"Do you remember us?" the gentleman asked and smiled--with the lady beside
him smiling too; speaking so much less as an earnest pilgrim or as a
tiresome tourist than as an old acquaintance. It was history repeating
itself as Gedge had somehow never expected, with almost everything the same
except that the evening was now a mild April-end, except that the visitors
had put off mourning and showed all their bravery--besides showing, as he
doubtless did himself, though so differently, for a little older; except,
above all, that--oh seeing them again suddenly affected him not a bit as
the thing he'd have supposed it. "We're in England again and we were near;
I've a brother at Oxford with whom we've been spending a day, so that we
thought we'd come over." This the young man pleasantly said while our
friend took in the queer fact that he must himself seem to them rather
coldly to gape. They had come in the same way at the quiet close; another
August had passed, and this was the second spring; the Birthplace, given
the hour, was about to suspend operations till the morrow; the last
lingerer had gone and the fancy of the visitors was once more for a look
round by themselves. This represented surely no greater presumption than
the terms on which they had last parted with him seemed to warrant; so that
if he did inconsequently stare it was just in fact because he was so
supremely far from having forgotten them. But the sight of the pair luckily
had a double effect, and the first precipitated the second--the second
being really his sudden vision that everything perhaps depended for him on
his recognising no complication. He must go straight on, since it was what
had for more than a year now so handsomely answered; he must brazen it out
consistently, since that only was what his dignity was at last reduced to.
He mustn't be afraid in one way any more than he had been in another;
besides which it came over him to the point of his flushing for it that
their visit, in its essence, must have been for himself. It was good
society again, and _they_ were the same. It wasn't for him therefore to
behave as if he couldn't meet them.
These deep vibrations, on Gedge's part, were as quick as they were deep;
they came in fact all at once, so that his response, his declaration that
it was all right--"Oh _rather_; the hour doesn't matter for _you_!"--had
hung fire but an instant; and when they were well across the threshold and
the door closed behind them, housed in the twilight of the temple, where,
as before, the votive offerings glimmered on the walls, he drew the long
breath of one who might by a self-betrayal have done something too
dreadful. For what had brought them back was indubitably not the glamour of
the shrine itself--since he had had a glimpse of their analysis of that
quantity; but their critical (not to say their sentimental) interest in the
queer case of the priest. Their call was the tribute of curiosity, of
sympathy, of a compassion really, as such things went, exquisite--a tribute
_to_ that queerness which entitled them to the frankest welcome. They had
wanted, for the generous wonder of it, to judge how he was getting on, how
such a man in such a place _could_; and they had doubtless more than
half-expected to see the door opened by somebody who had succeeded him.
Well, somebody _had_--only with a strange equivocation; as they would have,
poor things, to make out themselves, an embarrassment for which he pitied
them. Nothing could have been more odd, but verily it was this troubled
vision of their possible bewilderment, and this compunctious view of such a
return for their amenity, that practically determined in him his tone. The
lapse of the months had but made their name familiar to him; they had on
the other occasion inscribed it, among the thousand names, in the current
public register, and he had since then, for reasons of his own, reasons of
feeling, again and again turned back to it. It was nothing in itself; it
told him nothing--"Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes, New York"--one of those
American labels that were just like every other American label and that
were precisely the most remarkable thing about people reduced to achieving
an identity in such other ways. They could be Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes and
yet could be, with all presumptions missing--well, what these callers were.
It had quickly enough indeed cleared the situation a little further that
his friends had absolutely, the other time, as it came back to him, warned
him of his original danger, their anxiety about which had been the last
note sounded among them. What he was afraid of, with this reminiscence, was
that, finding him still safe, they would, the next thing, definitely
congratulate him and perhaps even, no less candidly, ask him how he had
managed. It was with the sense of nipping some such inquiry in the bud
that, losing no time and holding himself with a firm grip, he began on the
spot, downstairs, to make plain to them how he had managed. He routed the
possibility of the question in short by the assurance of his answer. "Yes,
yes, I'm still here; I suppose it _is_ in a manner to one's profit that one
does, such as it is, one's best." He did his best on the present occasion,
did it with the gravest face he had ever worn and a soft serenity that was
like a large damp sponge passed over their previous meeting--over
everything in it, that is, but the fact of its pleasantness.
"We stand here, you see, in the old living-room, happily still to be
reconstructed in the mind's eye, in spite of the havoc of time, which we
have fortunately of late years been able to arrest. It was of course rude
and humble, but it must have been snug and quaint, and we have at least the
pleasure of knowing that the tradition in respect to the features that do
remain is delightfully uninterrupted. Across that threshold He habitually
passed; through those low windows, in childhood, He peered out into the
world that He was to make so much happier by the gift to it of His genius;
over the boards of this floor--that is over _some_ of them, for we mustn't
be carried away!--his little feet often pattered; and the beams of this
ceiling (we must really in some places take care of _our_ heads!) he
endeavoured, in boyish strife, to jump up and touch. It's not often that in
the early home of genius and renown the whole tenor of existence is laid so
bare, not often that we are able to retrace, from point to point and from
step to step, its connexion with objects, with influences--to build it
round again with the little solid facts out of which it sprang. This
therefore, I need scarcely remind you, is what makes the small space
between these walls--so modest to measurement, so insignificant of
aspect--unique on all the earth. _There's nothing like it_," Morris Gedge
went on, insisting as solemnly and softly, for his bewildered hearers, as
over a pulpit-edge; "there's nothing at all like it anywhere in the world.
There's nothing, only reflect, for the combination of greatness and, as we
venture to say, of intimacy. You may find elsewhere perhaps absolutely
fewer changes, but where shall you find a _Presence_ equally diffused,
uncontested and undisturbed? Where in particular shall you find, on the
part of the abiding spirit, an equally towering eminence? You may find
elsewhere eminence of a considerable order, but where shall you find _with_
it, don't you see, changes after all so few and the contemporary element
caught so, as it were, in the very fact?" His visitors, at first confounded
but gradually spellbound, were still gaping with the universal
gape--wondering, he judged, into what strange pleasantry he had been
suddenly moved to explode, and yet beginning to see in him an intention
beyond a joke, so that they started, at this point, they almost jumped,
when, by as rapid a transition, he made, toward the old fireplace, a dash
that seemed to illustrate precisely the act of eager catching. "It is in
this old chimney-corner, the quaint inglenook of our ancestors--just there
in the far angle, where His little stool was placed, and where, I daresay,
if we could look close enough, we should find the hearth stone scraped with
His little feet--that we see the inconceivable child gazing into the blaze
of the old oaken logs and making out there pictures and stories, see Him
conning, with curly bent head, His well-worn hornbook, or poring over some
scrap of an ancient ballad, some page of some such rudely-bound volume of
chronicles as lay, we may be sure, in His father's window-seat."
It was, he even himself felt at this moment, wonderfully done; no auditors,
for all his thousands, had ever yet so inspired him. The odd slightly
alarmed shyness in the two faces, as if in a drawing-room, in their "good
society" exactly, some act incongruous, something grazing the indecent, had
abruptly been perpetrated, the painful reality of which stayed itself
before coming home--the visible effect on his friends in fine wound him up
as to the sense that _they_ were worth the trick. It came of itself now--he
had got it so by heart; but perhaps really it had never come so well, with
the staleness so disguised, the interest so renewed and the clerical
unction demanded by the priestly character so successfully distilled. Mr.
Hayes of New York had more than once looked at his wife, and Mrs. Hayes of
New York had more than once looked at her husband--only, up to now, with a
stolen glance, with eyes it hadn't been easy to detach from the remarkable
countenance by the aid of which their entertainer held them. At present,
however, after an exchange less furtive, they ventured on a sign that they
hadn't been appealed to in vain. "Charming, charming, Mr. Gedge!" Mr. Hayes
broke out. "We feel that we've caught you in the mood."
His wife hastened to assent--it eased the tension. "It _would_ be quite the
way; except," she smiled, "that you'd be too dangerous. You've really a
genius!"
Gedge looked at her hard, but yielding no inch, even though she touched him
there at a point of consciousness that quivered. This was the prodigy for
him, and had been, the year through--that he did it all, he found, easily,
did it better than he had done anything else in life; with so high and
broad an effect, in truth, an inspiration so rich and free, that his poor
wife now, literally, had been moved more than once to fresh fear. She had
had her bad moments, he knew, after taking the measure of his new
direction--moments of readjusted suspicion in which she wondered if he
hadn't simply adopted another, a different perversity. There would be more
than one fashion of giving away the Show, and wasn't _this_ perhaps a
question of giving it away by excess? He could dish them by too much
romance as well as by too little; she hadn't hitherto fairly grasped that
there might _be_ too much. It was a way like another, at any rate, of
reducing the place to the absurd; which reduction, if he didn't look out,
would reduce _them_ again to the prospect of the streets, and this time
surely without appeal. It all depended indeed--he knew she knew that--on
how much Grant-Jackson and the others, how much the Body, in a word, would
take. He knew she knew what he himself held it would take--that he
considered no limit could be imputed to the quantity. They simply wanted it
piled up, and so did every one else; wherefore if no one reported him as
before why were They to be uneasy? It was in consequence of idiots tempted
to reason that he had been dealt with before; but as there was now no form
of idiocy that he didn't systematically flatter, goading it on really to
its _own_ private doom, who was ever to pull the string of the guillotine?
The axe was in the air--yes; but in a world gorged to satiety there were no
revolutions. And it had been vain for Isabel to ask if the other
thunder-growl also hadn't come out of the blue. There was actually proof
positive that the winds were now at rest. How could they be more so?--he
appealed to the receipts. These were golden days--the Show had never so
flourished. So he had argued, so he was arguing still--and, it had to be
owned, with every appearance in his favour. Yet if he inwardly winced at
the tribute to his plausibility rendered by his flushed friends, this was
because he felt in it the real ground of his optimism. The charming woman
before him acknowledged his "genius" as he himself had had to do. He had
been surprised at his facility until he had grown used to it. Whether or no
he had, as a fresh menace to his future, found a new perversity, he had
found a vocation much older, evidently, than he had at first been prepared
to recognise. He had done himself injustice. He liked to be brave because
it came so easy; he could measure it off by the yard. It was in the
Birthroom, above all, that he continued to do this, having ushered up his
companions without, as he was still more elated to feel, the turn of a
hair. She might take it as she liked, but he had had the lucidity--all,
that is, for his own safety--to meet without the grace of an answer the
homage of her beautiful smile. She took it apparently, and her husband took
it, but as a part of his odd humour, and they followed him aloft with faces
now a little more responsive to the manner in which on _that_ spot he would
naturally come out. He came out, according to the word of his assured
private receipt, "strong." He missed a little, in truth, the usual
round-eyed question from them--the inveterate artless cue with which, from
moment to moment, clustered troops had for a year obliged him. Mr. and Mrs.
Hayes were from New York, but it was a little like singing, as he had heard
one of his Americans once say about something, to a Boston audience. He did
none the less what he could, and it was ever his practice to stop still at
a certain spot in the room and, after having secured attention by look and
gesture, suddenly shoot off: "Here!"
They always understood, the good people--he could fairly love them now for it;
they always said breathlessly and unanimously "There?" and stared down at the
designated point quite as if some trace of the grand event were still to be made
out. This movement produced he again looked round. "Consider it well: _the_ spot
of earth----!" "Oh but it isn't _earth_!" the boldest spirit--there was always a
boldest--would generally pipe out. Then the guardian of the Birthplace would be
truly superior--as if the unfortunate had figured the Immortal coming up, like a
potato, through the soil. "I'm not suggesting that He was born on the bare
ground. He was born _here_!"--with an uncompromising dig of his heel. "There
ought to be a brass, with an inscription, let in." "Into the floor?"--it always
came. "Birth and burial: seedtime, summer, autumn!"--that always, with its
special right cadence, thanks to his unfailing spring, came too. "Why not as
well as into the pavement of the church?--you've _seen_ our grand old church?"
The former of which questions nobody ever answered--abounding, on the other
hand, to make up, in relation to the latter. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes even were at
first left dumb by it--not indeed, to do them justice, having uttered the word
that called for it. They had uttered no word while he kept the game up, and
(though that made it a little more difficult) he could yet stand triumphant
before them after he had finished with his flourish. Only then it was that Mr.
Hayes of New York broke silence.
"Well, if we wanted to see I think I may say we're quite satisfied. As my
wife says, it _would_ seem your line." He spoke now, visibly, with more
ease, as if a light had come: though he made no joke of it, for a reason
that presently appeared. They were coming down the little stair, and it was
on the descent that his companion added her word.
"Do you know what we half _did_ think----?" And then to her husband: "Is it
dreadful to tell him?" They were in the room below, and the young woman,
also relieved, expressed the feeling with gaiety. She smiled as before at
Morris Gedge, treating him as a person with whom relations were possible,
yet remaining just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes's opinion. "We
_have_ awfully wanted--from what we had heard." But she met her husband's
graver face; he was not quite out of the wood. At this she was slightly
flurried--but she cut it short. "You must know--don't you?--that, with the
crowds who listen to you, we'd have heard."
He looked from one to the other, and once more again, with force, something
came over him. They had kept him in mind, they were neither ashamed nor
afraid to show it, and it was positively an interest on the part of this
charming creature and this keen cautious gentleman, an interest resisting
oblivion and surviving separation, that had governed their return. Their
other visit had been the brightest thing that had ever happened to him, but
this was the gravest; so that at the end of a minute something broke in him
and his mask dropped of itself. He chucked, as he would have said,
consistency; which, in its extinction, left the tears in his eyes. His
smile was therefore queer. "Heard how I'm going it?"
The young man, though still looking at him hard, felt sure, with this, of
his own ground. "Of course you're tremendously talked about. You've gone
round the world."
"You've heard of me in America?"
"Why almost of nothing else!"
"That was what made us feel----!" Mrs. Hayes contributed.
"That you must see for yourselves?" Again he compared, poor Gedge, their
faces. "Do you mean I excite--a--scandal?"
"Dear no! Admiration. You renew so," the young man observed, "the
interest."
"Ah there it is!" said Gedge with eyes of adventure that seemed to rest
beyond the Atlantic.
"They listen, month after month, when they're out here, as you must have
seen; then they go home and talk. But they sing your praise."