Easter was late, and when Tom and May left London to spend a week or two
with old Mr. Carlingford at Applethorpe, spring had already burst out
into freshest and greenest leaf. As they drove along the avenue from the
Lodge gate, May thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. The
ground sloped sharply from the road up on either side, and the russet of
the last year’s dead bracken was mingled with the milky green of the
fresh new shoots. Here and there an ash-tree with its black buds, or a
lime on which the little fans of green leaves were beginning to burst
from their red sheath, stood firmly among the young yearly plants, an
experienced guarantee to the steadfast kindness of the varying seasons.
Now and then a white-scutted rabbit bundled across the road, or a
squirrel whisked up to some safer eminence, and scolded violently from
among the branches. As they passed the lake, a moorhen half swam, half
flew to seek the shelter of the rhododendron bushes, leaving a widening
ripple behind it, and a sudden gust of wind arose, shaking half a dozen
catkins from the listless birch-trees. The whole air was redolent of
spring and country, and promise of fresh life.
Tom was driving, and May sat beside him. She had not been very well for
a week or two, and as the wind struck her, he thought she shivered
slightly.
“You’re not cold, are you, darling?” he said.
“No, Tom, only very happy.”
He laughed.
“Well, so am I; but I don’t shiver. Put that cloak round you.”
“Do you remember giving me your coat one night, Tom?” she asked.
“Yes; you were so obstinate, too. You refused to put it on for a long
time.”
They drove on in silence for a little way.
“Are you glad to get down here?” asked Tom.
“Yes, very. I’ve got so many people I know here. You see, Tom, I’m not
very clever, and I do like little quiet everyday things to do. And I see
more of you here. You’re always so busy in London. Ted’s here, too. He
got here two days ago.”
“Why doesn’t he come as your father’s curate?” asked Tom.
“Well, he has all his Cambridge work to do. He can’t very well give up
that. And yet I don’t know.”
“I think he’s right,” said Tom. “He is doing splendid work, I believe.
It doesn’t interest me, personally, but I do believe it ought to be
done.”
“Ted told me you always used to howl at him so for working at scholiasts
or syntax or something.”
“I know I used. But after all if the world is ever going to reach
perfection, you have to work up all lines perfectly. And he says that
scribes are terrible fellows for scamping their work and making stupid
mistakes; they must be shown up.”
“But there are bigger things in the world than scribes and scholiasts,
Tom,” said May, half-timidly.
“Yes, dear; but what is a man to do? He cannot work passionately at
things he does not feel passionately.”
“But there is one thing which it is every one’s duty to feel
passionately. And when a man goes into the church, it seems to me a sort
of visible sign that he does feel it passionately.”
“But there are other things in the world,” said Tom. “What is beauty
made for, or love, or anything lovely? Surely they are worth giving
one’s life for? If there was only meant to be one thing in the world
which it is right for men to strive after--I mean the personal direct
relation with God--why are all these wonderful and beautiful things
given us? Not just to look at and wonder and go by?”
“No. To help us to realize the personal and direct relation with God. We
should look on them as signs of His love for us. Do you remember the
first present you gave me, that little diamond ring? It was awfully
pretty, but I loved it because you gave it me.”
Tom was silent.
“It’s no use talking of it, darling, even with you,” he said at last.
“It is your passion, and I have another passion. Neither of us can
really conceive that there is another standpoint besides our own. We
acquiesce in there being others, but unless one experiences a thing, one
cannot feel it.”
“I am not afraid, Tom,” said she. “He will teach us all in the way it is
best for us to be taught. If we are willing to receive, He will give us
the knowledge of Himself, when it is good that we receive it.”
“And there we are at one,” said Tom. “That I believe with my whole
soul.”
They reached home just as evening was falling, but the night came on
warm and cloudless. Tom helped May very tenderly out of the carriage,
and after tea they walked a little up and down the gravel path above the
long terrace. The beds were already odorous with spring blossoms, and
white-winged moths hovered noiselessly over the flowers, and glided
silently away again like ghosts into the surrounding dusk.
The mist was rising a little from the low-lying fields towards the
village, across which two country lads were walking home, one with an
empty milk-pail in his hand, the other with a spade over his shoulder,
whistling loudly. And in the dusk husband and wife spoke together of the
dear event that was coming, and in that human love and longing their
souls met and mingled. May thought no more of the barrier which still
stood between them even in their almost perfect love and confidence.
She, in her clear unquestioning faith, was apt to lose sight too much of
the use and value of beauty and love and life, which are as directly
gifts from God as faith, and to wonder, with something like anguish,
when she thought how completely they had possession of her husband, what
the end would be. But now that the fulness and perfection of a woman’s
life was promised her, she, too, for a little felt the sweetness and
strength of living. She was a woman, and the crown of womanhood was
coming to her; the divine miracle was near its fulfilment. She was alone
in the hush of evening, beneath the opening stars, with her husband, and
things human and divine seemed so mingled together, that neither failed
of their completeness.
The next few days passed very peaceably. May, who had been rather
languid and out of spirits in London, soon regained her serene health.
She and Tom strolled together in the woods or drove out for an hour or
two every day. Ted and his father were with them a good deal, and Tom,
who had rather overworked himself in the last few weeks, found a new
pleasure in hanging about doing nothing. May insisted on his going long
rides or walks, in which she herself could not join, and after spending
the morning quietly in the woods with Tom, or paddling about on the lake
exploring the little creeks and islands, she would send Tom and Ted off
together in the afternoon for a long tramp or a ride over the Surrey
downs.
They had spent one of these afternoons, about a week after they had come
to Applethorpe, in this manner, and about four o’clock had descended on
to a little red-backed village standing in a hollow of the downs,
surrounded by hop-gardens and strawberry fields, and having had tea in
the country inn, proceeded homewards. Their way lay through the village
street with its neat white cottages, and long strips of garden fronting
the road. In one were flowering clumps of primroses, and a border of
merry daffodils lay underneath the windows. In another a more ambitious
show had been planned, and sundry little wooden labels, stuck about in
beds of young fresh green, not yet in flower, promised a crop of
annuals. In another a box hedge, cut into fantastic shapes, gave a
genteel privacy, and marked it off from its neighbours. The little
Norman church stood at the bottom of the street, and just as they passed
the gate a group of mourners came away from a grave which the sexton was
filling in. Tom waited for them to pass, and stood a moment watching
them ascend the street. They went in, he noticed, at the house with the
box hedge. A moment afterwards the clergyman, who knew Tom, came out,
and as they stopped to speak to him, Tom asked what the funeral had
been.
“A poor woman here,” he said, “who died in childbed two days ago. Poor
thing! she leaves her husband, such a nice young fellow, quite alone.
They had only been married nine months.”
Tom turned angrily round on the astonished young man.
“How can you say such horrible things?” he said, and walked off,
followed by Ted, at five miles an hour.
Ted caught him up in a few moments, and made him abate his pace.
“Poor old boy,” he said, “don’t get in such a state about it!”
They walked on a few moments in silence.
“It’s all too horrible,” broke out Tom at length. “How can such things
be? Poor darling! And I have been such a brute to her. Our lives are
lived apart really. She thinks the passion of my life is no more than a
plaything sent to amuse us, and the passion of hers is unintelligible to
me. It is no more than a beautiful unconvincing fable.”
“But what if the fable is true?” asked Ted.
“It may be true, but how can I tell? All I know is that it isn’t
convincing to me. It may be so, or it may not. But if it doesn’t
convince me, what am I to do? I would give the world to be convinced of
it.”
“She is very happy in your love,” said Ted.
“She is the best and sweetest woman on this earth,” said Tom. “I love
her more and more every day. But I do love my art too. My life would be
incomplete--impossible without either.”
Ted sighed.
“You are very fortunate. Your circle of completeness is widening every
day. You are in love with love and life.”
“Teddy, do leave that place,” said Tom earnestly. “It is changing you.
You always were narrow, you know, as I often told you, but you are
getting narrower. You only care about dead things. You had better care
about the worst of living things than the best of dead.”
“So you tell me. But no one can realize any one else’s conviction, as
you have also told me. You are playing symphonies to the deaf. It may be
so, or it may not be so. How can I tell?”
“But you know it is so,” said Tom.
“Sometimes I think it must be so. I know, at any rate, that you, for
instance, get more keen and active happiness out of life than I do. The
best emendation doesn’t give me the quality of pleasure which the smell
of a spring morning or a hundred other things give you.”
“I told you so. You do know it,” said Tom. “Why don’t you act on it?”
“I can’t. There is no other reason. It is no use to say to myself: ‘You
shall care for a spring morning more than you care for Zenobius.’ I
don’t care passionately for Zenobius, but I don’t care at all for a
spring morning.”
“I agree with you to a certain extent, you know,” said Tom--“more, at
any rate, than I used to at Cambridge. I think scholiasts ought to be
studied. They are a leaf, or a line in the book of ultimate perfection.
But you have got them out of focus. They are too close to your eyes, and
conceal everything else. Well, here we are at the vicarage. Good-bye,
Teddy! I must go home quickly.”
Tom passed along the village street, and at the church suddenly the
words of the clergyman came back to him with a sickening sense of
revulsion. He paused at the door a moment, and then by a sudden impulse
went in and knelt down in the nearest seat. He was not aware of
conscious thought, only of an overmastering need. “Why am I here,” he
thought to himself, “I who have no right here?” Then like an
overwhelming wave the thought of May came upon him--May, the love of his
strong, young life, soon to be in pain, perhaps in danger of death, like
the woman in the cottage with the box hedge, with that yet unborn life
within her. And the same impulse which had prompted him to come into the
church, prompted him to say, “If there is One all-powerful and
all-loving, may He be with her now.” And like the old pagans in Homer,
he felt inclined to vow a hecatomb of oxen if his prayer was granted.
And thus in his terrible fear and need Tom was brought by his love for
May to the feet of the unknown God.
He waited a moment before leaving the church, and looked round. There
were the old windows he knew so well: a pink Jonah being fitted neatly
into a green whale; a yellow-haired, long-legged David standing on the
chest of a prostrate Goliath, and with immense difficulty lifting the
giant’s sword; a perfect Niagara of dew descending on the fleece of
Gideon, Joshua laying violent hands on a red sun and a yellow moon, and
the walls of Jericho falling over symmetrically in one piece. The east
window consisted of three narrow lancets, still faintly visible in the
dusk, and the middle of these showed a figure crowned with thorns, with
arms outspread, drawing the whole world unto Him....
He went quickly up over the fields from the village where he and May had
walked the first night they came, and along the terrace walk. A little
wind stirred in the bushes, and blew across him the faint odour of the
flowers. In the house the lamps were already lit, and looking up to
May’s bedroom window he saw through the white blind a light burning
there. For one moment his heart stood still with fear, and then,
regathering courage, he went into the house.
His father was sitting in the library, with a green reading-lamp by him,
and he looked up quickly as Tom entered.
“Where is May? Where is May?” he asked.
Mr. Carlingford shut up his book.
“My dear boy, how late you are, and what on earth is the matter with
you? Tom, for God’s sake don’t be hysterical or faint. It’s all right,
but it has been very sudden. May’s child was born--a son--just about
four o’clock. She is asleep now, and doing very well.”
Tom stood there, perfectly pale, with his mouth slightly open. Then
quite suddenly his hat and stick fell from his hand, and he collapsed
into a chair.
Mr. Carlingford rang the bell.
“Tom, if you behave like that, I shall disown you. I never saw such an
absurd exhibition. Are you going to cry, or die, or what? Here, bring
some brandy quickly,” he said to the man who answered the bell.
The brandy revived Tom somewhat, and he stood up, still looking dazed
and puzzled.
“I don’t know what happened to me, father,” he said. “I never behaved
like that before. I want to see May and--and my son. Say it again. What
has happened exactly?”
“My dear Tom, from the way you behave, I should have thought that such a
thing as the birth of a child was a unique phenomenon, whereas it is one
of the most common exhibitions of the forces of Nature. It occurs, I am
told, many times every minute on this earth. You can’t see either of
them now.”
“The baby, just fancy!”
Tom picked up his hat and stick, and stood looking into the fire. Even
Mr. Carlingford was slightly shaken from the web of cynical observation,
out of the meshes of which, like a kind of spider, he culled the
weaknesses of mankind, Tom, with his smooth hairless face, looked so
boyish himself, and for a moment the old man’s memory went back with a
sudden feeling of tenderness to the time when Tom had been a soft
helpless atom like that which was lying upstairs now at its mother’s
breast.
“Tom, old boy, I’m so awfully pleased,” he said. “I always had an absurd
wish--I don’t know why--to see you with a baby sitting on your knee. You
are a good boy; you chose the wife I would have had you choose, and she
has behaved as a wife should behave.”
Tom turned round to his father with a beaming face.
“Then we are all satisfied, father,” he said, “and now I’m going
upstairs very quietly to see if I can see her--them. Them!”
May was asleep, and he was told to delay any further visit till the
morning. If she woke she had better not be disturbed; but she should be
told that Tom had come in, and that he had been up to see her.
Next day was Sunday, and Tom awoke very early in that most delicious way
of all, slowly, with a vague growing consciousness of utter happiness.
The window was open, and he lay a few minutes letting the cool breeze
ruffle his hair before he stirred. Then rising and putting on a
dressing-gown, he went to make inquiries as to whether May was awake,
and whether he might see her. The nurse answered both questions
affirmatively, and he went in. She was lying propped up by pillows, and
by the bed was a little pink-and-white cot, in which Tom could just see
a little crumpled red face.
May welcomed him with a smile, and laid her finger on her lips.
“Hush, Tom, he’s asleep,” she whispered, “but you may look at him.”
Tom availed himself of the permission.
“What a queer little thing it is!” he said.
“Queer! It!” objected May. “It’s him, and he’s beautiful.”
Tom knelt down by the bed.
“My darling, my darling!” he whispered. “I didn’t know how happy I could
be till I woke this morning. And it’s all real and true. I was almost
afraid till I saw you that it was a dream or a wish of mine.”
He raised himself and bent over her, and their lips met in a long kiss
of passion purified by tenderness.
He stood there for a moment, till the son and heir awoke and began to
howl, bringing the nurse into the room, who incontinently dismissed Tom.
He went back to his room and drew up the blind, letting a yellow splash
of sunlight on to the floor. In the bushes below the window a thrush
sang out of the fulness of his heart the wonderful repeated song which
he always knew, and which no one else will ever learn. Through the soft
air swept the first swallows of the new summer, flying high over the
shrubs and trees in the garden. Tom looked out for some minutes,
sniffing in the clear morning air, when from the village began the
church bell for early communion. A sudden impulse, an irresistible need
to thank some one for his happiness, as strong and urgent as his need
the night before of commending May to some protection stronger than man,
made him dress quickly and walk down to the church.
It was almost empty. Ted and his father were at the altar, and a few
parishioners were kneeling in the body of the church. The Ante-communion
Service was nearly over, and Mr. Markham was reading the Prayer for the
Church Militant as Tom entered. He went to the pew where he had knelt
the night before, and soon the blessed command fell on his ears--
“Draw near with faith, and take this holy sacrament to your comfort.”
What did it mean? How could he draw near with faith? What was faith? And
the grave, solemn voice from the altar answered him, that faith was to
know that God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son.
Was this, then, the answer to his strange unformulated desire to thank
some one for his happiness? Did it all come from this, from the quiet,
still church, from the memory of that sacrifice which sanctified love
and all that is beautiful?
He had wanted to vow a hecatomb of oxen the night before; he had longed
to be able to promise something to any power which would give him what
he had seen in May’s room that morning, and instead of that he himself
was bidden to the feast, and with the others he went up and knelt at the
table of Christ.
Tom waited outside the church for Ted and his father, in order to give
them news of May, and then turned homewards again. The desire to seek
aid which had prompted him to come to the church the night before had
given place to the desire to give thanks. He had come one step nearer to
the unknown God; he approached Him, not as a power, but as a benefactor.
The words of the great thanksgiving had thrilled him through and
through. “We praise Thee, we bless Thee.”
That desire of the human creature, constant through all centuries, to
seek for that which is outside itself, and stronger than itself, and
passes understanding, had come to him. Some hand had knocked, so he
thought, on the door of his soul, and wakened it from its sleep of
indifference. Was it perhaps, after all, only the result of this sudden
change from his deathly fears of the night before to the embracing
happiness of this morning? He could not tell; he scarcely cared to ask
himself.
After breakfast he saw May again, and when the nurse put an end to their
interview he went out under the cedar, filled with the double thought.
The bell for eleven o’clock church was ringing, but Tom had no intention
of going. The sacredness of the morning demanded solitude. He watched
the servants going down to church in their Sunday clothes, and marked
two footmen stealing away towards the woods, and by degrees the house
grew still. Tom went in and found a Bible with some little difficulty,
and brought it out. He wanted to know more of that wonderful Life that
had died, and had risen again for ever in men’s hearts, and he turned to
the Gospel of the Apostle of Love. There he could learn all that a man
need know, all that he had missed all his life.
But how to get at it? How to know that those words were spoken for him?
All he did know was that words and sentences which he had often heard
before were meaningless no longer, that something which was very real
and sacred to others had a sudden interest for him. He had never had
doubts on such subjects; simply the belief in which he had been scantily
brought up had faded and died a natural death, as leaves die in autumn
when the sap no longer feeds them. So now the simple Gospel narrative
struck him as so probable, so convincingly literal, that there was no
question of sifting or examination possible. He remembered vaguely, and
with some contempt, a book he had read not long before which seemed to
deny the fundamental truths of Christianity because the writer could not
bring himself to believe that Balaam’s ass really spoke. Even the
literal truth of the Gospel did not seem to matter; the conception was
divine; it was the best life that could have been lived: it was
perfection, no less, and that which is perfect is not man, but God.
Socrates warns us of the inutility of an unexamined belief, a statement
which is not universally true. For a man who is gifted or saddled--for
it is a dangerous bequest--with a critical nature the remark is
profoundly true. To deliberately refuse to look a doubt in the face is
an act of cowardice, a sacrifice and a stifling of our intellectual
capacities. But there are many natures, highly developed intellectually,
which are not critical, and to such religion is a matter of either
indifference or conviction. Whether there ever was a Garden of Eden with
a tree in the middle of it, round which was coiled a serpent, is a
question which has no interest for them. If pressed they may say that
some things are not meant to be taken literally, and dismiss the subject
from their minds. The critical mind finds some slight but spurious
consolation in shrugging its shoulders and labelling them as fools, but
its consolations end there, for there is no doubt which is the happier
of the two, and that an uncritical mind is synonymous with a foolish one
is not the case.
There is a certain experiment known to chemists as the solidification of
a supersaturated solution. Some fluid is heated, and while hot there are
dissolved in it large quantities of salt or alum. Now, a liquid when hot
can hold more substance in solution than when it is cold, and when this
surcharged liquid is allowed to cool quietly it actually holds more salt
than it is theoretically capable of holding, and as long as it is left
still it can do so. But if an atom of the same salt is put into it, the
whole mass solidifies. Tom’s spiritual fluid had been subjected to a
somewhat analogous experience. It had been surcharged with the salts of
love and life, and then came the atom as momentous as the straw which
breaks the camel’s back--the birth of the baby and the safety of May. It
was necessary for him to have something to which he could refer, and
from which he might derive his happiness; there must be for him a
Superior Being. He did not wish to argue about it, to examine reasons
for granting the existence of a first cause, or to split hairs over the
precise way in which God became incarnate in man. Simply his happiness
was too great for him to bear alone; his nature held more happiness than
it could hold by itself, and he had to refer it to something outside his
nature.