"Yes, I thought I'd better ask your advice."
"Do you mean for yourself?" Ames asked after a moment, "but I
supposed--I always supposed you were going into your father's business;
he has some business, hasn't he, or am I wrong?"
"Into my father's business!" Waters laughed comfortably. "No, I
shouldn't ever think of that. No, I want to live in London."
"Oh, I see!"
"Yes, of course if anything very good was offered me somewhere
else,--but no, I think I prefer London. What would you advise?"
"What I should advise!" Ames said, looking at him hopelessly. "I suppose
you've thought of something for yourself; you have some preference?"
"Preference? Oh no, nothing special. I thought I'd ask you."
Again Ames looked at him with an odd expression. Then in his polite,
weary, equable voice, he said, "Well, I must try and think. I suppose
your father--what does he want you to do?"
"My father--!" Waters' voice showed what he thought of fathers. "Oh, he
said that if I had a university education, there would be something."
"Ah, did he! Well, I suppose he ought to know," Ames said doubtfully.
"Oh, he doesn't know of anything definite," Waters explained; and then,
speaking loudly, as if to a deaf man, he added, "It was only what he
thought."
"Ah, that's quite different, isn't it?" Ames exclaimed, his face
brightening.
"But surely there is a great deal to do in London," Waters continued.
Yes, there must be a good deal, Ames admitted doubtfully; at least
everyone seemed very much occupied there.
"All I want is some work, that isn't too much grind, and decent pay."
"Ah, that is all that most people want," Ames observed, with half a
sigh.
"Of course at first I shouldn't expect anything very much," Waters went
on, hardly heeding his tutor's vague remarks; and he explained again
that he only wanted some decent occupation, with pay enough to live on.
Then he waited, gazing at his tutor's blank face as one might gaze at a
revolving lighthouse, waiting for its flash of light. As nothing came,
however, he said, "Surely there are lots of places where they want
Oxford men?"
"Possibly there were"; Ames looked as if he, however, had never heard of
them.
"But Grant and Vaughan had got good places, and Sturdy, they said, was
doing well at the Bar."
"Ah, I see you mean those clever men, who do so well in the Schools and
all. You're quite right; a man like Cornish for instance; I thought you
meant more the average man."
No, it wasn't Cornish, Waters meant; it wasn't the average man either.
"I mean more the man--what you call an all-round-man."
"What I call an all-round-man?" Ames looked bewildered.
"I mean," Waters continued, with desperate efforts to explain himself,
"I mean the man who is rather good all round, rows, and that sort of
thing. Perhaps he didn't get a First; didn't care much what he got,
didn't approve of the system."
Ames seemed busy looking for his glasses.
"There are people who don't approve of the system," Waters went on. "I
read an article once by someone, Professor something, not approving of
examinations. I forget just who it was."
"Professor Freeman, perhaps?"
"Yes, that's it! Well now, a man like that, what is he going to do?"
Waters asked, with renewed confidence.
"But Professor Freeman is dead, you know."
"But,--but,--I'm not speaking of Professor Freeman."
"How would you like to be a solicitor?" Ames asked, putting on his
glasses.
"A solicitor! oh, I shouldn't care for that," Waters promptly replied.
"You see it isn't the kind of work I like, and then the vacations are
too short."
Ames said nothing. He was sitting unusually still, and his large glasses
reflecting the light, resembled two enormous shining oval eyes in the
smoothness of his face. What he was really looking at Waters could not
tell, and he grew more and more uncomfortable. At last, with diminished
confidence, "There _are_ men who get on well at the Bar?" he said.
"There are."
"And if I were living in London I might do some writing? They do that,
don't they?"
"They do." Then Ames sighed and shook his head. "I think you had better
go home, Waters," he added; "I'm afraid there's nothing else. If you had
spoken to me before, I should have told you this."
"Oh, good Lord, Mr. Ames, you don't mean there's nothing!" Waters sat up
in his chair, with open mouth, staring at his tutor.
"Well, you know, I'm afraid there isn't."
"Oh but, Mr. Ames, there must be something!"
"Well you can try; but honestly, I think you had--if your father can
have you--I think you had better go home."
Waters looked at him. "He knows I helped to paint his door red last
week," the young man muttered to himself, "and now he's furious about
it."
But the comfort of this ebbed away gradually, as Ames went on to
describe the different professions, the struggle for success, the cruel
competition. Ames indeed seemed to have focussed himself, and instead of
the vague astonished way in which he was wont to speak of practical
affairs, he now showed a precision, and clearness, and knowledge of life
that was really appalling. "I am sorry it is so, Waters," he ended. "We
live pleasantly here, and we almost forget what the world outside is
like."
"I do think some one might have told me, Mr. Ames; I do indeed." Waters
could have cried with disappointment.
"You would never have believed it, Waters; we none of us can believe
that the world doesn't need us. It's hard, but whether we live or die,
the world doesn't care, can get on perfectly well without us. We each
have to find it out for ourselves." He sighed as if he too had once
known youth and hope, and the indifference of the world.
"But, Mr. Ames, I can't go home, indeed I can't. My other brother was
going into the business, and I always told people,--and everybody
supposed,--and to think that all my time here is wasted."
"Oh, not exactly wasted," Ames answered kindly. "It will always help
you, to be an Oxford man, and you will be sure to find it pleasanter at
home than you expected." Then beginning again to look at his papers, he
added, more in his old distant way, "I'll see you again, I hope, before
you go down. They'll miss you in College," he added politely, as Waters
moved towards the door. "I'm sure the 'Torpid'--"
"I might be a solicitor, Mr. Ames," Waters said in a meek voice, as he
stood disconsolately, his hand on the door-knob.
"Well, talk it over with your father," Ames replied, without looking up.
"It takes time and money you know. You think he wouldn't mind?"
"Oh no, he won't mind," Waters said, although he knew his father would
mind very much indeed.
He walked away slowly through the familiar quadrangle. His father!--how
would he ever dare tell his father? But no, it couldn't be true that
there was nothing for him, that nobody wanted him. He was well known in
College, had played in the football team, and rowed in the "Torpid," and
people liked him. Besides it was such a thing, they always said, to be
an English gentleman; and then Oxford culture--and you read of the
successful careers of rowing men, how they became Cabinet Ministers,
and Bishops, and things. No, it couldn't be true....
"Poor Lo-Ben," he said, patting his dog tenderly, as he unchained him in
the porch. "Poor old Lo-Ben, you'll stick to your master, won't you?"
The dog whined and licked the young man's hand, and they went out into
the street together.
Well, they would live alone, he and Lo-Ben, and they would go out for
lonely walks, after the long dreary days of work in his father's office.
And the people there would see him, and wonder about him; but he would
always be distant, only coldly polite when they met. Sometimes his old
College friends would come to stay in the neighbourhood; but they would
not look him up: all his friends would forget him, though he would
always remember them. And that afternoon they would all drive off
without him, probably they would be really glad not to have him. And
they would be perfectly happy; but he would never be happy again.
For no, it was not true, what Ames had said, about his getting to like
it at home. He would always hate it, he told himself desperately; and
life and everything was hateful; there was a chill in the sunshine, the
streets seemed full of noise and work and ugly working people. What was
the good of it? he wondered. And Ames said it was all like that. What
was the good of it, he asked again, when he flung himself down into one
of the great easy chairs in his lodgings. If you had to live in a dirty
provincial town, and sit on a stool all day, what was the good? Of
course some of the men at home seemed happy enough; they had their
cricket on Saturdays and things; but then they weren't university men.
For himself, Waters decided, for the first time in his life considering
in his concrete way the problem of existence, for himself it was all
finished; there was nothing more in life which could give him pleasure.
The servant brought up luncheon. At first Waters thought he could eat
nothing, and when he did begin in a melancholy way, he bitterly
contrasted his lonely meal with the happy party in College. He felt an
immense pity for himself; he would die young, he was sure; the life
might even drive him to suicide--such things had happened.
After his luncheon and beer he lit his pipe. By this time Buller and
Philpotts must have finished their luncheon too, and have started for
the stables. They would wonder at first why he did not come, but they
would not really care.
And now they must have started. He had done well not to go with them; he
would not have enjoyed it, Waters assured himself, repeating the old
phrases; he would never enjoy anything again. He looked at his watch
furtively. What! they wouldn't start for three minutes yet. Then he had
still just time enough to catch them. He seized his hat, and without
waiting for a reason--he had no time to wait--he hurried out, Lo-Ben
barking at his heels.
_The Claim of the Past_
They had all been to luncheon with Mr. Windus, and now, under his
guidance, they started out to see the College, walking together across
the quadrangle through the summer sunshine. Mr. Windus talked to Mrs.
Ellwood of Dalmouth, the Devonshire town where she lived, and he had
friends; the others were gossiping of the heat, the Oxford dances, while
Ruth Ellwood and young Rutherford came last of all.
Rutherford too belonged to Dalmouth, was, indeed, a cousin of the
Ellwoods--all the Dalmouth families were somehow related; but going
away early to school, and afterwards to Oxford, he had come at last to
seem more like a stranger to them than a friend or cousin. And this
invitation to meet the Ellwoods he had accepted merely out of
politeness; he was busy with his work, felt in no mood for the Oxford
gaieties, and anyhow cared, or thought he cared, very little indeed for
Dalmouth or the Dalmouth people.
But soon he had begun to listen with pleasure and interest to the home
news, as his charming cousin told it.
"And so the town isn't much changed?" he asked; "and the different
cousins, what has become of them all?"
With eager interest she went on telling him of all the old families, who
lived in the different houses; how the young girls had grown up--there
were so many pretty ones among the cousins!--and the young men had gone
into the family offices. Some of them were married and settled down
already.
"And Aunt Warner's house under the beeches, with its lawn, where we used
to play, is it just the same?"
"Oh, yes, just the same, only the Bartons live there now--Uncle James's
family; and on Thursdays we meet there--I mean the cousins' Tennis
Club--and when it rains we dance in the old drawing room. But how
shocked dear old Aunt Warner would have been to see us!" Then, as they
went through the gateway into the College garden, she added, "I'm afraid
all this gossip bores you; it's interesting for us who live at home, but
for other people--"
"Oh, but I belong to Dalmouth!" he protested.
"Of course you do, only it's so long since you've been there," she said
in half apology, "and we thought--I thought you didn't care."
It was indeed a long time, it was years since he had been there, he
remembered with a certain regret for the preoccupation, the youthful
intolerance, that had made him half despise his home. It was a charming
place after all, the grey seaport town with its wharves, and shipping,
and narrow streets, and the pleasant homes and gardens just outside
where his cousins and uncles, the merchants, lived--where as a boy he
had lived. How well he remembered watching, on summer afternoons, the
white sails of the family ships, as they floated up with the tide past
the green lawns and square old houses. A pleasant life it must be there,
he thought, and quite untroubled in its tranquil interests by any great
ambitions or ideas--the echoes of which, indeed, could hardly reach
them in their quiet old corner of the world.
And, as they talked, the young man began to fancy idly what his own life
would have been, had he never gone away from the old Devonshire town. It
had been intended, of course, that he should stay there, and take his
own part in the family concerns; even yet his uncles were keeping a
place for him; and although they feared he was quite spoiled by Oxford,
yet they would welcome him back, he knew, should he only give up those
ambitions, that to them--and to himself sometimes!--seemed so
impossible, so dreamy and unreal.
Ruth Ellwood stopped now and then to look at the garden flowers. "What
lovely irises, and how quaint those roses are, trained so stiffly on the
old walls."
"Are you fond of gardening?" he asked.
She was very fond of it, she said--not that she knew much about it! But
she liked planting things and tying them up, and she always gathered the
flowers for the house. Things grew so well at Dalmouth--roses and
peonies, and great chrysanthemums in the autumn. Only it made her a
little sad to see the chrysanthemums; their summers were so lovely!
Rutherford knew the house in which his cousin lived, and now he could
almost see her there, moving over the sweet grass, hatless, in the
morning light, to gather roses, filling old china bowls with their
fragrant leaves; or walking home on rainy evenings past the great cedar,
the wet lawn, and borders of dripping flowers.
"How beautiful she is!" he thought, looking furtively at her. The
impression of this beauty, her pleasant voice, the friendly people she
spoke of, and all the memories that made them seem so intimate together,
affected him with a curious fresh sense of happiness, coming into his
life, which had been of late somewhat discouraged and lonely, with a
charm as real and actual as that of the warmth of the sun, the scent of
roses.
They had reached the end of the garden, and as they turned back, still
following the others, he said hesitatingly to his companion something
about coming to Dalmouth soon for a visit.
"Oh, do come!" she cried, "I'm sure you'll enjoy it, and they will all
be so glad to see you."
"I hope so--but I'm afraid they must think rather badly of me--will be
prejudiced against me; you will have to introduce me."
"Oh, I will--only really, they won't be prejudiced against you." Then
she added, "Oxford is so charming!" in a way that touched Rutherford a
little. She at least, in spite of all she had heard at home, plainly
could see nothing so dreadful or dangerous in Oxford, or her cousin,
after all!
Yes, Oxford was charming, she said again, and not at all what she had
expected--at first she had been really almost afraid to come! But it was
all so pleasant; why had people such a prejudice against the
University?--her two brothers wanted to come, but her father would not
hear of it. But how could it unfit them for living at home? She had seen
how the undergraduates lived. And her brothers would have enjoyed it so.
She had been in several of the Colleges now, and had been on the river,
and was going out to tea that afternoon, and afterwards, to a dance.
"Tell me," she asked, as they followed the others towards the chapel
door, "are you going to any of the dances?"
He was afraid he wouldn't have the time, he said.
"Oh, what a pity, you ought to come," she cried; but her voice was
hushed when, out of the glare and sunshine, they went into the blue
obscurity, the cool old smell and quiet of the chapel.
The ladies looked at the windows, the religious carving; and their
movement, as they went about, filled with a rustling sound the vacant
silence of the place. Then they all gathered in a group while one of the
Fellows told them something of the history of the chapel: how it had
been built in the fourteenth century, and how ever since then the
members of the College had worshipped there, and among them many whose
names had afterwards grown famous.
"Tell me," Ruth Ellwood whispered, as they walked away, "is this where
the undergraduates sit; where do you sit?" He showed her the Scholars'
seats, and the old brass eagle from which they read the lessons, and
then, when they went through the ante-chapel, she paused a moment,
looking at the inscriptions and monuments.
"Were there any nice old epitaphs?" she asked. "Do show them to me, if
there are."
The rest of the party had left the chapel, but could still be seen
through the open door standing not far off in the sunshine, and the
gossip of their voices came in faintly now and then.
The old brasses, dating from Gothic times, bore inscriptions in rhyming
Latin, that Rutherford read and translated to his companion; there were
monuments of a later time, adorned with urns, cherubs, and
garlands--old trappings of death that made death itself seem almost
quaint and charming. But in the seventeenth century the tranquil records
of the scholars' lives were disturbed by echoes of old war and exile.
"Reader, look to thy feet! Honest and Loyal men are sleeping under
Thee," one inscription ran; and the name of more than one was recorded
"who, when Loyalty and the Church fainted, lay down and Died."
Other monuments were put up to the memory of young men who had died at
College. Well-born and modest, the old Latin described them, and dead,
centuries ago, in the flower of their fruitless years. "Vivere dulce
fuit!" one of them had complained, as four hundred years before, in
florid Latin, he bade farewell to youth and hope.
Of another it was quaintly said, "Talis erat vita, qualis stylus,
elegans et pura"; while another undergraduate's virtues were recorded in
verses ending with the line,
"Expertus praedico, tutor eram."
Then there was an inscription in English verse, from some Cavalier poet,
Rutherford thought,
"Him while fresh and fragrant Time
Cherisht in his golden prime;
Ere Hebe's hand had overlaid
His smooth cheeks with downy shade,
The rush of Death's unruly wave
Swept him off into his grave.
* * * * *
Eyes are vocall, teares have tongues,
And there be words not made with lungs;
Sententious showres: Oh let them fall!
Their cadence is rhetoricall."
Another of the same date recorded the deeds of the young
scholar-soldiers "who, at the news of Battle, changed their Gownes for
Armour, and Faithfully served King Charles I. from Edge Hill fight, to
the End of those unhappie Wars." But one youth in that early conflict
had been killed in the pursuit of victory "after Gloriously redeeming,
with his own hands, the banner Royal of the King."
So they linger there for a few moments, passing from one to another of
the epitaphs, with their records of knightly effort, of the ideal and
romantic hopes of youth, completed afterwards, or quenched long ago by
early death. And to the young man, as he spells them out, they seem at
last to form a continuing tradition of lives dauntlessly lived and lost,
and then recorded here, briefly, in this ancient corner of the College.
His companion, too, was vaguely charmed and touched by the old
inscriptions, and as they turned at last to go out she stopped in front
of another tablet. Would he read it? It was too high for her to see.
Rutherford looked at it. "It's a modern one, I don't think it will
interest you--"
"Oh yes, it will--do read it."
He looked at it in silence for a minute. Faint sounds of music floated
into the dim chapel from the world outside--music, and distant voices
calling. Then he read the name and date; a young man who had been
drowned the year before. "His companions at School and College have
erected this tablet, wishing to preserve the recollection of one who was
much beloved, and whose influence for good was greatly felt in this
place. He was of a courageous and enthusiastic nature; the example, had
he lived, of his generous ambitions--" But in the middle, Rutherford's
voice changed a little, and with a shiver his cousin turned and went
away. Had she guessed that they had been friends, these two, or was it
merely that she felt at last the chill of the place, and of all the old
dead about her?
In a moment the young man turns to go out too. But as he looks through
the dimness of the chapel on the summer and sunlight, and his cousin
standing there outside the door, how far it all seems, how unreal! Only
real to him is a sense of the briefness of life, and of the great,
difficult things that may nevertheless be done or attempted before death
comes. And as he walks away again with his cousin, he is quite certain,
now at last, that this is no mere emotion or boyish enthusiasm, but an
influence that for evil or good must rule his life--must come, at least,
between him and any choice of ease and the common happiness.
_A Broken Journey_