"_A NEW FOOT on The FLOOR_"
When our daughter (are there any two other words so well-wed as these?
What music their union makes!) was only about ten years old, her mother,
which is my wife writ large and heavenly, and I were taking tea at
Inglewood, which my long-suffering readers will remember as the home
which first welcomed me to New Jedboro and the residence of Mr. Michael
Blake. When our meal was over, Mr. Blake and I were enjoying a quiet
game of billiards, which was a game I loved. But I may have more to say
about this later on, for so had some of my pious people, though I am
inclined to think that they objected not so much because they thought
the game was wrong as because they feared I was enjoying it. For, to
some truly good Scotch folk the measure of enjoyableness is the measure
of sin, and a thing needeth no greater fault than to be guilty of
deliciousness. But the converse of this they also hold as true, namely,
that what maketh miserable is of God, and to be wretched is to be pious
at the heart. For which reason, I have observed oftentimes, they deem
that to be a truly well-spent Sabbath day which had banished all
possible happiness from their children's lives, bringing them to its
close limp and cramped and sore, but catechism-full and with a good mark
in the book of life for every weary hour.
Was it Johnson who ventured the opinion that the Puritans put
bear-baiting under the ban, not because it was painful to the bears but
because it was pleasant to the people? Whether it was or no, I shall not
discuss it. Neither shall I discuss the ethics of billiards, unless it
be to say this much, that if there be games in heaven, I do not doubt it
will have an honoured place, for it is an ivory game and truthful,
abhorring vagrant luck and scoring only by eternal laws which Euclid
made his own. And I make no doubt that many a hand hath plied the
billiard cue which long ere this hath touched with its finger-tips the
ivory gates and golden.
But to return. We were in the very midst of our game, of which I
remember very little, often and often though I have tried to recall
every feature of that eventful night. But I do recall that we spoke
about our Margaret, and there was a deep strain of wistful envy in Mr.
Blake's voice. I remember well his saying that God's richest earthly
gift was that of wife and child and hearth.
"Though I speak," he added almost bitterly, "as I might speak of distant
stars, for I have no one of the three," and his lips closed tightly
while he drove his ball with a savage hand.
"You have not wife or child," I said, "but no man who has been sheltered
by your friendship can agree with you about your hearth. It has warmed
my heart too many times when that heart was cold."
"There is no hearth where there is neither wife nor child," he answered
almost passionately. "Hearths are not built with hands. Do you not know,
sir, that if a man would have a fireside he must begin to kindle it when
youth is still throbbing in his heart? From boyhood up he is preparing
it, or else he is quenching it in darkness. Do you know, sir, if I were
a preacher I would burn that into young men's hearts till they would
feel that heaven or hell were all bound up with how they reverence or
despise their future fireside. I would tell them that no man can lay his
hearth in ashes in the hot days of youth, and then build it up again in
the rainy days of age.
"I would tell every wastrel, and every man who is rehearsing hell with
his youthful follies, that he cannot eat his cake and have it. For
hearth and wife and child are not for him. I would tell him that he
cannot breed a cancer in his heart while he is young and cure it with
some pious perfume brewed by the hand of age. I would tell them that
till my lips blistered, and then they should hear of the grace of God
till those same lips were rosy with its healing."
Amazed, I stood and gazed at him, for there was a fearful fascination in
his face. The face of a saint it was, with that warlike peace which only
a battling and victorious life can give, but it had for the time the
half-hunted look of one who trembles at the sound of footsteps he had
hoped were forever still, of one whose soul was overstormed by surging
waves of memory. There is sometimes a dread ghastliness in the thought
that out of the abundance of a man's heart his mouth is speaking, though
he declares it not. It is like the procession of a naked soul; or, to
change the figure, it is like beholding a man unearth some very corpse
he had long sought to hide.
It was his turn to play--ah me! the grim variety of life--and his ball
failed but narrowly of a delicate ambition.
"If I could but have it back and play it over," I heard him rather sigh
than say, whereat I bethought myself of the high allegory of a game.
Musing still, I stood apart, gazing as one gazes at a fire, which in
very truth I was.
"It is your shot, sir," he said, in a voice as passionless as when I
first heard it years before.