing, feeling, of expression, would pass before him and become for him,
after a fashion, the experience of an untravelled man. His journeys had
been short and saving, but poetic justice again seemed inclined to work for
him in placing him just at the point in all Europe perhaps where the
confluence of races was thickest. The theory at any rate carried him on,
operating helpfully for the term of his anxious beginnings and gilding in a
manner--it was the way he characterised the case to his wife--the somewhat
stodgy gingerbread of their daily routine. They hadn't known many people
and their visiting-list was small--which made it again poetic justice that
they should be visited on such a scale. They dressed and were at home, they
were under arms and received, and except for the offer of refreshment--and
Gedge had his view that there would eventually be a _buffet_ farmed out to
a great firm--their hospitality would have made them princely if mere
hospitality ever did. Thus they were launched, and it was interesting; so
that from having been ready to drop, originally, with fatigue they emerged
as even-winded and strong in the legs as if they had had an Alpine holiday.
This experience, Gedge opined, also represented, as a gain, a like
seasoning of the spirit--by which he meant a certain command of
impenetrable patience.
The patience was needed for the particular feature of the ordeal that, by
the time the lively season was with them again, had disengaged itself as
the sharpest--the immense assumption of veracities and sanctities, of the
general soundness of the legend, with which every one arrived. He was well
provided certainly for meeting it, and he gave all he had, yet he had
sometimes the sense of a vague resentment on the part of his pilgrims at
his not ladling out their fare with a bigger spoon. An irritation had begun
to grumble in him during the comparatively idle months of winter when a
pilgrim would turn up singly. The pious individual, entertained for the
half-hour, had occasionally seemed to offer him the promise of beguilement
or the semblance of a personal relation; it came back again to the few
pleasant calls he had received in the course of a life almost void of
social amenity. Sometimes he liked the person, the face, the speech: an
educated man, a gentleman, not one of the herd; a graceful woman, vague,
accidental, unconscious of him, but making him wonder, while he hovered,
who she was. These chances represented for him light yearnings and faint
flutters; they acted indeed within him to a special, an extraordinary tune.
He would have liked to talk with such stray companions, to talk with them
_really_, to talk with them as he might have talked had he met them where
he couldn't meet them--at dinner, in the "world," on a visit at a
country-house. Then he could have said--and about the shrine and the idol
always--things he couldn't say now. The form in which his irritation first
came to him was that of his feeling obliged to say to them--to the single
visitor, even when sympathetic, quite as to the gaping group--the
particular things, a dreadful dozen or so, that they expected. If he had
thus arrived at characterising these things as dreadful the reason touched
the very point that, for a while turning everything over, he kept dodging,
not facing, trying to ignore. The point was that he was on his way to
become two quite different persons, the public and the private--as to which
it would somehow have to be managed that these persons should live
together. He was splitting into halves, unmistakably--he who, whatever else
he had been, had at least always been so entire and in his way so solid.
One of the halves, or perhaps even, since the split promised to be rather
unequal, one of the quarters, was the keeper, the showman, the priest of
the idol; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest man he had
always been.
There were moments when he recognised this primary character as he had
never done before; when he in fact quite shook in his shoes at the idea
that it perhaps had in reserve some supreme assertion of its identity. It
was honest, verily, just by reason of the possibility. It was poor and
unsuccessful because here it was just on the verge of quarrelling with its
bread and butter. Salvation would be of course--the salvation of the
showman--rigidly to _keep_ it on the verge; not to let it, in other words,
overpass by an inch. He might count on this, he said to himself, if there
weren't any public--if there weren't thousands of people demanding of him
what he was paid for. He saw the approach of the stage at which they would
affect him, the thousands of people--and perhaps even more the earnest
individual--as coming really to see if he were earning his wage. Wouldn't
he soon begin to fancy them in league with the Body, practically deputed by
it--given, no doubt, a kindled suspicion--to look in and report
observations? It was the way he broke down with the lonely pilgrim that led
to his first heart-searchings--broke down as to the courage required for
damping an uncritical faith. What they all most wanted was to feel that
everything was "just as it was"; only the shock of having to part with that
vision was greater than any individual could bear unsupported. The bad
moments were upstairs in the Birthroom, for here the forces pressing on the
very edge assumed a dire intensity. The mere expression of eye,
all-credulous, omnivorous and fairly moistening in the act, with which many
persons gazed about, might eventually make it difficult for him to remain
fairly civil. Often they came in pairs--sometimes one had come before---and
then they explained to each other. He in that case never corrected; he
listened, for the lesson of listening: after which he would remark to his
wife that there was no end to what he was learning. He saw that if he
should really ever break down it would be with her he would begin. He had
given her hints and digs enough, but she was so inflamed with appreciation
that she either didn't feel them or pretended not to understand.
This was the greater complication that, with the return of the spring and
the increase of the public, her services were more required. She took the
field with him from an early hour; she was present with the party above
while he kept an eye, and still more an ear, on the party below; and how
could he know, he asked himself, what she might say to them and what she
might suffer _Them_ to say--or in other words, poor wretches, to
believe--while removed from his control? Some day or other, and before too
long, he couldn't but think, he must have the matter out with her--the
matter, namely, of the _morality_ of their position. The morality of women
was special--he was getting lights on that. Isabel's conception of her
office was to cherish and enrich the legend. It was already, the legend,
very taking, but what was she there for but to make it more so? She
certainly wasn't there to chill any natural piety. If it was all in the
air--all in their "eye," as the vulgar might say--that He _had_ been born
in the Birthroom, where was the value of the sixpences they took? where the
equivalent they had engaged to supply? "Oh dear, yes--just about _here_";
and she must tap the place with her foot. "Altered? Oh dear, no--save in a
few trifling particulars; you see the place--and isn't that just the charm
of it?--quite as _He_ saw it. Very poor and homely, no doubt; but that's
just what's so wonderful." He didn't want to hear her, and yet he didn't
want to give her her head; he didn't want to make difficulties or to snatch
the bread from her mouth. But he must none the less give her a warning
before they had gone _too_ far. That was the way, one evening in June, he
put it to her; the affluence, with the finest weather, having lately been
of the largest and the crowd all day fairly gorged with the story. "We
mustn't, you know, go _too_ far."
The odd thing was that she had now ceased even to be conscious of what
troubled him--she was so launched in her own career. "Too far for what?"
"To save our immortal souls. We mustn't, love, tell too many lies."
She looked at him with dire reproach. "Ah now are you going to begin
again?"
"I never _have_ begun; I haven't wanted to worry you. But, you know, we
don't know anything about it." And then as she stared, flushing: "About His
having been born up there. About anything really. Not the least little
scrap that would weigh in any other connexion as evidence. So don't rub it
in so."
"Rub it in how?"
"That He _was_ born----" But at sight of her face he only sighed. "Oh dear,
oh dear!"
"Don't you think," she replied cuttingly, "that He was born anywhere?"
He hesitated--it was such an edifice to shake. "Well, we don't know.
There's very little _to_ know. He covered His tracks as no other human
being has ever done."
She was still in her public costume and hadn't taken off the gloves she
made a point of wearing as a part of that uniform; she remembered how the
rustling housekeeper in the Border castle, on whom she had begun by
modelling herself, had worn them. She seemed official and slightly distant.
"To cover His tracks He must have had to exist. Have we got to give
_that_ up?"
"No, I don't ask you to give it up _yet_. But there's very little to go
upon."
"And is that what I'm to tell Them in return for everything?"
Gedge waited--he walked about. The place was doubly still after the bustle of
the day, and the summer evening rested on it as a blessing, making it, in its
small state and ancientry, mellow and sweet. It was good to be there and it
would be good to stay. At the same time there was something incalculable in the
effect on one's nerves of the great gregarious density. This was an attitude
that had nothing to do with degrees and shades, the attitude of wanting all or
nothing. And you couldn't talk things over with it. You could only do that with
friends, and then but in cases where you were sure the friends wouldn't betray
you. "Couldn't you adopt," he replied at last, "a slightly more discreet method?
What we can say is that things have been _said_; that's all we have to do with.
'And is this really'--when they jam their umbrellas into the floor--'the very
_spot_ where He was born?' 'So it has, from a long time back, been described as
being.' Couldn't one meet Them, to be decent a little, in some such way as
that?"