I'm going to show you something that's wrong in your conduct. If I
told you you'd behaved like a sulky young whelp, you'd say I was
unjust, wouldn't you? Well, that's just what you've done."
"Father----"
"Don't interrupt. You've had your say, and I mean now to have mine,
and be done with it. If you'd come to me when this thing began to
trouble you, I'd have talked it over with you frankly. But what did
you do? You kept away from me. You did worse. You went about
repeating what Dr. Leet said. You hadn't even the common decency to
wait until you'd seen me. You hadn't even the gratitude to recollect
that I'd done the best I could for you, and was planning to do more.
You behaved just like a bad-hearted little boy who goes about letting
folks think that his father is his enemy. That's pretty behaviour in a
son, isn't it? But it seems that's the kind of son I've got. And for
that I don't forgive you. You've made it clear that you and I can't
draw together."
"I never meant anything of the kind."
"Never meant! What kind of excuse is that? It's what every
slack-baked youth in the office says when he's played the fool. And
when a youth can find nothing better to say than that, I fire him. And
I'm going to fire you."
"I am entirely in your hands, father. I can see that I was wrong in
not coming to you at once. What more can I say?"
"It's too late to say anything. You can't undo wrong by just saying
you are wrong. The plain fact is, I can't trust you. There's only one
end for it--you must go your way, and I mine."
There was a rough dignity in Masterman as he uttered these words which
was profoundly moving. Had he been only angry, violent, or satirical,
Arthur could have borne it. He would have been sustained by the
justice of his cause. But now that very justice on which he had relied
for strength broke beneath him like a rotten prop. He who had been so
keen for justice was himself unjust. He saw himself--an implicit
parricide, a child who had taken arms against his father. And he saw
with a sudden agonised clearness of perception his father's nature,
with its strange blending of rugged virtue and unscrupulous craft, its
hard, indomitable fibre shot through by soft veins of tenderness, his
public traffic with dishonour almost counterbalanced by his stern
reticence under the early cruelties he had endured, and his honourable,
stoical silence under their brutal ignominies--he saw all this, and he
saw himself as weak, hysteric, foolish, crying out for justice in
another, but blind to the folly of his own behaviour.
"I am sorry, father," he said in a broken voice.
"That's the first sensible word you've said to-night. Only, you see,
it comes too late. You and me's got to part. Our roads lie different."
"What do you wish me to do, father?"
"I don't know. I want to think things over. You'd better go now."
And then with a sudden savage burst of anger, as Arthur left the room,
he shouted after him: "You can take my compliments to Dr. Leet, and
tell him he's a confounded interfering fool!"
But there was more of pain than anger in this violent dismissal.
X
THE FAREWELL
The night had fallen upon Eagle House. Arthur sat alone in his bedroom
at the open window. A soft wind talked to itself in the branches of
the big mulberry tree on the lawn; a few placid stars shone in the
blue-black heavens, then the late moon like a yellow fire; a nested
sparrow chirped contentedly beneath the eaves; and, like a solemn wash
of waves upon a hidden beach, London moaned and murmured through all
its vast circumference. Out of the deep night the Spirit of his own
Youth arose, and sat beside him.
"Listen to me," said the Spirit. "I bring with me two swords--Faith
and Courage. Gird them on."
But London laughed. A soft derision shook the leaves upon the mulberry
tree, and the waves upon the hidden beach were scornful.
"You have your life to live. Live it," said the Spirit.
But the stars, like eyes, turned slowly toward him in despairing irony.
"How many millions have we heard say that," they whispered, "and each
has been overcome in turn, and has sunk in nameless dust."
"You are not as the nameless millions," said the Spirit. "You are
yourself, with your own right and power to live."
And at that the heavens moved, and an infinite procession of scarred
brows and sad eyes, passed by, and a multitude of lips whispered, "We
said that once, but Life was too strong for us."
"Nevertheless, thou canst conquer Life," said the Spirit.
"Nay, Life will conquer thee," replied the legions of the dead. "Let
be. Submit. Why strive when all strife is vain?"
And then, out of the deep well of his misery, a bubble of light swam
up, and something in his soul cried, "I will not submit! I will gird
on the two swords of Faith and Courage. I will conquer Life!"
* * * * *
He had sat so long in absorbed silence that he was unconscious that the
door of the room had opened and shut. The noise of the closing door,
gentle as it was, roused him like a clap of thunder. He turned at the
sound, and saw his mother.
She was robed in white, a white silk shawl was drawn over her head, and
in the dim light she looked like a gentle apparition.
"Mother!" he cried.
She came toward him with outstretched arms.
And then, as by a magic touch, he became a little child again. She sat
besides him, drew his head down upon her warm bosom, put her arm round
his neck, and whispered, "I know." And beneath her gentle caress,
thawed as it were by the mere warmth of contact with her, something
hard and cold in his own heart dissolved and drained itself away in
delicious tears. He wept unrestrainedly, as a child weeps who is in no
haste to cease from weeping, lest the consolation for his tears should
cease with the tears themselves. And the chief sweetness of it all lay
in the silence of their communion. Neither spoke because there was no
need of speech. He knew that he was comprehended, and this is the
final ecstasy of all communion. From this faithful bosom he had drawn
his life; these hands had been the first to touch him; and as they had
long ago bound up his childish bruises, so now their very touch drew
the hurt out of his pained heart. He drank life from her again; he was
conscious of a warm inflowing flood of strength, of restful power, of
quiet blessedness.
When at last he lifted his eyes he saw her transfigured. The frost of
silence had melted from her face; he caught in the dim light the
sparkle of her eyes, divined rather than discerned the flush of her
cheek and the new youth and vehemence of her aspect.
"Mother!" he said again.
She quietly pushed him from her, and gazed deep into his eyes.
"And now let us talk," she whispered.
"You know what has happened?" he said.
"Yes, I know."
"O mother, what am I to do?"
"You must do right, my son."
She was silent for a moment, and he felt her hand tighten as it held
his own. Then she said abruptly, "I have my confession to make before
I can counsel you."
"Your confession, mother?"
"Can't you see that one is needed? Have you never asked yourself the
reason for my silence, my aloofness, and my lack of interest in life?
Did you never feel yourself that these things were unnatural, that
there must be a reason for them, and that the reason must be tragic? I
am going to tell you that reason. I have waited for this hour for
years--O my God, what dreary, fearful years! I have watched your
growth with terror, Arthur--yes, with terror, because I feared what you
might become. Do you know what I feared? God forgive me! I feared
you might be like your father. I watched every little seed of thought
as it opened in you, fearful of what flower it might bear. I studied
every glance, every sign of disposition, every drift of temperament;
weighed your words, analysed them endlessly through sleepless nights,
gazed into your mind and heart with dread and yearning. No one knows
what I suffered when you went to Oxford. There was not a night when I
did not lie awake for hours thinking of you. I said, 'Here he will
meet the world in all its grossness, and he will succumb to it, as a
thousand others have done. He will lose his fineness; he will become
like the rest.' Each time when you came home I met you with a kind of
terror. I dared scarcely look into your face for fear of the record I
might find written there. A mother reads the signs that no one else
can read. She knows, as no one else can know, the secret potencies
within the nature of her child. And knowing what I did of life, I was
terrified; and it was because I feared to look I stood aloof, that I
shunned even speech with you, that I have shut myself for years within
a wall of ice. Arthur, can you forgive me?"
"O my poor mother! it is I who should ask forgiveness, because I did
not understand you better."
She stooped to kiss his forehead, and went on relentlessly: "No; I see
now that I was wrong. I denied myself to you. I should have given
myself to you all the more because I feared for you. But surely I have
been punished--punished by the loss of how many moments like this! And
I might have had them! What can ever give me back the kisses I have
never kissed?"
"Mother, I will not have you talk like that. I have never doubted that
you loved me. And I love you all the more for what you have endured
for me. Yes, I knew you suffered--I always understood that."
"I suffered--but I have not yet told you the deepest cause. I must
tell you that too."
"I don't want to know, mother. I have no right to know."
"Yes; it is your right to know."
There was anguish in her voice now. The yellow rays of the sinking
moon, falling on her face, revealed a white, strained contour, as
though flame and marble mingled.
"Listen, Arthur. I must go back through the years to the time when I
married your father. I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as
lighthearted as a girl could be. Your father had a greatness of his
own--never think that I doubt that--and when I first met him I thought
him the most wonderful man in all the world. No man was ever better
calculated to impress the senses of a young girl. I gave him what was
almost adoration, unthinking adoration. Of course I knew that I shared
only one part of his life, but what did I care? Women are usually
content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the
men they trust live when they are away from them. Of the nature of
your father's business life I could hardly form a guess. It was not my
concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until--until a day came when I
had to know.
"I will spare you details, Arthur. I have said enough when I say that
the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on
merciless chicanery and fraud. I begged him on my knees to alter it.
I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to
suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread. At first he
argued with me, as one might with a foolish child. He told me he was
no worse than other people--all businesses were like that; he was as
good as circumstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my
pretty Puritanism. Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew
angry.
"'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried.
"'You shall give me no more,' I answered. 'You have taken from me much
more than you gave.'
"'What have I taken?'
"'My belief in you, my belief in life,' I answered. And then, in my
hot anger, I told him all that I had learned, and how I abhorred to
live softly at the price of cruel suffering in others, and refused to
profit by the wages of robbery. He turned pale at that, for he saw
that I knew something which went beyond legalised dishonesty.
"From that hour our lives were separate. I never again wore my girlish
finery; I ate as little as I could; I lived in solitude. I knew that
nothing I could say would influence him. I was condemned to futility.
It was in that year of our final quarrel you were born. O my boy, can
you understand now with what terror I looked at your little innocent
face as it lay upon my bosom? For many, many months I wished you dead
for fear of what you might become. I have watched the growth of your
father's wealth with far deeper alarm than men have ever watched the
coming of poverty. I could discern in it nothing but a threat to you.
I have wasted myself in tears and prayers for you, all the time telling
myself that prayers were in vain. And now--praise be to the God I have
insulted!--I find my prayers miraculously answered. Arthur, my son,
you have stood the test. Your soul has overcome the forces of your
blood. I live to-night, I live for the first time in twenty years, and
God restores to me the years that the locust has eaten."
Her impassioned speech thrilled him like the note of rapture in the
voice of a saint. And as she spoke, with that pale moonlight lighting
her face like a flame, it was as though the saint's halo rested on her
brow; she was the creature of a vision, ineffably pure and tender,
clothed in the eternal sacredness of motherhood. He had rested his
head upon her bosom while he wept; he knelt now, and laid it on her
knees.
"O my son, my son," she cried, "I planned for this long before you were
born, but I never thought it would come true. It was for this I
chastened myself with tears and fasting, hoping that the life I
nourished might be freed from the stain I feared. But I had no faith.
I could only bring God my timidity; I could only plead my agony; I had
no strength to bring to Him. Yet He heard me, and after all the
doubting years He has given me the desire of my heart."
"And I never understood," he whispered.
"But you understand now, and I am repaid in full," she answered. "When
I saw you go out with your father to-night into the office, I knew the
great battle of your life had come, and something told me you would not
fail."
"Yet I did fail, mother. He made me feel that I had wronged him."
"I know. He told me."
"He said I had behaved like a bad-hearted little boy. He humbled me to
the dust."
"I know that too. That is why I came to you, my dear. I knew that you
would need me."
"I do need you, mother. Everything is dark and perplexed to me. It
seems that though I have done right, I have done it in the wrong way."
"The great thing is to have done right. That atones for everything
with God, I think."
"But I don't see the next step, mother."
"We never do, till we take it. But I can see it. Shall I tell you
what it is?"
"Yes, mother."
"It is the step I did not take--that is why I see it so clearly. You
must go away. You must take your life into your own hands. You must
begin it all over again. Women cannot do that; men can. Only now and
then does a woman claim her own personality, and for her the risk is
terrible. But a man can do it; he is meant to do it. That is where he
finds his greatness."
"But that will be to leave you, mother. How can I do that, especially
now, when I know what your life has been?"
"It is the fate of mothers, dearest, and it is a joyous fate. What
matter where you go? I shall still live in you. Don't you see, dear,
that my life reaches its height to-night, and through you? I have paid
twenty years of loneliness and tears for this hour, and I find the
price light. Do you think I grudge a few more years of separation?
And they will not be lonely. I have wept my last tears for you. I
have triumphed after all, and nothing can rob me of my triumph."
The supreme self-abnegation of that speech was too great to be
understood all at once. It came upon him by degrees; perhaps it would
be true to say that it was only after many years, when he stood beside
his mother's grave, that he understood its full significance. But
enough of that significance was felt even now to fill his soul with
wonder. He saw only the first page in the sacred gospel of motherhood,
but he caught its meaning. To ask nothing, to give everything, to
purchase momentary rapture with the grief of years, to toil without
reward, to love and be forgotten, to yield flesh and heart for the
nurture of the seeds of life in others, to create for them the
unparticipated victory--that was the destiny of motherhood, a thing not
less sacred than the love that once endured the Cross for man. To find
himself so loved was an overwhelming thought. Beneath its weight he
lay breathless, in an ecstasy of marvel.
"Yes, you must go away," she continued. "Shall I tell you why?"
"Yes, mother, tell me."
"Because if you stay in London you will never find your freedom. In
London the net is drawn so close that individuality is strangled.
London insists upon conformity. It grinds men down by slow attrition
to a common likeness. I have thought it all over. It is because there
are cities like London, full of avarice and pleasure, that the best men
grow into criminals without knowing it. Your father might have been a
good man if he had never seen London.
"And there is another reason too. Your father, in spite of his anger,
will not give you up. He will try to keep you near him, even though
you are not his partner in the business. He will bribe you by his
generosity, subdue you by his forgiveness. And he is a strong man,
remember, who always gets his own way sooner or later. Don't you know
that, Arthur?"
"Do you mean that his very love for me is a peril, mother?"
"Yes, that is what I mean, my dear. You don't know what it means to be
subject to the constant pressure of a strong man who loves you. But I
know. It is that which has reduced my own life to futility. If I had
hated your father, my hatred would have given me strength to leave him.
But because I loved him, I learned to distinguish between him and his
sin. Oh! there have been many times when I have been almost overcome;
times when I have said, 'What is the use of struggle?' It were wiser
to submit at once, to accept a strong man's love with gratitude, to ask
no questions, to become like the rest. I have never really submitted,
but I have compromised, and that has meant futility! But you are
different. You have your chance to escape, to build your own life. I
don't want your life to be futile, as mine has been. It is the torture
of all tortures. Arthur, I think I would rather see you dead!"
"But you, mother, how can I leave you?"
"Have I not told you I wish you to go? Do you think I am so selfish,
dear, that I would have you stay with me to your loss? That would be
my loss too, and a worse loss than any I have yet endured. My heart
says, Stay; but see, I pluck the weakness from my heart. Arthur, I
command you to go."
She rose as she spoke. The moon had sunk. The first gray gleam of day
was in the sky, and suddenly the earliest sunbeam clothed her. In that
fuller light he saw her face irradiated.
"I will go," he said.
She drew him to her, and kissed his brow.
"There speaks my own true son," she said.
For some moments a deep silence filled the room. A bird twittered in
the dawn-light; London turned like a weary sleeper on a couch of pain;
a wind, fresh from the fountains of the day, blew hopefully, with a
hint of free seas and far-off lands.
"Promise me one thing, my son."
"What is that, mother?"
"It is that whatever your life may be, it shall be honest. Rich or
poor, defeated or successful, accept no gain by violence, win no
pleasure by dishonour. O my son, you know why I say this, you know
what I mean by it."
"Yes, I know, mother, and I promise."
"And go at once, my dear. I have foreseen this hour and have provided
for it. You will not go without money. You need not be ashamed to
take it; it is yours. I have saved it, and for you. And now God bless
you, my dear, dear son!"
She withdrew herself from his arms and was gone. The full day shone
now, and from its shining summits Arthur heard the bugle cry, calling
him to distant lands and new life.
PART TWO
THE AMERICAN MADONNA
XI
NEW YORK
If he had been able to earn his living in any conventional and accepted
way, he would not have been on his way to join the S.S. _Saurian_ as
she lay off the landing-stage at Southampton on that bright September
morning. The poor must needs learn a trade, because a trade is
necessary to mere existence; but it is the tragedy of the rich and the
semi-rich that, when once deprived of the artificial security of
riches, they are helpless.
Arthur had plenty of time to do battle with this afflicting thought as
he travelled down to Southampton. It accompanied him, like a voice of
irony, in the rushing wheels; flashed upon him in the sentinel
telegraph posts, each bearing aloft its spark of silent fire; saluted
him from a hundred fields where men stood bare-armed beside the loaded
wains; mocked him in casual glimpses of firm faces behind the glass of
signal-boxes, in hurrying porters at the points of stoppage, in groups
of labourers leaning lightly on spade or mattock, as the train
thundered past. In all these faces, common as they were, there was a
look of proud efficiency. In every sight and sound was the vindication
of human toil. These men, each in his several way, had solved the
problem of life. Each had learned to do something which the world
wanted done. They did the work required of them, undistracted by
problems and philosophies; asked no questions concerning the structure
of society or the nature of life; were content to add their stone to
the cairn, to pass on and be forgotten, and to earn the final simple
elegy, "home have gone and ta'en their wages."
But Arthur--what did he know of this primeval life of man, which had
gone on from the dawn of the world, unchanged by change of dynasties,
by the readjustment of nations, by the birth and death of a hundred
intricate philosophies, literatures, reforms, social experiments,
social reconstructions? He knew less than the humblest child who
followed the reapers in the field, or began the perilous process of
existence by earning casual pence in the mine or factory. Like so many
youths in an age when all forms of hand-labour have lost their dignity,
he had learned a hundred things which lent a false glamour to
existence, but not one which supplied its vital needs. He had
accumulated accomplishments, but had not developed efficiencies, as
though one should adorn and decorate a machine in which the works were
lacking.
"Let me reckon up my capital," he thought as the train rushed on; "let
me ascertain my authentic stock-in-trade. I have some knowledge of
Greek literature and Roman history, but it is probable that in all this
train-load of human creatures there are not half a dozen who would
attach the least value to my knowledge. I can decipher old French
chronicles with fair success; I know enough of music to understand the
theory of counterpoint, and enough of poetry to construct a decent
sonnet; and, so far as I can see, these are not commodities which
possess any marketable value. I have thirty pounds given me by my
mother; but if my life depended upon my earning thirty pence, I know no
possible method by which I might wrest the most wretched pittance from
the world's closed fist. I am, in fact, an incompetent, but through no
fault of my own. It seems that I have been elaborately trained to do a
great number of things which no one wants done, but not one of the
things for which the world makes eager compensation. What were mere
pastime to the savage is to me an inaccessible display of effort; left
alone with the whole open world for my kingdom, it is doubtful if I
could build a house, grow a potato, bake a loaf, or secure the barest
means of life. Such is my deplorable condition that it is
possible--no, entirely certain, that the poorest emigrant in this
rushing freight of men and women would scruple to change places with
me. That's a pretty situation for a gentleman of England and an Oxford
graduate, isn't it?"