mistress of the house, and in entertaining the new friends who came to
see her. After a while, when the novelty had worn off, the old
insuperable feeling of monotony returned, more particularly in the
evening. Mr. Farrow never went near a public-house, but he never
opened a book, and during the winter, when the garden was closed,
amused himself with an accordion, or in practising his part in a catch,
or in cutting with a penknife curious little wooden chairs and tables.
This mode of passing the time was entertaining enough to him, but not
so to Miriam, who was fatally deficient, as so many of her countrymen
and countrywomen are, in that lightness which distinguishes the French
or the Italians, and would have enabled her, had she been so
fortunately endowed with it, to sit by the fire and prattle innocently
to her husband, whatever he might be doing. When she came to her new
abode and was turning out the corners, she discovered upstairs in a
cupboard a number of brown-looking old books, which had not been
touched for many a long day. Amongst them were Rollin's Ancient
History, some of Swift's Works with pages torn out, doubtless those
which some impatiently clean creature had justly considered too filthy
for perusal. There were also Paul and Virginia, Dryden's Virgil,
Robinson Crusoe, and above all a Shakespeare. Miriam had never been
much of a reader; but now, having nothing better to do, she looked into
these books, and generally brought one downstairs in the afternoon.
Swift she did not quite understand, and he frightened her; she never,
in fact, got through anything but Gulliver and the Tale of a Tub; but
some of his sayings stuck to her and came up against her again and
again, until, like most of us who have had even a glimpse of the dark
and dreadful caverns in that man's soul, she wished that he had never
been born. For years, even to the day of her death, the poison of one
sentence in the Tale of a Tub remained with her--those memorable words
that "happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived." Yet
she pitied him; who does not pity him? Who is there in English history
who excites and deserves profounder pity?
Of all her treasures, however, the one which produced the deepest
impression on her was "Romeo and Juliet." She saw there the
possibilities of love. For the first time she became fully aware of
what she could have been. One evening she sat as in a trance. Cowfold
had departed; she was on the balcony in Verona, Romeo was below. She
leaned over and whispered to him--
"My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep: the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite."
She went on; the day was breaking; she heard the parting--
"Farewell! farewell! one kiss and I'll descend,"
Her arms were round his neck with an ecstasy of passion; he was going;
the morning star was flashing before the sun, and she cried after him--
"Art thou gone so? love, lord, ay husband, friend!
I must hear from thee every day in the hour,
For in a minute there are many days."
Ah, God! what is the count of all the men and women whom, since it was
first "plaid publiquely with great applause," this tragedy has reminded
of the _what might have been_!
Mr. Didymus Farrow, during his wife's absence in Verona, had been very
much engaged in whittling a monkey which toppled over on a long pole,
but being dissatisfied with its performance he had taken his accordion
out of the box, and, just as Lady Capulet called, he struck up "Down
amongst the dead men," which, whatever its merit may be, is not
particularly well adapted to that instrument. Verona and Romeo were
straightway replaced by Cowfold and the Cowfold consort. He was in the
best of spirits, and he stooped down just as his wife was waking, took
the cat--which was lying before the fire--and threw it on her lap.
"Oh, please do not!" she exclaimed, a little angry, shocked, and sad.
"I wish you would not sit and addle your brains over those books.
Blessed if I don't burn them all! What good do they do? Why don't you
talk?"
"I've nothing particular to say."
"You never have anything to say when you've been reading. Now if I
read a bit of the newspaper, I've always something to talk about."
She was silent, and her husband continued his tune.
"Miriam, my dear, you aren't well. Are you in pain?"
Mr. Farrow never understood any suffering unless it was an ache of some
bind.
"Let me get you just a drop of brandy with some ginger in it."
"No, thank you."
"Yes, you will have just a drop," and he jumped up at once and went to
the cupboard.
"I tell you I will not."
The "not" came out with such emphasis that he desisted and sat down.
The monkey lay on the table, the accordion lay there too; Mr. Farrow
stopped his whistling and sat back in his chair with his finger to his
mouth. At last, he took up the book, turned it over, and put it down
again. He loved his wife after his fashion, and could not bear to see
anybody distressed. He placed his chair beside hers, and lifting her
arm, put it round his neck, she nothing resisting.
"Tell me now, there's a dear, what's the matter," and he kissed her.
"Nothing," she said, somewhat softened by his caresses.
"That's right, my twopenny," a name he used confidentially to her. "A
little faint; the room is rather close," and he opened the window a
trifle at the top, returning to his seat, and embracing her again.
Yet, though she yielded, it was not Mr. Farrow who held her in his
arms; she purposely strove to think an imaginary Romeo's head was on
her neck--his face was something like the face of Montgomery--and she
kept up the illusion all that night. When she came down to breakfast
and sat opposite her husband, it struck her suddenly that she had
cheated him and was a sinner.
In the afternoon she went out for a stroll through the streets, and up
to the monument in the park. Cowfold was busy, for it was market-day.
Sheep-pens were in the square full of sheep, and men were purchasing
them and picking them out as they were sold; dogs were barking; the
wandering dealer who pitched his earthenware van at the corner was
ringing his plates together to prove them indestructible; old Madge
Campion, who sold gooseberry-tarts and hot mutton-pies on her board
under an awning supported by clothes-props, was surrounded by a shoal
of children, as happy as the sunshine; the man with the panorama was
exhibiting, at one halfpenny a head, the murder of Lord William Russell
to a string of boys and girls who mounted the stool in turn to look
through the glasses; and the cheapjack was expatiating on the merits of
cutlery, pictures, fire-irons, and proving that his brass candlestick,
honestly-worth-ten-shillings-but-obtainable-at-one-and-four-pence-
because-he-really-could-not-cart-it-about-any-longer answered the
double purpose of a candlestick and burglar-alarm by reason of the
tremendous click of the spring, which anybody might--if they
liked--mistake for a pistol.
Through all the crowd Miriam walked unsympathetic. She cursed the
constitution with which she was born. She wished she had been endowed
with that same blessed thoughtlessness, and that she could be taken out
of herself with an interest in pigs, pie-dishes, and Cowfold affairs
generally. She went on up to her favourite resting-place; everything
was so still, and her eye wandered over the illimitable distance but
without pleasure. She recollected that she had an engagement; that two
cousins of her husband were coming to tea, and she slowly returned. At
half-past five they appeared. They chattered away merrily with Mr.
Farrow, who was as lively as they were, until by degrees Miriam's
silence began to operate, and they grew dull. Tea being over, she
managed to escape, and as she went upstairs she heard the laughter
recommence, for it was she who had suppressed it. Lying down in her
room overhead, the noise continued, and it came into her mind that
wherever she went she cast a cold shadow. "They must wish me dead,"
she thought.
She had been married so short a time; to what a dreary length the
future stretched before her, and she did not love the man she had
chosen, as she understood love. How was life to be lived? She did not
reproach herself. If she could have done that, if she could have
accused herself of deliberate self-betrayal, it would have been better;
but she seemed to have been blindfolded, and led by some unknown force
into the position in which she found herself.
For some days she went on with her books, but the more she read the
more miserable she became, because there was nobody with whom she could
interchange what she thought about them. She was alarmed at last to
find that something very much like hatred to her husband was beginning
to develop itself. She was alarmed because she was too much of an
Englishwoman to cherish the thought of any desperate remedy, such as
separation; and yet the prospect of increasing aversion, which appeared
to grow she knew not how, terrified her. One Monday afternoon she had
gone out to her usual haunt in the park, and near the monument she saw
somebody whom she presently recognised to be Mr. Armstrong, the vicar
of Marston-Cocking, a village about four miles from Cowfold. She knew
him because he had dealt with her husband, and she had met him in the
shop. Marston-Cocking was really nothing better than a hamlet, with a
little grey squat church with a little square tower. Adjoining the
churchyard was Mr. Armstrong's house. It was not by any means a model
parsonage. It was a very plain affair of red brick with a door in the
middle, a window with outside shutters on either side, and one story
above. There was a small garden in front, protected from the road by
white palings and a row of laurels. At the back was a bigger garden,
and behind that an orchard. It had one recommendation, worth to its
tenant all the beauty of a moss-covered manse in Devonshire, and that
was its openness. It was on a little sandy hill. For some
unaccountable reason there was a patch of sand in that part of the
country, delicious, bright, cheerful yellow and brown sand, lifting
itself into little cliffs here and there, pierced with the holes of the
sand-martin. It exhaled no fogs, and was never dull even on a November
day, when the clay-lands five miles away breathed a vapour which lay
blue and heavy on the furrows, and the miry paths, retaining in their
sullenness for weeks the impress of every footmark, almost pulled the
boots off the feet as you walked along them. At Marston, on the
contrary, the rain disappeared in an hour; and the landscape always
seemed in the depths of winter to retain something of summer sunshine.
The vicarage was open, open to every wind, and from the top rooms the
stars could be seen to rise and set, no trees intercepting the view.
Mr. Armstrong was a man of sixty, a widower with no children. His
income from his living was about two hundred pounds annually, and the
number of his parishioners all told, men, women, and children, was, as
nearly as may be, two hundred. He had been at Marston-Cocking for
thirty-five years. He came just after his wife died--how he hardly
knew. The living was offered him; he thought the change would do him
good, although he did not intend to remain; but there he had stayed,
and there was no chance of his removal. He was completely out of the
world, troubled himself with no church controversies, and preached
little short sermons telling his congregation not to tell lies nor be
unkind to one another. Every now and then he introduced into his
discourses his one favourite subject, astronomy, and by degrees the
labourers in Marston-Cocking knew more about the sky and its daily and
nightly changes than many a highly educated person in the city. Mr.
Armstrong, otherwise a very plain, simple creature, always grew
eloquent on the common ignorance of the heavens. "Here," he would say,
"has God thrust upon us these marvellous sights. These are not the
secrets hidden in the mine--they are forced upon us; and yet we walk
with our heads to the earth; we do not know the morning star when we
see it, nor can we even recognise the Pleiads and Arcturus which Job
knew." Mr. Armstrong had made all his instruments with his own hands,
and had even used the top of the church-tower as an observatory. Mrs.
Bullen, the wife of the one farmer in the parish, a lady who wrote the
finest of Italian pointed hands, who had been in a Brighton
boarding-school for ten years, and had been through "Keith on the Use
of the Globes," was much scandalised at this "appropriation of the
sacred edifice to secular purposes," as she called it, but she met with
no encouragement. The poor people somehow connected heaven with the
stars, and Mr. Armstrong never undeceived them, so that they saw
nothing improper in the big telescope under the weathercock.
"Really, James," said Mrs. Bullen one morning to Mr. Armstrong's
gardener and general man-of-all-work as he was carrying a chair from
the house into the tower, "do you think this is quite right? Do you
think our Saviour would have sanctioned the erection of a profane
instrument over the house of prayer?"
James was very thick-headed, and hardly knew the meaning of these long
words, bat he did not like Mrs. Bullen, and he resented her talking to
him, a servant, in that strain about his master.
"Ah! Mrs. Bullen, you needn't bother yourself. He's all right with
the Saviour,--more so nor many other people, maybe."
"Well, but, James, this is a church consecrated to the service of God."
"Ah! how do you know? Very likely o' nights--for he's up there when
you're abed and asleep--he's a looking into heaven through that there
glass, and, sees God and the blessed angels."
"Really, James, can you be so ignorant as not to know that God is a
Spirit? I am astonished at you." And Mrs. Bullen passed on without a
single doubt in her mind that there was a single weak spot in her
creed, or that anybody could question its intelligibility and coherence
who would not also question the multiplication-table. She told her
husband when she got home that it was really dreadful to think that the
poor had such low views of the Divine Being. How degraded! No wonder
they were so immoral. Bullen, however, did not trouble himself much
about these matters. He assented to what his wife said, but then he
called "spirit" "sperrit," to her annoyance, and she could not get him
to comprehend what she meant by "entirely immaterial," although it was
so plain.
Mr. Armstrong, as we have said, was in front of Miriam. He had brought
a small telescope to that point to be tested, for exactly eight miles
away was a church-tower with a clock, and he wished to see if he could
tell the time by it. Miriam was about to avoid him, but he recognised
her and beckoned to her.
"Ah! Mrs. Farrow, is it you? Would yon like to look through my glass?"
He adjusted it for her, and she saw the hour quite plainly.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "that is wonderful!"
"Yes, it is pretty well. We will now put him in his box. For the box
I have to thank Mr. Farrow. He is one of the neatest hands at that
kind of work I know, although it is not exactly his trade. I never was
much of a joiner."
Miriam was a little surprised. She knew that her husband was clever
with his tools, but she had never set any value on his labours. Now,
however, she was really struck with the well-polished mahogany and the
piece of brass neatly let into the lid, and when she heard Mr.
Armstrong's praises she began to think a little differently.
"Ah!" he continued, "it is so difficult now to get anybody to take any
interest in such a job as that. I have got another box at home made by
a professed cabinetmaker, and it is really disgraceful. It will never
be right, although I have had it altered two or three times. When it
was shut it caught the object-glass inside. I remedied that defect,
but only to create a worse, for then the instrument shook about. So it
is, when once a thing is badly done, you had better get rid of it; it
is of no use to bother with it. You may depend upon it, it is not bad
just here or there, but is bad all through, and the attempt to mend it
serves no other purpose than to bring to light hidden weakness. On the
other hand, if you are fortunate enough to have work done like Mr.
Farrow's, it is perfect all through. You can never surprise it, so to
speak. Just look at it. Look at that green baize rest. There is not
the thirty-second part of an inch to spare on either side, and the lid
comes down so evenly that you can hardly see where the edge is. Shake
the box, and you will not feel a single movement. You have never seen
my big telescope at Marston?"
"No."
"Well, if you like, you can come over with your husband any bright
night, and I shall be happy to show it to you."
Miriam thanked him, and they parted.
A few days afterwards Mrs. and Mr. Farrow presented themselves at the
vicarage. It was a lovely evening, and so clear that the outline of
the constellations was obscured by the multitude of small stars, which
usually are not seen, or seen but imperfectly. In the south was
Jupiter, mild, magnificent, like a god amongst the crowd of lesser
divinities.
Mr. Armstrong, with all the ardour of an enthusiast for his science,
began a little preliminary lecture.
"I am not going to let you peep simply in order to astonish you. I
abominate what are called popular lectures for that very reason. If
you can be made to understand the apparent revolution of the heavens,
that is better than all speculation. To understand is the great thing,
not to gape. Now I assume you know that the earth goes round on its
axis, and that consequently the stars seem to revolve round the earth.
But the great difficulty is to realise _how_ they go round, because the
axis is not upright, nor yet horizontal, but inclined, and points to
that star up there, the pole-star. Consequently the stars describe
circles which are not at right angles with the horizon, nor yet
parallel to it. That is my first lesson."
Mr. Farrow comprehended without the slightest difficulty, but Miriam
could not. She had noticed that some of the stars appear in the east
and disappear in the west, but beyond that she had not gone. Mr.
Armstrong continued--
"The next thing you have to bear in mind is that the planets move about
amongst the stars. Just think! They go round the sun, and so do we.
The times of their revolution are not coincident with ours, and their
path is sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards. Suppose we were in
the centre of the planetary system, all these irregularities would
disappear; but we are outside, and therefore it looks so complicated."
Again Mr. Farrow comprehended, but to Miriam it was all dark.
"Now," continued Mr. Armstrong, "these are the two great truths which I
wish you not simply to acknowledge, but to _feel_. If you can once
from your own observation _realise_ the way the stars revolve--why some
near the pole never set--why some never rise, and why Venus is seen
both before the sun and after it--you will have done yourselves more
real good than if you were to dream for years of immeasurable
distances, and what is beyond and beyond and beyond, and all that
nonsense. The great beauty of astronomy is not what is
incomprehensible in it, but its comprehensibility--its geometrical
exactitude. Now you may look."
Miriam looked first. Jupiter was in the field. She could not suppress
a momentary exclamation of astonished ecstasy at the spectacle. While
she watched, Mr. Armstrong told her something about the mighty orb. He
pointed out the satellites, contrasted the size of Jupiter with that of
the earth, and explained to her the distances at which parts of the
planet are from each other as compared with those of New Zealand and
America from London. But what affected her most was to see Jupiter's
solemn, still movement, and she gazed and gazed, utterly absorbed,
until at last he had disappeared. The stars had passed thus before her
eyes ever since she had been born, but what was so familiar had never
before been emphasised or put in a frame, and consequently had never
produced its due effect.
Afterwards Mr. Farrow had his turn, and Mr. Armstrong then observed
that they had had enough; that it was getting late, but that he hoped
they would come again. They started homewards, but their teacher
remained solitary till far beyond midnight at his lonely post. The
hamlet lay asleep beneath him in profoundest peace. His study had a
strange fascination for him. He never wrote anything about it; he
never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much
about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at
Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary. It was for
some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind
needed. It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with
his lot.
On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.
"You didn't quite understand Mr. Armstrong, Miriam?"
"No, not quite."
"Ah! it is not easy; it all lies in the axis not being perpendicular,
and in our not being in the middle. Now look here!"
He took a long string; tied one end to the curtain-rod over the window,
and brought the other down to the floor. He then took Miriam, placed
her underneath it in the middle with her face to the window.
"Now, that is the north, and the top of the string is the pole star.
Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars
are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left."
But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was
unimaginable. It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with
such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple
feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an inclined
sphere.
Mr. Farrow was not disappointed.
"It will be all right," he said, and the next morning he was busy in
the shed in the bottom of the garden. He came to his afternoon meal
with glee, and directly it was over, took his wife away to see what he
had been doing. The shed had two floors, with a trap-door in the
middle. To the topmost corner of the upper story he had fixed a pole
which descended obliquely through a hole in the floor. This was the
axis, and the floor was the horizon. He had also, by the help of some
stoutish wire and some of his withies, fairly improvised a few
meridians, so that when Miriam put her head through the trap-door, she
seemed to be in the centre of a half globe.
"Now, my dear, it will all be plain. I cannot make the thing turn, but
you can fancy a star fixed down there in the east at the end of that
withy, and if the withy were to go round, or if the star were to climb
up it, it would just go so," tracing its course with his finger, "and
set there. Now, those stars near the pole, you see, would never set,
and that is why we see them all night long."
It all came to her in an instant.
"Really, how clever you are!" she said.
"Do you think so?" and there was a trace of something serious,
something of a surprise on his countenance.
"I have heard Mr. Armstrong talk about the stars before, although never
so much as he did that night, and then I've watched them a good bit,
and noticed the way they go. As for the planets, they are not so easy,
but I think I have got hold of it all."