_THE REV. WILLIAM HOWARD._
I.
After his return to London Sherman for a time kept to himself, going
straight home from his office, moody and self-absorbed, trying not to
consider his problem—her life, his life. He often repeated to himself,
“I must do what people expect of me. It does not rest with me now—my
choosing time is over.” He felt that whatever way he turned he would do
a great evil to himself and others. To his nature all sudden decisions
were difficult, and so he kept to the groove he had entered upon.
It did not even occur to him to do otherwise. He never thought of
breaking this engagement off and letting people say what they would. He
was bound in hopelessly by a chain of congratulations.
A week passed slowly as a month. The wheels of the cabs and carriages
seemed to be rolling through his mind. He often remembered the quiet
river at the end of his garden in the town of Ballah. How the weeds
swayed there, and the salmon leaped! At the week’s end came a note from
Miss Leland, complaining of his neglecting her so many days. He sent
a rather formal answer, promising to call soon. To add to his other
troubles a cold east wind arose and made him shiver continually.
One evening he and his mother were sitting silent, the one knitting,
the other half-asleep. He had been writing letters and was now in a
reverie. Round the walls were one or two drawings, done by him at
school. His mother had got them framed. His eyes were fixed on a
drawing of a stream and some astonishing cows.
A few days ago he had found an old sketch-book for children among some
forgotten papers, which taught how to draw a horse by making three
ovals for the basis of his body, one lying down in the middle, two
standing up at each end for flank and chest, and how to draw a cow by
basing its body on a square. He kept trying to fit squares into the
cows. He was half inclined to take them out of their frames and retouch
on this new principle. Then he began somehow to remember the child with
the swollen face who threw a stone at the dog the day he resolved to
leave home first. Then some other image came. His problem moved before
him in a disjointed way. He was dropping asleep. Through his reverie
came the click, click of his mother’s needles. She had found some
London children to knit for. He was at that marchland between waking
and dreaming where our thoughts begin to have a life of their own—the
region where art is nurtured and inspiration born.
He started, hearing something sliding and rustling, and looked up to
see a piece of cardboard fall from one end of the mantlepiece, and,
driven by a slight gust of air, circle into the ashes under the grate.
“Oh,” said his mother, “that is the portrait of the _locum tenens_.”
She still spoke of the Rev. William Howard by the name she had first
known him by. “He is always being photographed. They are all over the
house, and I, an old woman, have not had one taken all my life. Take
it out with the tongs.” Her son after some poking in the ashes, for it
had fallen far back, brought out a somewhat dusty photograph. “That,”
she continued, “is one he sent us two or three months ago. It has been
lying in the letter-rack since.”
“He is not so spick and span looking as usual,” said Sherman, rubbing
the ashes off the photograph with his sleeve.
“By the by,” his mother replied, “he has lost his parish, I hear. He
is very mediæval, you know, and he lately preached a sermon to prove
that children who die unbaptized are lost. He had been reading up the
subject and was full of it. The mothers turned against him, not being
so familiar with St. Augustine as he was. There were other reasons in
plenty too. I wonder that any one can stand that monkeyish fantastic
family.”
As the way is with so many country-bred people, the world for her was
divided up into families rather than individuals.
While she was talking, Sherman, who had returned to his chair, leant
over the table and began to write hurriedly. She was continuing her
denunciation when he interrupted with—“Mother, I have just written
this letter to him:—
“‘MY DEAR HOWARD:
“‘Will you come and spend the autumn with us? I hear you are
unoccupied just now. I am engaged to be married, as you know;
it will be a long engagement. You will like my betrothed. I
hope you will be great friends.
“‘Yours expectantly,
“‘JOHN SHERMAN.’”
“You rather take me aback,” she said.
“I really like him,” he answered. “You were always prejudiced against
the Howards. Forgive me, but I really want very much to have him here.”
“Well, if you like him, I suppose I have no objection.”
“I do like him. He is very clever,” said her son, “and knows a great
deal. I wonder he does not marry. Do you not think he would make a
good husband?—for you must admit he is sympathetic.”
“It is not difficult to sympathize with every one if you have no true
principles and convictions.”
Principles and convictions were her names for that strenuous
consistency attained without trouble by men and women of few ideas.
“I am sure you will like him better,” said the other, “when you see
more of him.”
“Is that photograph quite spoilt?” she answered.
“No; there was nothing on it but ashes.”
“That is a pity, for one less would be something.”
After this they both became silent, she knitting, he gazing at the cows
browsing at the edge of their stream, and trying to fit squares into
their bodies; but now a smile played about his lips.
Mrs. Sherman looked a little troubled. She would not object to any
visitor of her son’s, but quite made up her mind in no manner to put
herself out to entertain the Rev. William Howard. She was puzzled as
well. She did not understand the suddenness of this invitation. They
usually talked over things for weeks.
II.
Next day his fellow-clerks noticed a decided improvement in Sherman’s
spirits. He had a lark-like cheerfulness and alacrity breaking out at
odd moments. When evening came he called, for the first time since his
return, on Miss Leland. She scolded him roundly for having answered her
note in such a formal way, but was sincerely glad to see him return
to his allegiance. We have said he had sometimes, though rarely, a
talkative fit. He had one this evening. The last play they had been to,
the last party, the picture of the year, all in turn he glanced at.
She was delighted. Her training had not been in vain. Her barbarian was
learning to chatter. This flattered her a deal.
“I was never engaged,” she thought, “to a more interesting creature.”
When he had risen to go Sherman said—“I have a friend coming to visit
me in a few days; you will suit each other delightfully. He is very
mediæval.”
“Do tell me about him; I like everything mediæval.”
“Oh,” he cried, with a laugh, “his mediævalism is not in your line. He
is neither a gay troubadour nor a wicked knight. He is a High Church
curate.”
“Do not tell me anything more about him,” she answered; “I will try to
be civil to him, but you know I never liked curates. I have been an
agnostic for many years. You, I believe, are orthodox.”
As Sherman was on his way home he met a fellow-clerk, and stopped him
with—
“Are you an agnostic?”
“No. Why, what is that?”
“Oh, nothing! Good-bye,” he made answer, and hurried on his way.
III.
The letter reached the Rev. William Howard at the right moment,
arriving as it did in the midst of a crisis in his fortunes. In the
course of a short life he had lost many parishes. He considered himself
a martyr, but was considered by his enemies a clerical coxcomb. He
had a habit of getting his mind possessed with some strange opinion,
or what seemed so to his parishioners, and of preaching it while the
notion lasted in the most startling way. The sermon on unbaptized
children was an instance. It was not so much that he thought it true as
that it possessed him for a day. It was not so much the thought as his
own relation to it that allured him. Then, too, he loved what appeared
to his parishioners to be the most unusual and dangerous practices. He
put candles on the altar and crosses in unexpected places. He delighted
in the intricacies of High Church costume, and was known to recommend
confession and prayers for the dead.
Gradually the anger of his parishioners would increase. The rector,
the washerwoman, the labourers, the squire, the doctor, the school
teachers, the shoemakers, the butchers, the seamstresses, the local
journalist, the master of the hounds, the innkeeper, the veterinary
surgeon, the magistrate, the children making mud pies, all would be
filled with one dread—popery. Then he would fly for consolation to
his little circle of the faithful, the younger ladies, who still
repeated his fine sentiments and saw him in their imaginations
standing perpetually before a wall covered with tapestry and holding
a crucifix in some constrained and ancient attitude. At last he would
have to go, feeling for his parishioners a gay and lofty disdain, and
for himself that reverend approbation one gives to the captains who
lead the crusade of ideas against those who merely sleep and eat. An
efficient crusader he certainly was—too efficient, indeed, for his
efficiency gave to all his thoughts a certain over-completeness and
isolation, and a kind of hardness to his mind. His intellect was like a
musician’s instrument with no sounding-board. He could think carefully
and cleverly, and even with originality, but never in such a way as to
make his thoughts an allusion to something deeper than themselves. In
this he was the reverse of poetical, for poetry is essentially a touch
from behind a curtain.
This conformation of his mind helped to lead him into all manner
of needless contests and to the loss of this last parish among much
else. Did not the world exist for the sake of these hard, crystalline
thoughts, with which he played as with so many bone _spilikins_,
delighting in his own skill? and were not all who disliked them
merely—the many?
In this way it came about that Sherman’s letter reached Howard at the
right moment. Now, next to a new parish, he loved a new friend. A visit
to London meant many. He had found he was, on the whole, a success at
the beginning of friendships.
He at once wrote an acceptance in his small and beautiful handwriting,
and arrived shortly after his letter. Sherman, on receiving him,
glanced at his neat and shining boots, the little medal at the
watch-chain and the well-brushed hat, and nodded as though in answer to
an inner query. He smiled approval at the slight, elegant figure in its
black clothes, at the satiny hair, and at the face, mobile as moving
waters.
For several days the Shermans saw little of their guest. He had friends
everywhere to turn into enemies and acquaintances to turn into friends.
His days passed in visiting, visiting, visiting. Then there were
theatres and churches to see, and new clothes to be bought, over which
he was as anxious as a woman. Finally he settled down.
He passed his mornings in the smoking-room. He asked Sherman’s leave
to hang on the walls one or two religious pictures, without which he
was not happy, and to place over the mantlepiece, under the pipe-rack,
an ebony crucifix. In one corner of the room he laid a rug neatly
folded for covering his knees on chilly days, and on the table a
small collection of favourite books—a curious and carefully-chosen
collection, in which Cardinal Newman and Bourget, St. Chrysostom and
Flaubert, lived together in perfect friendship.
Early in his visit Sherman brought him to the Lelands. He was a
success. The three—Margaret, Sherman, and Howard—played tennis in the
Square. Howard was a good player, and seemed to admire Margaret. On
the way home Sherman once or twice laughed to himself. It was like the
clucking of a hen with a brood of chickens. He told Howard, too, how
wealthy Margaret was said to be.
After this Howard always joined Sherman and Margaret at the tennis.
Sometimes, too, after a little, on days when the study seemed dull and
lonely, and the unfinished essay on St. Chrysostom more than usually
laborious, he would saunter towards the Square before his friend’s
arrival, to find Margaret now alone, now with an acquaintance or two.
About this time also press of work, an unusual thing with him, began
to delay Sherman in town half an hour after his usual time. In the
evenings they often talked of Margaret—Sherman frankly and carefully,
as though in all anxiety to describe her as she was; and Howard with
some enthusiasm: “She has a religious vocation,” he said once, with a
slight sigh.
Sometimes they played chess—a game that Sherman had recently become
devoted to, for he found it drew him out of himself more than anything
else.
Howard now began to notice a curious thing. Sherman grew shabbier and
shabbier, and at the same time more and more cheerful. This puzzled
him, for he had noticed that he himself was not cheerful when shabby,
and did not even feel upright and clever when his hat was getting old.
He also noticed that when Sherman was talking to him he seemed to be
keeping some thought to himself. When he first came to know him long
ago in Ballah he had noticed occasionally the same thing, and set it
down to a kind of suspiciousness and over-caution, natural to one who
lived in such an out-of-the-way place. It seemed more persistent now,
however. “He is not well trained,” he thought; “he is half a peasant.
He has not the brilliant candour of the man of the world.”
All this while the mind of Sherman was clucking continually over its
brood of thoughts. Ballah was being constantly suggested to him. The
grey corner of a cloud slanting its rain upon Cheapside called to mind
by some remote suggestion the clouds rushing and falling in cloven surf
on the seaward steep of a mountain north of Ballah. A certain street
corner made him remember an angle of the Ballah fish-market. At night
a lantern, marking where the road was fenced off for mending, made him
think of a tinker’s cart, with its swing can of burning coals, that
used to stop on market days at the corner of Peter’s Lane at Ballah.
Delayed by a crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling of water
near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-jet balanced a
wooden ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract with a long
Gaelic name, that leaped crying into the Gate of the Winds at Ballah.
Wandering among these memories a footstep went to and fro continually
and the figure of Mary Carton moved among them like a phantom. He
was set dreaming a whole day by walking down one Sunday morning to
the border of the Thames—a few hundred yards from his house—and
looking at the osier-covered Chiswick eyot. It made him remember an
old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed his garden
at home was a certain wood-bordered and islanded lake, whither in
childhood he had often gone blackberry-gathering. At the further end
was a little islet called Inniscrewin. Its rocky centre, covered with
many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake. Often when life and
its difficulties had seemed to him like the lessons of some elder boy
given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to dream of going
away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few
years out, rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the island slopes
by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water and the
quivering of the bushes—full always of unknown creatures—and going
out at morning to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds.
These pictures became so vivid to him that the world about him—that
Howard, Margaret, his mother even—began to seem far off. He hardly
seemed aware of anything they were thinking and feeling. The light that
dazzled him flowed from the vague and refracting regions of hope and
memory; the light that made Howard’s feet unsteady was ever the too
glaring lustre of life itself.
IV.
On the evening of the 20th of June, after the blinds had been
pulled down and the gas lighted, Sherman was playing chess in the
smoking-room, right hand against left. Howard had gone out with a
message to the Lelands. He would often say, “Is there any message I
can deliver for you? I know how lazy you are, and will save you the
trouble.” A message was always found for him. A pile of books lent for
Sherman’s improvement went home one by one.
“Look here,” said Howard’s voice in the doorway, “I have been watching
you for some time. You are cheating the red men most villainously. You
are forcing them to make mistakes that the white men may win. Why, a
few such games would ruin any man’s moral nature.”
He was leaning against the doorway, looking, to Sherman’s not too
critical eyes, an embodiment of all that was self-possessed and
brilliant. The great care with which he was dressed and his whole
manner seemed to say, “Look at me; do I not combine perfectly the
zealot with the man of the world?” He seemed excited to-night. He had
been talking at the Lelands, and talking well, and felt that elation
which brings us many thoughts.
“My dear Sherman,” he went on, “do cease that game. It is very bad for
you. There is nobody alive who is honest enough to play a game of chess
fairly out—right hand against left. We are so radically dishonest that
we even cheat ourselves. We can no more play chess than we can think
altogether by ourselves with security. You had much better play with
me.”
“Very well, but you will beat me; I have not much practice,” replied
the other.
They reset the men and began to play. Sherman relied most upon his
bishops and queen. Howard was fondest of the knights. At first Sherman
was the attacking party, but in his characteristic desire to scheme
out his game many moves ahead, kept making slips, and at last had to
give up, with his men nearly all gone and his king hopelessly cornered.
Howard seemed to let nothing escape him. When the game was finished he
leant back in his chair and said, as he rolled a cigarette—
“You do not play well.” It gave him satisfaction to feel his
proficiency in many small arts. “You do not do any of these things at
all well,” he went on, with an insolence peculiar to him when excited.
“You have been really very badly brought up and stupidly educated in
that intolerable Ballah. They do not understand there any, even the
least, of the arts of life; they only believe in information. Men who
are compelled to move in the great world, and who are also cultivated,
only value the personal acquirements—self-possession, adaptability,
how to dress well, how even to play tennis decently—you would be not
so bad at that, by the by, if you practised—or how to paint or write
effectively. They know that it is better to smoke one’s cigarette with
a certain charm of gesture than to have by heart all the encyclopedias.
I say this not merely as a man of the world, but as a teacher of
religion. A man when he rises from the grave will take with him only
the things that he is in himself. He will leave behind the things that
he merely possesses, learning and information not less than money and
high estate. They will stay behind with his house and his clothes and
his body. A collection of facts will no more help him than a collection
of stamps. The learned will not get into heaven as readily as the
flute-player, or even as the man who smokes a cigarette gracefully. Now
you are not learned, but you have been brought up almost as badly as
if you were. In that wretched town they told you that education was to
know that Russia is bounded on the north by the Arctic Sea, and on the
west by the Baltic Ocean, and that Vienna is situated on the Danube,
and that William the Third came to the throne in the year 1688. They
have never taught you any personal art. Even chess-playing might have
helped you at the day of judgment.”
“I am really not a worse chess-player than you. I am only more
careless.”
There was a slight resentment in Sherman’s voice. The other noticed it,
and said, changing his manner from the insolent air of a young beauty
to a self-depreciatory one, which was wont to give him at times a very
genuine charm—
“It is really a great pity, for you Shermans are a deep people, much
deeper than we Howards. We are like moths or butterflies on rather
rapid rivulets, while you and yours are deep pools in the forest where
the beasts go to drink. No! I have a better metaphor. Your mind and
mine are two arrows. Yours has got no feathers, and mine has no metal
on the point. I don’t know which is most needed for right conduct. I
wonder where we are going to strike earth. I suppose it will be all
right some day when the world has gone by and they have collected all
the arrows into one quiver.”
He went over to the mantlepiece to hunt for a match, as his cigarette
had gone out. Sherman had lifted a corner of the blind and was gazing
over the roofs shining from a recent shower, and thinking how on such a
night as this he had sat with Mary Carton by the rectory fire listening
to the rain without and talking of the future and of the training of
village children.
“Have you seen Miss Leland in her last new dress from Paris?” said
Howard, making one of his rapid transitions. “It is very rich in
colour, and makes her look a little pale, like St. Cecilia. She is
wonderful as she stands by the piano, a silver cross round her neck.
We have been talking about you. She complains to me. She says you are
a little barbarous; you seem to look down on style, and sometimes—you
must forgive me—even on manners, and you are quite without small talk.
You must really try and be worthy of that beautiful girl, with her
great soul and religious genius. She told me quite sadly, too, that
you are not improving.”
“No,” said Sherman, “I am not going forward; I am at present trying to
go sideways like the crabs.”
“Be serious,” answered the other. “She told me these things with the
most sad and touching voice. She makes me her confidant, you know, in
many matters, because of my wide religious experience. You must really
improve yourself. You must paint or something.”
“Well, I will paint or something.”
“I am quite serious, Sherman. Try and be worthy of her, a soul as
gentle as St. Cecilia’s.”
“She is very wealthy,” said Sherman. “If she were engaged to you and
not to me you might hope to die a bishop.”
Howard looked at him in a mystified way and the conversation dropped.
Presently Howard got up and went to his room, and Sherman, resetting
the chess-board, began to play again, and, letting longer and longer
pauses of reverie come between his moves, played far into the morning,
cheating now in favour of the red men now in favour of the white.
V.
The next afternoon Howard found Miss Leland sitting, reading in an
alcove in her drawing-room, between a stuffed paroquet and a blue De
Morgan jar. As he was shown in he noticed, with a momentary shock, that
her features were quite commonplace. Then she saw him, and at once
seemed to vanish wrapped in an exulting flame of life. She stood up,
flinging the book on to the seat with some violence.
“I have been reading that sweet ‘Imitation of Christ,’ and was just
feeling that I should have to become a theosophist or a socialist, or
go and join the Catholic Church, or do something. How delightful it is
to see you again! How is my savage getting on? It is so good of you to
try and help me to reform him.”
They talked on about Sherman, and Howard did his best to console her
for his shortcomings. Time would certainly improve her savage. Several
times she gazed at him with those large dark eyes of hers, of which the
pupils to-day seemed larger than usual. They made him feel dizzy and
clutch tightly the arm of his chair. Then she began to talk about her
life since childhood—how they got to the subject he never knew—and
made a number of those confidences which are so dangerous because so
flattering. To love—there is nothing else worth living for; but then
men are so shallow. She had never found a nature deep as her own.
She would not pretend that she had not often been in love, but never
had any heart rung back to her the true note. As she spoke her face
quivered with excitement. The exulting flame of life seemed spreading
from her to the other things in the room. To Howard’s eyes it seemed
as though the bright pots and stuffed birds and plush curtains began
to glow with a light not of this world—to glimmer like the strange
and chaotic colours the mystic Blake imagined upon the scaled serpent
of Eden. The light seemed gradually to dim his past and future, and to
make pale his good resolves. Was it not in itself that which all men
are seeking, and for which all else exists?
He leant forward and took her hand, timidly and doubtingly. She did
not draw it away. He leant nearer and kissed her on the forehead. She
gave a joyful cry, and, casting her arms round his neck, burst out,
“Ah! you—and I. We were made for each other. I hate Sherman. He is
an egotist. He is a beast. He is selfish and foolish.” Releasing one
of her arms she struck the seat with her hand, excitedly, and went
on, “How angry he will be! But it serves him right! How badly he is
dressing. He does not know anything about anything. But you—you—I
knew you were meant for me the moment I saw you.”
That evening Howard flung himself into a chair in the empty
smoking-room. He lighted a cigarette; it went out. Again he lighted
it; again it went out. “I am a traitor—and that good, stupid fellow,
Sherman, never to be jealous!” he thought. “But then, how could I
help it? And, besides, it cannot be a bad action to save her from a
man she is so much above in refinement and feeling.” He was getting
into good-humour with himself. He got up and went over and looked
at the photograph of Raphael’s Madonna, which he had hung over the
mantlepiece. “How like Margaret’s are her big eyes!”
VI.
The next day when Sherman came home from his office he saw an envelope
lying on the smoking-room table. It contained a letter from Howard,
saying that he had gone away, and that he hoped Sherman would forgive
his treachery, but that he was hopelessly in love with Miss Leland, and
that she returned his love.
Sherman went downstairs. His mother was helping the servant to set the
table.
“You will never guess what has happened,” he said. “My affair with
Margaret is over.”
“I cannot pretend to be sorry, John,” she replied. She had long
considered Miss Leland among accepted things, like the chimney-pots on
the roof, and submitted, as we do, to any unalterable fact, but had
never praised her or expressed liking in any way. “She puts belladonna
in her eyes, and is a vixen and a flirt, and I dare say her wealth is
all talk. But how did it happen?”
Her son was, however, too excited to listen.
He went upstairs and wrote the following note—
“MY DEAR MARGARET:
“I congratulate you on a new conquest. There is no end to your
victories. As for me, I bow myself out with many sincere wishes
for your happiness, and remain,
“Your friend,
“JOHN SHERMAN.”
Having posted this letter he sat down with Howard’s note spread
out before him, and wondered whether there was anything mean and
small-minded in neatness—he himself was somewhat untidy. He had
often thought so before, for their strong friendship was founded in a
great measure on mutual contempt, but now immediately added, being in
good-humour with the world, “He is much cleverer than I am. He must
have been very industrious at school.”
A week went by. He made up his mind to put an end to his London life.
He broke to his mother his resolve to return to Ballah. She was
delighted, and at once began to pack. Her old home had long seemed to
her a kind of lost Eden, wherewith she was accustomed to contrast the
present. When, in time, this present had grown into the past it became
an Eden in turn. She was always ready for a change, if the change came
to her in the form of a return to something old. Others place their
ideals in the future; she laid hers in the past.
The only one this momentous resolution seemed to surprise was the old
and deaf servant. She waited with ever-growing impatience. She would
sit by the hour wool-gathering on the corner of a chair with a look
of bewildered delight. As the hour of departure came near she sang
continually in a cracked voice.
Sherman, a few days before leaving, was returning for the last time
from his office when he saw, to his surprise, Howard and Miss Leland
carrying each a brown paper bundle. He nodded good-humouredly, meaning
to pass on.
“John,” she said, “look at this brooch William gave me—a ladder
leaning against the moon and a butterfly climbing up it. Is it not
sweet? We are going to visit the poor.”
“And I,” he said, “am going to catch eels. I am leaving town.”
He made his excuses, saying he had no time to wait, and hurried off.
She looked after him with a mournful glance, strange in anybody who had
exchanged one lover for another more favoured.
“Poor fellow,” murmured Howard, “he is broken-hearted.”
“Nonsense,” answered Miss Leland, somewhat snappishly.