Meanwhile the “sheltered life” had gone on as usual at Mr. Markham’s.
The delight in Ted’s success had moved away into its appointed
background, in front of which the slow, happy days passed on as
uneventfully as ever. But about November a change took place. The Lord
Chancellor appeared to have been suddenly struck by Mr. Markham’s
admirable editions of school classics, or perhaps the fame of the neat
covers of the books May stitched for the parish library had reached him,
and he offered him the living of Applethorpe, which had just become
vacant. Mr. Markham was unwilling to leave his old parish, and May even
more so, but the offer was not one to be refused. Applethorpe was a
large country parish, and, what was a distinct advantage, a richer one
than Chesterford; old Mr. Carlingford, in particular, though careful to
avoid in his own person direct means of grace, being always ready to
supply funds whereby it might be administered to others.
Ted was delighted with the change; his roots had been transplanted so
often in school and university life that they never struck very deeply
in the soil of Chesterford. The close neighbourhood of Tom’s house
weighed heavily in favour of Applethorpe, and the accessibility of Lord
Ramsden’s library, which contained many dust-ridden old volumes, among
which he had visions, as every book-lover has, of finding undiscovered
treasures in the way of twelfth-century missals, was not without its
effect. May alone did not like it. It seemed to her that she was going
out into new and more elaborate places, which might prove perplexingly
different from the green fields and country lanes she knew so well.
Things were going to be on a bigger scale; they would keep one curate,
perhaps two; London itself loomed on the horizon, and when her father
had gone to see the place, he came back saying that it looked a pretty
country but there had been a London fog, which had drifted down from
town.
However, she quite acquiesced in her father’s decision, and before
Christmas they had moved.
Their house stood at one end of the long straggling village, a typical
rectory of the older class, with a tennis lawn in front and a
stable-yard behind, a hall paved with red tiles, and far too much ivy
and virginia creeper on the walls. Ted arrived soon after from
Cambridge, with a large square box full of books, which could only just
get through the front door.
He and May had gone a long exploring walk in the country one afternoon,
and were returning home along the clean frozen road through the village.
They had been talking about the place.
“It’s so big, Ted,” May had said, “it almost frightens me, as I told you
once a big place would do. It is so hard to get hold of a lot of people
like this.”
“Well, there will be a curate, won’t there?” said Ted. “Of course it’s
too large for father alone.”
“Yes, I know there will; but you don’t understand. I must get hold of
them myself. I must do all I did at Chesterford, and more.”
Ted looked at her kindly.
“Yes, I know how you feel about it. It’s the personal relation you want,
isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t care about their personal relation to me. They might all
hate me if they liked. But the quickest way to get at people’s hearts
for any purpose is to make them like one.”
“Don’t be worried, May,” said he. “You will soon get to know them all,
unless I’m very much mistaken.”
“Ah, but just think of the state things are in! I went to see an old
woman yesterday. She couldn’t understand at first why I came. I told her
I was the new vicar’s daughter, and she asked me what I wanted. The late
vicar used never to visit anybody, she said.”
“Yes, it will be hard work.”
“I wish you could come here after you were ordained,” said May, “as
father’s curate.”
“I must stop at Cambridge,” said Ted. “You wouldn’t wish me to give that
up?”
“No, I suppose not,” said May; “and yet, I don’t know. I think parish
work is the highest in the world.”
“There is plenty of that to do in Cambridge,” said Ted, “for that
matter; but I am not the man to do it. I can’t do it as you can--and
father,” he added.
“Ah, but what is good work in other lines compared to any work in that?”
said May, earnestly--“especially for a man who means to be a clergyman.”
“Yes, but other things can’t be neglected. You have no business to leave
alone what you think you can do, for anything else. One’s talents,
whatever they are, are given one to use.”
“But is there not ‘that good part’?” asked May.
Ted walked on in silence a little way.
“I did not know you thought of it like that,” he said at length. “Do you
admit no call but that of saving souls directly by your means?”
“I didn’t know I felt it myself, till we came here,” said May; “until I
saw this place so absolutely uncared for. Look at the rich people, too.
Old Mr. Carlingford is very liberal, because he is very rich; but he
never comes to church.”
“Ah, that reminds me,” said Ted. “Tom is coming home soon, in about a
fortnight, he said.”
May paused on the doorstep.
“I suppose he will come here, won’t he? I didn’t know he was coming back
so early.”
And she turned rather quickly, and went into the house.
The new curate soon came, and fulfilled to the utmost all the admirable
accounts of himself which had led to his engagement. He was strong and
vigorous, and exerted all his vigour and strength in the work to which
he had been called. He was even bold enough to pay a visit to Mr.
Carlingford single-handed, and the latter gentleman conversed to him
very fluently and agreeably for half an hour on the coal-strike, and the
lamentable weakness of the English fleet in the Mediterranean, offered
to draw a cheque then and there to supply coal for villagers who were
unable to have fires in this very nipping weather, and courteously
declined to interest himself any further.
He was walking back through the village, and met May there, who had been
visiting.
“I have just been to see Mr. Carlingford,” he said.
May looked up quickly.
“I didn’t know----” she began. “Oh! old Mr. Carlingford. Yes. Did you
get anything out of him?”
“I got a cheque,” said Mr. Douglas.
May laughed.
“Yes, that’s not so difficult, though it’s something to be thankful for.
These poor creatures are half frozen.”
“Mr. Carlingford really is very generous. But is there no hope of
getting hold of him really? He might do much more than he does.”
“I wonder. Tom Carlingford is coming home this week. He might do
something with his father. I’ll ask my brother about it. By the way, we
are dining there to-night. Are you going?”
“No, I’ve got my cheque,” said the young man. “That’s enough for one
day. Besides, I have a boys’ meeting at Chipford Mills. I must leave you
here. I have to go up to Breigton cottages first.”
May turned and shook hands with him.
“It’s absurd for me to thank you for all you are doing,” she said. “You
do all sorts of things which my father couldn’t possibly do, and which
we have no right to expect.”
“Surely that is a curate’s business,” he said, laughing, and taking off
his hat.
Mr. Markham was suffering from a slight cold, and he had not been out
that day. He was sitting over the fire in the drawing-room, reading a
comedy of Aristophanes, when May came in.
“How cold you look!” he said. “I ordered tea as you were a little late.”
“Yes; I couldn’t come before, father,” she said, “and even now I have
only got through half the things I wanted to do.”
“Never mind, dear; but you should make an effort to be punctual; and
charity begins at home, eh, May?”
May turned from the fire, where she had been warming her hands, and
poured out a cup of tea. Her father, seeing he got no answer, continued
somewhat reproachfully--
“My cold is rather worse this evening, and I can’t think what you did
with that medicine. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“I put it on the table in your study.”
“No, dear. I think not. I looked for it there.”
May went out of the room and brought back the bottle.
“Yes, it was there. You had put some of your papers on to it.”
“Thanks very much. I hope you took care not to disturb the papers.”
“No, I disturbed nothing. Will you have some now?”
“No, I’ve just had my tea. I was wanting it before tea. I always take it
before meals, you know.”
May sat down in a chair and stirred her tea.
“Mr. Carlingford has given Mr. Douglas a cheque to get coals for the
people. It’s fearfully cold, and, poor things, many of them can’t afford
coals.”
“A good fellow, Douglas,” murmured Mr. Markham, as he smiled
appreciatively at Aristophanes.
“I was wondering if we couldn’t let them have some wood,” said May.
“There are stacks of it in the yard.”
Mr. Markham put his finger in his place.
“Yes, I will see about it. Who want it?”
“Oh, half a dozen of the cottages down here, and more at the mills.”
“Well, dear, hadn’t you better make a little list? It would save me some
trouble. Dear me, the fire wants mending. And then, if you would let me
have it in about an hour, I could just finish this play.”
“We dine at Mr. Carlingford’s to-night,” said May.
“Yes, dear, I know. Ah, δίκαιος λόγος. How admirable that is!”
Mr. Carlingford felt that he was doing his duty beautifully that
evening. He had given a cheque to the curate in the afternoon, and he
was having his vicar to dinner in the evening. His definition of duty
was vague and comprehensive. It meant doing those things which he
either did not wish to do or felt no desire to do. He had no desire to
give Mr. Douglas a cheque, and he did not wish to have his vicar to
dinner. The latter was therefore more clearly his duty than the former,
since the essential character of such acts varied in exact ratio to
their unpleasantness. An evening, he reflected, as he dressed for
dinner, should be spent alone in a warm room, after a light meal, and be
conveyed to the senses through the medium of several glasses of good
port. Clergymen were often teetotalers, and it gave him a positive sense
of discomfort to see people drinking water. Water was meant to wash in.
To him, in this state of mind, Mr. Markham was a pleasant surprise. He
showed no inclination to talk about mutton broth and district visiting,
he seemed to be well up in current topics of interest, and he was no
teetotaler. In fact, he made some rather knowing remarks on the subject
of cellars, and the depreciated nature of corks nowadays. And May really
was an admirable girl. “Why didn’t that fool Tom fall in love with her,
instead of heathen goddesses?” was his mental comment as she came in.
“I heard from my prodigal son to-day,” he said, as they were sitting at
dinner; “he has decided to continue his prodigality for another month.
The fatted calf may get fatter still. Poor boy! he is quite mad, and he
means to fill the house with statues. Statues always give me the
shivers. They really lower the temperature of the room. It is impossible
to see too little of them.”
“They’ll have to go in the kitchen,” said Mr. Markham.
“An excellent suggestion, my dear Mr. Markham, but think of the soup!
However, Tom is so dreadfully energetic, he always makes me feel hot.
The statues shall be wheeled about with him, and that will preserve the
equability of the temperature.”
“He wrote to my brother saying he was coming back at once,” said May.
“He does not deserve that you should remember that,” said Mr.
Carlingford, urbanely. “But I shall be so glad to see him that I will
tell him.”
“Oh, you needn’t do that,” said May, laughing.
Mr. Carlingford looked up at her a moment, and smiled to himself. That
slight flush on May’s face might only have been the effect of coming out
of the cold night air into warm rooms, but the other explanation pleased
him more.
“You and Tom will have great talks about Greek sculpture and Greek
literature, Mr. Markham,” said Mr. Carlingford, still adapting himself.
“I hear you are a wonderful scholar.”
“I have so little time for anything but my parish duties,” said Mr.
Markham, “that I never get the chance of working at classics. We are
very busy here, eh, May?”
“Well, it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good,” said Mr.
Carlingford, “and the parish is the gainer.”
The two gentlemen sat on in the dining-room afterwards, while May spent
a lonely but pleasant quarter of an hour in the drawing-room. She was
tired, for she had been out all day, and a low chair in front of the
fire suited her mood exactly. She never read much, and the books on the
table, chiefly by French authors of whom she had never heard, did not
excite her interest. So she fed on her own thoughts, and made quiet
uneventful plans for the future. When one is young, difficulties produce
a quickening of the hand and pulse, not a tendency to give up, to be
content with what is done. The powers of the mind and soul, like the
muscles of the body, grow only through their active employment, and the
harder the work the fitter they become. It is only when the capability
of growth ceases that exertion is labour. Her thoughts ran on the events
of the day, on the material as well as the spiritual needs of those
clustered cottagers, on the want, the suffering.... There was one girl
who lived alone in a tiny room in one of the poorer cottages with her
week-old baby. It was the common story; she was weak and ill, and unable
to work. Yet to such as her the promise had been made. The baby too;
surely the words “How much more shall He feed you” did not mean the
workhouse? She must consult her father about them. She had already
started a Sunday afternoon class for children. Poor mites, they did not
need theology yet; it was better to teach them to be clean, to show them
pictures that would amuse them, to let them spend a happy hour in a warm
bright room, with playthings and wooden bricks to build with.
And for herself, what? She neither wanted nor contemplated any change.
The work that lay before her was so inevitably hers, that any possible
change would be to neglect the whole purpose of her life. She was her
father’s daughter, and he was a parish priest. What other call could
there be for her which could be clearer than that? She rose from her
chair and walked once or twice up and down the room, and stopped at
length before a long mirror set in the wall. There was a lamp on either
side standing on the top of two chiffoniers, and her image was reflected
in bright light. She gazed a few seconds at herself without thinking
what she was doing, and then drew in her breath with a sudden start, for
she saw in the mirror a reflection, not of what she was used to think
herself, but the reflection of a woman, and she was that woman. The
whole thing flashed on to and off her brain in a moment, but it had been
there.
Meanwhile Mr. Carlingford and his vicar were having a comfortable glass
of port over the fire. The vicar liked everything to be good of its
sort; his terriers were all in the kennel stud-book, his Walter Scott
was an _édition de luxe_, and he had a beautiful Romney in his
dining-room. And all Mr. Carlingford offered him was first-rate; the
dinner had been excellent, the fire was of that superlative mixture,
cedar logs and coal, and the port was certainly above criticism. He
regretted profoundly that his slight cold had taken the edge off his
sense of taste.
Mr. Carlingford expressed singular but original ideas on the subject of
money.
“I had the pleasure of giving your curate, a delightful young fellow I
should say,” he began, “a small cheque this afternoon. So many
clergymen, Mr. Markham, if you will excuse a criticism on your
fellow-workers, are distinguished only for their superficial grasp of
subtleties; but Mr. Douglas is distinguished for his wonderfully keen
grasp of the obvious. I asked him for how much I should draw the cheque,
and he said at once the sum he wished to receive. I hope you will always
ask me when you want anything.”
“You are very generous.”
Mr. Carlingford finished his glass, and put it down on the
chimney-piece.
“Money may be the root of all evil,” he said, “but it is in itself a
very necessary evil. It is one of those little snares without which we
should be always tripping up. But it is a very troublesome thing. Tom, I
know, detests money; perhaps that is why he spends it so quickly.
However, there is always a chance of something smashing and his being
left penniless, so he needn’t abandon all hope of being happy yet. He is
a great friend of your son, is he not?”
“Yes, Ted saw a great deal of him at Cambridge, though he was a year or
two the senior.”
“I was so glad to see he had got his Fellowship. I suppose he will
remain at Cambridge.”
“Yes, he means to. He is fond of the place, and it is a pleasant life.”
“And that, after all, is the best investment you can make of your time,”
remarked Mr. Carlingford.
“Not financially, I am afraid.”
“My dear Mr. Markham, you are confusing the end and the means. The
harmless necessary cash can at the best only secure you a pleasant life,
and if the pleasant life comes to you without, it becomes not
necessary, but superfluous.”
“Well, there is no fear of cash ever being superfluous to Ted.”
“Cash is always superfluous, except when you cannot get credit,” said
his host. “If there were no cash in the world we should all live in our
several stations on our credit with each other, and how much simpler
that would be!”
“I am afraid there would be complications ahead.”
“There are always complications ahead,” said Mr. Carlingford, “but in
the fulness of time they fall behind. Meanwhile one rubs along somehow.
Shall we move into the next room?”
It is to be feared that if Tom, in the new life that had opened for him
at Athens, could have seen how Ted was spending his life at Cambridge,
he would have been far from satisfied with him. It requires strong
vitality or real originality to avoid the paralyzing effect which
routine brings with it, and though Ted was original enough to give birth
to some theories concerning patristic literature which were received in
the most favourable manner by past masters of his craft, his horizons
were imperceptibly narrowing around him. It is the peculiar property of
such changes that they are imperceptible; to be alive to them would be
to guard against them, for no thinking man acquiesces in limitations
which he can see. He spent long mornings of steady work, he took gentle
exercise in the afternoon, and played whist for an hour or two after
hall; and any routine, when one is surrounded by men who are engaged in
similar routines, is deadly. He let old acquaintances drop, he did not
care to initiate new ones, and he lived with a few men who were in the
same predicament as himself, and was perfectly happy. He worked not for
fame’s sake, but for the sake of the work, and though his method of
working is undoubtedly the more highly altruistic, yet it has to be paid
for in other ways. A little personal ambition is a very human and
therefore a very suitable thing for men, for it keeps one alive to the
fact that one is one man among other men, not one machine for producing
knowledge among other machines. A machine may very likely do the work
better; a perfect machine would do it perfectly, but it will not become
a man by so doing, though a man, as the higher of the two, may quite
easily degenerate into a machine.
Ted’s talk with May about parish work led to his taking a district in
Barnwell, and doing work there. But, as he told her, he had no power of
doing that sort of thing--he had none of the missionary spirit, nor any
desire now to enter into the personal relation with his fellows, which
distinguished, though in opposite ways, both his sister and Tom. The
sight of dirt and squalor was productive in him, in the first instance,
not of a desire to make it clean, but to go away. He realized to the
full how deplorable a state of uncleanliness, physical or moral, was,
and he would have been very uncomfortable to think that there were not
well-endowed institutions the object of which was to rectify it.
Before Tom had gone away in November, he completed a couple of
statuettes, which he had made during the summer, had them cast in bronze
by the _cire perdue_ process, and sent them to a winter exhibition. He
had only just received the news that they had been accepted before he
went away, and had heard nothing of them since. But one day in the
winter Ted had been turning over a current number of the _Spectator_,
and found them mentioned in a notice of the exhibition with that high
praise which is both rare and convincing, and felt a strong but
unsympathetic pleasure, for, judging from his own point of view, he
would have felt none himself that a casual critic thought them good. A
few nights afterwards, by one of those coincidences which would be so
strange if they were not so common, he met at dinner with the master of
another college, the sculptor Wallingthorpe, who talked chiefly about
himself, but a little about his art. He was a picturesque man, and his
picturesqueness added a strong flavour to his conversation.
“I seldom or never go to exhibitions,” he said. “A beautiful subject
badly treated warps one. One has to be convalescent after it. One’s
artistic sense has been bruised, and it has to recover from the blow:
the injured tissues have to heal.”
Ted mentioned the name of the exhibition where Tom’s studies had
appeared, and asked if he had been there.
“Yes, I did go there--no wine, thanks; I never take wine, by the way. It
is a stimulant, and I don’t require stimulating, I require soothing. I
am glad you mentioned that exhibition; there were two studies there of
extreme, unusual merit. They produced in me that feeling that I could
have done the thing myself, that I wished I had. That is the final
excellence from one’s own point of view. They realized to me the vision
I might have had.”
“Whom were they by?” asked Ted.
“By quite a young man, I believe; certainly by quite a new one.
Carlingford was the name.”
“Ah! I know him well,” said Ted.
They were sitting over the wine after dinner, and Wallingthorpe, who did
not care to talk to Ted exclusively any longer, but wanted a larger
audience, bent forward and shook him warmly by the hand. This was done
in a dramatic and fervid manner, and naturally drew the attention of the
rest of the table.
Wallingthorpe turned round to explain himself.
“I was congratulating Mr. Markham on knowing a man of genius,” he said.
The natural inference was that these felicitations were offered to Ted
on the happy event of his having become acquainted with Wallingthorpe,
but that gentleman was self-denying enough to dispel the idea.
“I was speaking of two very remarkable little works in the Ashdon
Gallery, by a young man called Carlingford, with whom Mr. Markham tells
me he is intimate. They are very faulty in many ways, but faults matter
nothing when there is the divine essential burning behind them. Mr.
Carlingford is an uncut diamond. There are superficial flaws in the
stone, which will be polished away. He has only got to work and to
live.”
“Carlingford,” said some one; “he was up at King’s till quite lately,
was he not?”
Mr. Marshall blinked intelligently behind his spectacles.
“Yes, but we had no idea we were harbouring a genius. In fact, no one
even suspected he had real talent of any kind. But he was not stupid.”
“It is possible, even probable, that he had no talent,” exclaimed
Wallingthorpe. “Genius and talent have nothing in common. You might as
well expect to find a bird that had hands because it has wings. Genius
flies, talent--the metaphor breaks down--walks on its hands and feet.
But what made you think he had no talent?”
“His work was always very careless, and showed no very distinct
promise.”
Wallingthorpe beat the air with prophetic hands.
“His Greek prose! His Latin verses! His οὐ and his μἠ That is very
likely. Did it not occur to any one that you might as well have set a
wild Indian to hem handkerchiefs?”
“You see we all have to hem handkerchiefs here,” said his host urbanely;
“that is the reason why young men come to Cambridge.”
“And you wonder when your thorns bear grapes and your thistles figs!”
said Wallingthorpe. “Yet those are to blame who did not know that the
thistle was a fig-tree.”
Dr. Madeford laughed good-naturedly.
“But we are all delighted when we find it bearing figs,” he said,
“although, of course, we don’t allow that we thought it a thistle. We
have a higher idea of what we study.”
Wallingthorpe became pacific.
“Consider me rebuked,” he said, “but think of the pity of it. Four or
five years ago that boy ought to have been alternately turned loose in
Rome and shut up with a model and a mountain of clay. By now those
defects would have vanished. They would never have been in his nature.
Their possibility would have been taken out of him before they had
birth.”
“Then you have really a high opinion of his work?” asked Markham.
“My dear young man, I have the highest. He has genius, and he has love
of his work. Show me the man of whom I can say that, and I hail him as a
brother.”
Wallingthorpe’s egotism was too deep to call conceit; it was a
conviction that was the mainspring of his nature, the driving-power of
his work. It should not matter to the outside world what the
driving-power is, if the result is admirable, and Wallingthorpe’s
results certainly were admirable.
But further conversation would seem bathos after this, and the party
passed into the drawing-room.
Wallingthorpe had a word or two more with Ted as he was leaving.
“What is Carlingford doing now?” he asked.
“He’s in Athens, working there.”
“A dangerous experiment. Is he much impressed by classical art?”
“Very much indeed; he believes in nothing else, he says.”
The sculptor frowned.
“That means he will try to stand on tip-toe for a month or two instead
of flying. However, he will get tired of that. He will soon learn that
the only real art is realism.”
“He says that a sculptor out there called Manvers is always impressing
that on him.”
“Manvers? Well, no one ever accused Manvers of not being a realist. That
is about the only crime he has never been suspected of. Manvers is
extremely talented, but he has not a touch of genius. However, for
diabolical cleverness in his work he can’t be touched. On the other
hand, any tendency in Carlingford to idealism might be encouraged by
Manvers indirectly. He would find it impossible, if he had leanings that
way, not to have his bias strengthened by anything so rampantly
realistic as Manvers’ work.”
“Tom Carlingford is coming back to England in a few weeks.”
“I’m glad of that. The future is in his own hands.”