THE PERFECT LOVER
Tommy has not lasted. More than once since it became known that I was
writing his life I have been asked whether there ever really was such
a person, and I am afraid to inquire for his books at the library lest
they are no longer there. A recent project to bring out a new edition,
with introductions by some other Tommy, received so little support
that it fell to the ground. It must be admitted that, so far as the
great public is concerned, Thomas Sandys is done for.
They have even forgotten the manner of his death, though probably no
young writer with an eye on posterity ever had a better send-off. We
really thought at the time that Tommy had found a way.
The surmise at Rintoul, immediately accepted by the world as a fact,
was that he had been climbing the wall to obtain for Grizel the
flowers accidentally left in the garden, and it at once tipped the
tragedy with gold. The newspapers, which were in the middle of the
dull season, thanked their gods for Tommy, and enthusiastically set to
work on him. Great minds wrote criticisms of what they called his
life-work. The many persons who had been the first to discover him
said so again. His friends were in demand for the most trivial
reminiscences. Unhappy Pym cleared £ll 10s.
Shall we quote? It is nearly always done at this stage of the
biography, so now for the testimonials to prove that our hero was
without a flaw. A few specimens will suffice if we select some that
are very like many of the others. It keeps Grizel waiting, but Tommy,
as you have seen, was always the great one; she existed only that he
might show how great he was. "Busy among us of late," says one, "has
been the grim visitor who knocks with equal confidence at the doors of
the gifted and the ungifted, the pauper and the prince, and twice in
one short month has he taken from us men of an eminence greater
perhaps than that of Mr. Sandys; but of them it could be said their
work was finished, while his sun sinks tragically when it is yet day.
Not by what his riper years might have achieved can this pure, spirit
now be judged, and to us, we confess, there is something infinitely
pathetic in that thought. We would fain shut our eyes, and open them
again at twenty years hence, with Mr. Sandys in the fulness of his
powers. It is not to be. What he might have become is hidden from us;
what he was we know. He was little more than a stripling when he
'burst upon the town' to be its marvel--and to die; a 'marvellous boy'
indeed; yet how unlike in character and in the nobility of his short
life, as in the mournful yet lovely circumstances of his death, to
that other Might-Have-Been who 'perished in his pride.' Our young men
of letters have travelled far since the days of Chatterton. Time was
when a riotous life was considered part of their calling--when they
shunned the domestic ties and actually held that the consummate artist
is able to love nothing but the creations of his fancy. It is such men
as Thomas Sandys who have exploded that pernicious fallacy....
"Whether his name will march down the ages is not for us, his
contemporaries, to determine. He had the most modest opinion of his
own work, and was humbled rather than elated when he heard it praised.
No one ever loved praise less; to be pointed at as a man of
distinction was abhorrent to his shrinking nature; he seldom, indeed,
knew that he was being pointed at, for his eyes were ever on the
ground. He set no great store by the remarkable popularity of his
works. 'Nothing,' he has been heard to say to one of those gushing
ladies who were his aversion, 'nothing will so certainly perish as the
talk of the town.' It may be so, but if so, the greater the pity that
he has gone from among us before he had time to put the coping-stone
upon his work. There is a beautiful passage in one of his own books in
which he sees the spirits of gallant youth who died too young for
immortality haunting the portals of the Elysian Fields, and the great
shades come to the portal and talk with them. We venture to say that
he is at least one of these."
What was the individuality behind the work? They discussed it in
leading articles and in the correspondence columns, and the man proved
to be greater than his books. His distaste for admiration is again and
again insisted on and illustrated by many characteristic anecdotes. He
owed much to his parents, though he had the misfortune to lose them
when he was but a child. "Little is known of his father, but we
understand that he was a retired military officer in easy
circumstances. The mother was a canny Scotchwoman of lowly birth,
conspicuous for her devoutness even in a land where it is everyone's
birthright, and on their marriage, which was a singularly happy one,
they settled in London, going little into society, the world
forgetting, by the world forgot, and devoting themselves to each other
and to their two children. Of these Thomas was the elder, and as the
twig was early bent so did the tree incline. From his earliest years
he was noted for the modesty which those who remember his boyhood in
Scotland (whither the children went to an uncle on the death of their
parents) still speak of with glistening eyes. In another column will
be found some interesting recollections of Mr. Sandys by his old
schoolmaster, Mr. David Cathro, M.A., who testifies with natural pride
to the industry and amiability of his famous pupil. 'To know him,'
says Mr. Cathro, 'was to love him.'"
According to another authority, T. Sandys got his early modesty from
his father, who was of a very sweet disposition, and some instances of
this modesty are given. They are all things that Elspeth did, but
Tommy is now represented as the person who had done them. "On the
other hand, his strong will, singleness of purpose, and enviable
capacity for knowing what he wanted to be at were a heritage from his
practical and sagacious mother." "I think he was a little proud of his
strength of will," writes the R.A. who painted his portrait (now in
America), "for I remember his anxiety that it should be suggested in
the picture." But another acquaintance (a lady) replies: "He was not
proud of his strong will, but he liked to hear it spoken of, and he
once told me the reason. This strength of will was not, as is
generally supposed, inherited by him; he was born without it, and
acquired it by a tremendous effort. I believe I am the only person to
whom he confided this, for he shrank from talk about himself, looking
upon it as a form of that sentimentality which his soul abhorred."
He seems often to have warned ladies against this essentially womanish
tendency to the sentimental. "It is an odious onion, dear lady," he
would say, holding both her hands in his. If men in his presence
talked sentimentally to ladies he was so irritated that he soon found
a pretext for leaving the room. "Yet let it not be thought," says One
Who Knew Him Well, "that because he was so sternly practical himself
he was intolerant of the outpourings of the sentimental. The man, in
short, reflected the views on this subject which are so admirably
phrased in his books, works that seem to me to found one of their
chief claims to distinction on this, that at last we have a writer who
can treat intimately of human love without leaving one smear of the
onion upon his pages."
On the whole, it may be noticed, comparatively few ladies contribute
to the obituary reflections, "for the simple reason," says a simple
man, "that he went but little into female society. He who could write
so eloquently about women never seemed to know what to say to them.
Ordinary tittle-tattle from them disappointed him. I should say that
to him there was so much of the divine in women that he was depressed
when they hid their wings." This view is supported by Clubman, who
notes that Tommy would never join in the somewhat free talk about the
other sex in which many men indulge. "I remember," he says, "a man's
dinner at which two of those present, both persons of eminence,
started a theory that every man who is blessed or cursed with the
artistic instinct has at some period of his life wanted to marry a
barmaid. Mr. Sandys gave them such a look that they at once
apologized. Trivial, perhaps, but significant. On another occasion I
was in a club smoking-room when the talk was of a similar kind. Mr.
Sandys was not present. A member said, with a laugh, 'I wonder for how
long men can be together without talking gamesomely of women?' Before
any answer could be given Mr. Sandys strolled in, and immediately the
atmosphere cleared, as if someone had opened the windows. When he had
gone the member addressed turned to him who had propounded the problem
and said, 'There is your answer--as long as Sandys is in the room.'"
"A fitting epitaph, this, for Thomas Sandys," says the paper that
quotes it, "if we could not find a better. Mr. Sandys was from first
to last a man of character, but why when others falter was he always
so sure-footed? It is in the answer to this question that we find the
key to the books, and to the man who was greater than the books. He
was the Perfect Lover. As he died seeking flowers for her who had the
high honour to be his wife, so he had always lived. He gave his
affection to her, as our correspondent Miss (or Mrs.) Ailie McLean
shows, in his earliest boyhood, and from this, his one romance, he
never swerved. To the moment of his death all his beautiful thoughts
were flowers plucked for her; his books were bunches of them gathered
to place at her feet. No harm now in reading between the lines of his
books and culling what is the common knowledge of his friends in the
north, that he had to serve a long apprenticeship before he won her.
For long his attachment was unreciprocated, though she was ever his
loyal friend, and the volume called 'Unrequited Love' belongs to the
period when he thought his life must be lived alone. The circumstances
of their marriage are at once too beautiful and too painful to be
dwelt on here. Enough to say that, should the particulars ever be
given to the world, with the simple story of his life, a finer
memorial will have been raised to him than anything in stone, such as
we see a committee is already being formed to erect. We venture to
propose as a title for his biography, 'The Story of the Perfect
Lover.'"
Yes, that memorial committee was formed; but so soon do people forget
the hero of yesterday's paper that only the secretary attended the
first meeting, and he never called another. But here, five and twenty
years later, is the biography, with the title changed. You may wonder
that I had the heart to write it. I do it, I have sometimes pretended
to myself, that we may all laugh at the stripling of a rogue, but that
was never my reason. Have I been too cunning, or have you seen through
me all the time? Have you discovered that I was really pitying the boy
who was so fond of boyhood that he could not with years become a man,
telling nothing about him that was not true, but doing it with
unnecessary scorn in the hope that I might goad you into crying:
"Come, come, you are too hard on him!"
Perhaps the manner in which he went to his death deprives him of these
words. Had the castle gone on fire that day while he was at tea, and
he perished in the flames in a splendid attempt to save the life of
his enemy (a very probable thing), then you might have felt a little
liking for him. Yet he would have been precisely the same person. I
don't blame you, but you are a Tommy.
Grizel knew how he died. She found Lady Pippinworth's letter to him,
and understood who the woman was; but it was only in hopes of
obtaining the lost manuscript that she went to see her. Then Lady
Pippinworth told her all. Are you sorry that Grizel knew? I am not
sorry--I am glad. As a child, as a girl, and as a wife, the truth had
been all she wanted, and she wanted it just the same when she was a
widow. We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything
else from God, but the right to ask that.
And to her latest breath she went on loving Tommy just the same. She
thought everything out calmly for herself; she saw that there is no
great man on this earth except the man who conquers self, and that in
some the accursed thing which is in all of us may be so strong that to
battle with it and be beaten is not altogether to fail. It is foolish
to demand complete success of those we want to love. We should rejoice
when they rise for a moment above themselves, and sympathize with them
when they fall. In their heyday young lovers think each other perfect;
but a nobler love comes when they see the failings also, and this
higher love is so much more worth attaining to that they need not cry
out though it has to be beaten into them with rods. So they learn
humanity's limitations, and that the accursed thing to me is not the
accursed thing to you; but all have it, and from this comes pity for
those who have sinned, and the desire to help each other springs, for
knowledge is sympathy, and sympathy is love, and to learn it the Son
of God became a man.
And Grizel also thought anxiously about herself, and how from the time
when she was the smallest girl she had longed to be a good woman and
feared that perhaps she never should. And as she looked back at the
road she had travelled, there came along it the little girl to judge
her. She came trembling, but determined to know the truth, and she
looked at Grizel until she saw into her soul, and then she smiled,
well pleased.
Grizel lived on at Double Dykes, helping David in the old way. She was
too strong and fine a nature to succumb. Even her brightness came back
to her. They sometimes wondered at the serenity of her face. Some
still thought her a little stand-offish, for, though the pride had
gone from her walk, a distinction of manner grew upon her and made her
seem a finer lady than before. There was no other noticeable change,
except that with the years she lost her beautiful contours and became
a little angular--the old maid's figure, I believe it is sometimes
called.
No one would have dared to smile at Grizel become an old maid before
some of the young men of Thrums. They were people who would have
suffered much for her, and all because she had the courage to talk to
them of some things before their marriage-day came round. And for
their young wives who had tidings to whisper to her about the unborn
she had the pretty idea that they should live with beautiful thoughts,
so that these might become part of the child.
When Gavinia told this to Corp, he gulped and said, "I wonder God
could hae haen the heart."
"Life's a queerer thing," Gavinia replied, sadly enough, "than we used
to think it when we was bairns in the Den."
He spoke of it to Grizel. She let Corp speak of anything to her
because he was so loyal to Tommy.
"You've given away a' your bonny things, Grizel," he said, "one by
one, and this notion is the bonniest o' them a'. I'm thinking that
when it cam' into your head you meant it for yoursel'."
Grizel smiled at him.
"I mind," Corp went on, "how when you was little you couldna see a
bairn without rocking your arms in a waeful kind o' a way, and we
could never thole the meaning o't. It just comes over me this minute
as it meant that when you was a woman you would like terrible to hae
bairns o' your ain, and you doubted you never should."
She raised her hand to stop him. "You see, I was not meant to have
them, Corp," she said. "I think that when women are too fond of other
people's babies they never have any of their own."
But Corp shook his head. "I dinna understand it," he told her, "but
I'm sure you was meant to hae them. Something's gane wrang."
She was still smiling at him, but her eyes were wet now, and she drew
him on to talk of the days when Tommy was a boy. It was sweet to
Grizel to listen while Elspeth and David told her of the thousand
things Tommy had done for her when she was ill, but she loved best to
talk with Corp of the time when they were all children in the Den. The
days of childhood are the best.
She lived so long after Tommy that she was almost a middle-aged woman
when she died.
And so the Painted Lady's daughter has found a way of making Tommy's
life the story of a perfect lover, after all. The little girl she had
been comes stealing back into the book and rocks her arms joyfully,
and we see Grizel's crooked smile for the last time.