Coming from the brilliant air into the dim room of the inn, he did not
at first recognise a man already seated there, finishing a frugal meal
of bread and cheese and ale. The man was tall, with somewhat stooping
shoulders; his face was long and bearded, his forehead high, with thin
dark hair, his eyes dark and penetrating. He wore a flannel shirt with
a silk tie of some indeterminate colour akin to dull crimson. He held
a book in one hand, and read as he ate.
As Arthur entered the room he looked up.
"You don't know me, I suppose," he said genially. "But I know you by
sight at least. My name is Hilary Vickars."
So this was Hilary Vickars, of whom he had heard Scales speaking at the
deacon's tea. Now that he looked at him more closely he recognised him
at once. Among the crowd of ordinary faces in the church, that face
had stood out with a singular distinctness. It was a face at once
grave and composed, sad and humorous; the face of a man who had striven
much and suffered much, but had retained through all a certain
vivacity, which was distinct from gaiety while including it. And all
these qualities seemed to rest upon a deeper quality of composure, so
that the final impression was of a man who through suffering had won
his way to some secret knowledge which gave him an air of gentle
authority.
"I have often wished to know you," said Arthur.
"And I you."
"Why should you wish to know me?"
"Oh! a fancy of mine. It is my business to study people. And you do
not look like the run of folk in Highbourne Gardens. Most of the folk
in Highbourne Gardens are dear, good, comfortable folk, but stodgy.
They are as alike as peas. I could tell you their exact method of
life, even to what they have for breakfast. They are products of
manufacture, all turned out just alike to the last hair, and all doing
just the same things every day, without the least variation. That is
what stodginess means."
"And I am not stodgy?" Arthur laughed.
"No; you are fluid. You have not hardened into shape yet. You are a
problem."
Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness
for the man. It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of
ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford. The church
young men he had found distasteful to him. They were good young men
for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously
virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and
inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes;
but they had no mental horizons. They were also inclined to be a
little shy of him, as a rich man's son with a superior education; a
little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that
intercourse with them had not been easy. But here was a man who spoke
another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once
asserts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible.
Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in
conversation. Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses--a
trick which lent emphasis to what he said. It was as though he fumbled
for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch.
Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not pronounce a word in
the way common among educated men. The variation was slight; it could
scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency
of early training. Perhaps the boy's face betrayed his surprise too
ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly:
"I envy you. It was my dream to go to Oxford. I didn't dream true in
that case."
"Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur
generously.
"No, I have never cherished that--delusion. Deprivations in middle
life don't matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made
up." He paused a moment, and then added. "I was a gardener before I
became an author."
Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.
"Oh! I assure you," he said, "even gardeners have their dreams. Mine,
as I said, was Oxford, for I spent my youth within sight of her spires,
within sound of her bells. I believed I could become a scholar;
indeed, I still believe my old belief not quite foolish. I spent all
my money on grammars and dictionaries which I did not know were
obsolete, got to know the classics in a crude fashion, and went on
imagining that some day I might enter the University. Of course it was
all an absurd dream; you do not need to be told that. My first real
discovery in life was that learning is the privilege of wealth. That
led me to some other discoveries of the same nature, the sum of which
was that the great mass of mankind are born disinherited, and that I
was one of them. It hurt me dreadfully at the time, but in the long
run it was the making of me. It set me studying life as it is, not as
it once was in ancient times. And the more I studied it, the more I
came to admire common men and women, until at last I was glad that I
belonged to them. It is a great thing to know just to whom you belong;
no man does any kind of good work till he knows that."
"But you are not a common man," Arthur interrupted. "You are a writer."
"Oh! I have some aptitudes that are not common, no doubt; I am
immodest enough to think that. But if I am a writer, I write of common
people. It is common life that interests me, the virtues, vices,
trials, heroisms, debasements, and nobilities of plain people. But I
did not mean to talk about myself, and you must forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive. What you say deeply interests me. My
father said a thing to-day about life which has been in my thoughts a
good deal, and you make me recall it. By the way, do you know my
father?"
"Yes, I know him."
He spoke the words with a certain caustic accent which did not pass
unnoticed.
"You mean you do not like him," Arthur replied with a flash of anger.
"No, I don't say that. I know him merely as a type. But what did he
say?"
"He said life was a hard business, in which one was sure to be hurt;
that it was a big strong beast which could only be subdued by whip and
bridle."
"An excellent definition. Life is strong and cruel and hard. Men who
really live soon discover that."
"Have you found it so?"
"Yes. And I've seen the big strong beast tread thousands down--the
people who haven't got the whip and bridle."
He spoke the words with remarkable intensity. They were flashed from
him rather than spoken. Then, as if ashamed of his display of feeling,
he rose from the table, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "The evening
is coming on. I must be going."
They went out of the inn together. The long gray road with its groups
of trees and dim houses lay before them; and, as the darkness deepened,
the distant lights of London flung a yellow conflagration on the sky.
"That's where the big strong beast lies," said Vickars. "You can hear
his mighty hooves at work." And, as he spoke, from that great caldron
of life, that lay packed and mist-swathed to the eastward of the road,
there did come up a sound as of waves upon a groaning beach, a sound of
crashing and rending, mingled with the dull thud of wheels and the
demoniac shriek of engine and of factory whistles.
But he did not recur to the theme. The talk became trivial,
commonplace; once only did it touch a theme of interest, when Vickars
recalled how Coleridge and Keats and Haydon and Leigh Hunt had trodden
that same road, each with his own separate vision of what life meant,
and what man was meant to do in it.
It was nearly dark when they reached the neighbourhood of Highbourne
Gardens. Presently Vickars stopped before a small house, one of many,
in a long gravelled street. The houses were all alike; each had its
strip of garden, its bow-window, its door with glass panels, its aspect
of decent mediocrity. There was still enough light to see that though
the houses were comparatively new, a kind of premature decay had
overtaken them. The iron garden-gates sagged upon their hinges, and
the bricks appeared to be joined with sand, which errand-boys had
picked out in deep grooves while waiting in the porch for orders. The
dilapidation of age may be respectable and even romantic, but in this
dilapidation of newness there was something inexpressibly depressing.
"This is where I live," said Vickars.
"I don't think I was ever in this street before," said Arthur. "It
must have been built while I was at Oxford."
"It was," said Vickars. "Your father built it."
They said good-night and parted.
IV
MRS. BUNDY
A few days after Arthur's memorable conversation with his father,
Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom. He
went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little
notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till
long past midnight. The causes of his silence were, as usual,
inscrutable. Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding,
wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence
never came. Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of
tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won. But
in Masterman's nature there was a curious element of perversity, which
often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest.
It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that
seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty
tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual
observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions
could be predicated from any precedent experience.
Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the
office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever. I'll tell you when I
want you," and the boy said no more. His sister had gone away to spend
some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and
he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.
It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to
the society of such friends as were available. Among these was Hilary
Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking. He walked with him
occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the
house. Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had
been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly,
cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman. She was a person of extraordinary
slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and
light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that
she cheerfully shouldered other people's burdens as a kind of right.
Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had
come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent
sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some
sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and
optimistic friend. Over such youths she exercised a directorship as
complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye
their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they
had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of
their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic
fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.
"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample
breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby
London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious
land-ladies. Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud
mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent
their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours. But
to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose
mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults
reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.
Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to
tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy's view of life was not unlike theirs. Her
whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a
speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o'-the-wisp of
sudden fortune. He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike
eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned
in wrong directions. At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal,
nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment's notice to wander
off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he
returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil
which he soon contrived to lose again. Most women would have tired of
these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy's faith in her husband never
faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not
disconcert her. When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at
once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her
carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it
lasted. When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the
cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household
service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy. He always came
back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his
return was sometimes dramatic--as, for instance, when he appeared at
midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid
in her pocket a county-court summons for a year's milk bills which she
could not pay.
"Come in wi' you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and
she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a duchess
introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the
Bundy star was in eclipse. And then she would sit down and tell him
wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic
for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the
wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes
he had had of being a multimillionaire. Just now, it appeared, he was
engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of
dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as
England. And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and
with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter,
which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her
with a clouded brow.
"It's small good staying in England these days, if you want to
prosper," she would remark. "What wi' all the ships upon the sea and
all the new lands that lie beyond, it's a shame for a youth to sit at
home. You don't get any fun out of life that way."
Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a
kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in
Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in
Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her
lot that he never said it. On the contrary, there was sown in his mind
a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got
exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.
She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of
palmistry, and ended by saying, "You'll have your adventures before
long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot
through his veins at the prophecy.
"You've got a hand like Bundy's," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and
said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.
"Bundy's had his bad times," she retorted, "but he's had his good times
too. But if you asked him, I don't think he'd regret anything, and
he'd live the same life again if he had the choice. And so would I,
for that matter."
And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the
air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur
was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as
something to be greatly envied.
He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he
learned to love her. She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so
motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got
into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.
One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father's plans
for him.
"He wants me to enter the business," he said.
"And why not, laddie?"
"Frankly, I don't like it."
"That's neither here nor there. You've got to live, and as long as a
business is honest, one business is as good as another."
"But is it honest?"
He had not meant to ask the question. It came from him unawares. It
was a long-silent, long-concealed thought, suddenly become audible.
"What is dishonest in it?"
"I can't quite tell. But I do know that my father buys land for
speculative building, and puts up houses that are built of the
rottenest material, and sells them to ignorant people."
"Aye, laddie, your father's like the man in the parable, 'an austere
man, gathering where he has not strawed.' But he's a strong man, is
your father. There's few stronger men than Archibold Masterman.
"Strong, but is he good? I mean, is his way of life right?"
"I canna' tell about that, laddie. But if I was you, I think I
wouldn't ask that question about my father. There's a lot of goodness
in men, and my conviction is that most men are about as good as they
know how to be. There's many people wouldn't call Bundy good, because
he's what they call a speculator, and has to live with wild men, and
doesn't go to church when he's home; but I know he's got a heart of
gold. He never cheated any man knowingly. He's lost himself much more
than men have lost by him. And he'd always give away his last penny to
the poor."
"Ah, but that's not the point. I know my father is good in that way.
Why, only the other day he rebuilt a church entirely at his own expense
for people who had no legal claim at all on him. But it's his
business, it's the method of it. And I must find an answer, for I must
join him in the business or refuse it."
"Well, if you feel like that, refuse it, laddie. Not that I'll say
you're wise, nor even right. Fathers have some claims on their sons
after all, and these claims ought to come before your own tastes. Only
if you know you couldn't draw together with your father, and would only
make him and yourself unhappy trying to, then the best thing is to say
so at once."
"I suppose you are right," he said in a lugubrious voice. And then he
added, "There's another trouble, too. How am I to get my living?"
"You'll find that out fast enough when you become acquainted with
hunger," she said with a laugh.
"But if I don't go into my father's business, God only knows what I can
do. I don't seem to be fitted for anything in particular."
"I wouldn't worry about that, either," she replied. "There's very few
men do the things they think they're fitted for; but they find out how
to do other things that are just as important. There's Bundy, now;
you'll never guess what he thought himself fitted for when I married
him."
"Well, what?"
"A clergyman."
Arthur laughed profanely. The thought of the nefarious Bundy, whose
life had been spent in the promotion of companies of a singular
collapsibility, as a clergyman was too ridiculous.
"Ah! you may laugh, but let me tell you he'd have made a first-rate
parson if he'd gone to college, and started fair."
She spoke with heat, which immediately passed into laughter, as she
caught a glimpse of the whimsicality of the thing.
"Ye canna' say Bundy has not a fine flow of language when he chooses,
and he can look as solemn as a bishop, and I'm sure he would have had a
fine bedside manner," she continued. "But my belief is that a man who
can do one thing well can do any other thing just as well."
"That's a consoling faith, at any rate."
"It isn't a faith, it's a fact. It's just a question of ability. The
worst of you London-bred lads is that you all want a place made for
you, and you don't see that the strong man makes a place for himself."
Arthur did not quite like that, and he liked it the less because he
knew that it was true. For was not he London bred? Had not his path
been made easy for him? And how could that happen without some
emasculation of nature? To grow up in streets, carefully paved and
graded, punctually lit at night; to live in houses where a hundred
conveniences sprang up to meet the idle hand, to be guarded from
offence, provided for without exertion--ah, how different that life
from the primitive life of man, familiar with rain and tempest, with a
hundred rude and moving accidents, always poised upon the edge of
peril, and existing instant by instant by an indomitable exercise of
will and strength! For the first time he caught a vital glimpse of the
primeval life of man, and recognised its self-sufficing dignity. For
the first time he realised that the essence of all true living lay in
daring. It was a truth which neither London nor Oxford had imparted to
him. He had not even learned it through his own father, whom he knew
conventionally rather than really. Strangely enough, it came to him
now through the talk of Mrs. Bundy, wise with a wisdom which
vicissitude alone could teach, and through the somewhat sorry epic of
her husband's hazardous adventures.
"The strong man makes a place for himself"--it was sound doctrine and
indubitable fact as well; but was he one of the strong? The question
hung upon the confines of his mind, a whispered interrogation, which
disturbed and sometimes tortured him. Youth is always a little
ludicrous, often pathetically ludicrous, and in nothing so much as in
its capacity for taking itself seriously. Life seems such an immensely
solemn business at one-and-twenty. Later on we discover that the
decisions on which we supposed angels waited are of scant interest to
any one but ourselves, and that the world goes on much the same
whatever we do or say.
Yet youth is right, even in its crude vanity and egoism, for the
history of the world would be poor reading if it recorded nothing
better than the commonsense and commonplace performances of middle-age.
Mrs. Bundy, from her fifty years' coign of vantage, saw life as Arthur
could not see it; above all, she saw its width, which was a great
vision to attain.
"No man really enjoys life," she said to him one day, "unless he starts
poor."
"How do you make that out?"
"Because the poor are the only people capable of adventures," she
replied. "As long as a man is poor, anything may happen to him; but
after he becomes rich, nothing happens."
"But you would like to be rich, wouldn't you?"
"Not rich enough to want for nothing," she replied.
As usual she fell back upon her own experience for wisdom, and drew a
shrewd and humorous sketch of one of her episodic emergences into
wealth.