Lord Corstorphine had been an Oxford man, but some curious lingering
dread of Puseyism made Lady Charmington send Sainty to Cambridge. She
gave a moment’s anxious thought to the vicinity of Newmarket, but, as
she truly said, that hardly seemed a danger to Sainty; and as Arthur was
to read for the army when he left Eton, there was no question of the
University for him.
Sainty went to college, as he did most things, from the habit of
obedience, but with no great hope of personal enjoyment. Anticipation to
him was rarely pleasurable; he had not the sanguine temperament. He
looked on Cambridge as a larger Eton, a new field for unpopularity and
isolation in the midst of a crowd, but he soon began to be aware of an
atmosphere of wider toleration than he had known at school.
It is true he was a dreary failure among his peers, the gilded youth who
went to Newmarket, kept hunters, and spent their evenings at the
card-table; and he was ignominiously blackballed for a certain
fashionable dining-club for which some one was so ill-advised as to put
him up. His college, however, was large enough to contain men of all
sorts, and among some of the more thoughtful he found congenial society
and kindly appreciation, especially in the little knot of undergraduates
who gathered round a young don called Gerald Newby.
Sainty was just ripe for some one to worship, and Newby supplied the
object beautifully. In all his reserved, unhappy boyhood, he had never
known the joy of that falling in friendship, so to speak, which is one
of youth’s happiest prerogatives. The only two companions for whom he
had felt much affection, his cousin and his brother, had certainly given
him more pain than pleasure. The generous delights of an enthusiastic
admiration had hitherto been withheld from him. This young man,
sufficiently his senior to speak to his troubled soul with a certain
authority, yet near enough to his own age for discussion on equal terms,
excited such a feeling in the highest degree.
It is difficult for older people not to smile at very young men’s
estimates of themselves or of one another. Newby had opinions, splendid
opinions, on all sorts of subjects, which his disciple imbibed with
rapture. Sainty took his young mentor quite seriously, and Gerald, it
need hardly be said, took himself quite seriously; and between them they
were sublimely earnest and high-toned, and perhaps, if the truth must be
told, just a trifle priggish.
For one thing, of course, Sainty had ‘doubts.’ It is not to be supposed
that a youth with a morbid conscience, a tender heart, a keen mind and
delicate health, reared in Lady Charmington’s school of extreme
Calvinistic theology, should have reached the age of eighteen without
many searchings of heart.
Little as this profane page may seem the place for the discussion of
such subjects, it would be impossible to give an adequate notion of
Sainty’s life at Cambridge or his relations with Gerald Newby, without a
passing reference to the topics that kept them from their beds far into
the small hours of many a chilly morning.
Young men of Gerald Newby’s stamp can conceive of nothing that is not
the better for being ‘threshed out,’ as he would have called it. He held
that if the old creeds were ‘outworn,’ it was no reason for abandoning
faith--that there was to be evolution in belief as in other things; and
he had dreams of an universal Church freed from strangling dogmas, in
which all sincere seekers after truth should meet in a common
brotherhood. Perhaps he was a little vague as to what was to be left as
the object of belief, when everything had been eliminated in which the
controversially inclined could find matter for discussion, but that did
not trouble him in the least.
‘What we want,’ he said to Sainty, ‘is more light. All churches in all
ages have been alike in the mistake of endeavouring to stifle discussion
of their doctrines. Discussion is the breath of life; unquestioning
acceptance is death.’
‘But once one begins questioning things, one is so apt to find one
doesn’t believe them----’
‘Then let them go. Depend upon it, what won’t bear the investigation of
reason cannot be worth keeping. The truth, and the truth only, must
emerge clearer and purer from every test to which it is submitted; and
it is the truth we want. Why, when in all other departments of knowledge
our understanding becomes truer and stronger every year, should we seek
to stultify ourselves and shrink from all growth in the highest science
of all, that which deals with the fount of all knowledge, and the spring
of all conduct?’
‘But suppose,’ Sainty asked, ‘one should find in the end that one
believes nothing?’
‘Then believe nothing,’ said Newby grandly. ‘But I won’t, I can’t,
suppose any such thing; it is belief that comes of inquiry, not the
negation of belief.’
Sainty was very much impressed. He had never before had any one to whom
he could unburthen himself on these subjects. His mother, he knew well,
would have revolted in horror from any questioning of the doctrines she
herself accepted, and his uncle would not have approached the discussion
in that serious spirit which alone he thought befitting. But the lads
who assembled evening after evening in Newby’s rooms had no angelic fear
of treading on anything, and talked everlastingly on all subjects,
religious doubt or belief among the rest. If they found the world out of
joint they by no means shared Hamlet’s distress at being ‘born to set it
right,’ or doubted for a moment their perfect ability to do so. These
boys who so confidently settled the affairs of the nation, the world,
the universe, are getting middle-aged men now, hard-working public
officials, clergymen, schoolmasters, and would probably smile at their
own youthful enthusiasms. Many of them are married and fathers of
families. Newby himself is senior dean of the college, and a very
different person from the ardent apostle of universal belief and
brotherhood to whom Sainty brought so many of his perplexities.
Belchamber spent an immense amount of time in the young don’s
comfortable rooms. A kind of sensual austerity marked the place,
something cloistral and monastic, yet with a touch of art and luxury.
Pale autumnal sunlight, or the soft glow of shaded lamps, lingered
lovingly on the backs of well-bound books, some large framed photographs
of early Italian Madonnas, and a reproduction of a Neapolitan bronze. A
great many teacups reflected the fire, while a permanent faint smell of
tobacco just gave a masculine character to the mellow warmth of the
atmosphere. Several armchairs and a huge sofa seemed always trying, by
the sad colour and severe pattern of their coverings, to conceal the
fact of their depth and softness, just as their owner, who had a
handsome refined face and a well-knit frame, affected a slouch and wore
shabby clothes to show he was not vain.
If Sainty poured himself out to Gerald when they were alone, he took but
little share in the general discussions, when other people were present.
To express himself was always a difficulty to him; he lay, as it were,
on the margin of the pool of talk, into which one eager speaker after
another dashed past him while he was still trying to summon courage for
the plunge. It would sometimes happen that at the end of a long evening
he had not opened his mouth, and he was taken to task more than once on
the subject by his friend. ‘You really should try and talk more; men
take your silence for ungraciousness. It looks as if you didn’t think
them even worth disagreeing with, you know. Locke asked me to-day if you
weren’t very proud; he said you sat all the time he was talking about
the essential Christianity of Shelley’s point of view, the other night,
with a little supercilious expression which said plainer than words that
you thought him a fool.’
‘Oh dear! and I was so much interested,’ Sainty cried. ‘I had nothing
particular to say about it; to tell the truth, I had never thought of
Shelley exactly from that point of view, but I liked it all so much.’
‘Well, you should have told him so; you see, you didn’t convey that
impression to Locke.’
Gerald was by no means always tender with his proselyte. He had great
belief in his own powers of sympathy--(‘I understand,’ he used to say in
a meaning way to those who laid bare their difficulties to him)--but he
was quite capable of ‘smiting friendly and reproving’ when the occasion
seemed to demand it. ‘I shouldn’t be your friend, if I didn’t say ...’
was a favourite formula with him, and he constantly invited an equal
frankness in others, though it is doubtful how he would have liked the
invitation to be accepted.
‘I have been thinking a good deal,’ he said, pausing in the act of
making tea, and turning to Sainty with the kettle in one hand, ‘about
what you said the other day of shunning uncongenial society. Of course
there is a great deal of truth in it, and nothing obliges one to live
habitually with people with whom one has nothing in common, but one has
a duty to the outside world as well as to oneself.’
‘I can no more be myself with certain people,’ Sainty objected, ‘than I
can write my own handwriting on paper I don’t like.’
‘Of course we all feel that,’ responded Gerald rather brutally, ‘but
there are two things to consider: in the first place, there’s the danger
to one’s own character of getting narrow and cliquey; and in the second,
unless you have something to do with men who are your inferiors in aim
or culture, how are you to influence them for better things?’
‘I don’t say they are my inferiors,’ said Sainty humbly; ‘I only say
they are so unlike me in their habits and point of view that I can’t
talk to them. They may be quite as good fellows as I am; probably they
think themselves much better----’
‘Yes, but _you_ don’t think so; you know you don’t,’ insisted his mentor
sternly. ‘Ah! you are looking at that Giotto; it’s from the Arena Chapel
at Padua; it’s a jolly thing, isn’t it? The meekness of the Virgin’s
expression is so wonderful. Those fellows lost so much of the religious
feeling when they ceased to be archaic. Probably you don’t cordially
like or approve even of all the fellows you meet here. I don’t
altogether myself. But it is one of my principles to welcome all sorts
of men. It is not only that I think they may get good from us, but they
teach us too. We must try to be broad, to keep our sympathies open on
all sides, to be in touch with every kind of person, if we hope to do
any good.’
‘You are like St. Paul,’ said Sainty quite seriously; ‘it is very
wonderful of you. I wish I was more adaptable, but people shut me up
so.’
Newby smilingly deprecated the likeness to St. Paul, but in his heart he
thought it quite true. ‘Take Parsons, for instance,’ he said; ‘do you
suppose I am not often shocked by things he says? Yet I think he keeps
us fresh, as it were; he is bracing, stimulating, useful, if only as
keeping alive in us the wholesome reprobation of some of the views he
thinks it necessary to advocate. And look at the matter from his point
of view. It is far better he should come here, and find his own level,
and meet with wholesome disagreement, than be driven into thinking
himself a social pariah persecuted for his opinions, or surround himself
with a little set of duller men, who would take what he says for gospel,
and on whom his influence would be wholly bad.’
‘I don’t like Ned Parsons,’ said Sainty simply. ‘I know he’s clever and
amusing and all that, but I think he’s rather a beast.’
They were interrupted by the arrival of several undergraduates,
including the subject of their discussion, the pursuit of which had
therefore to be postponed to a more fitting opportunity.
‘Yes, Newby,’ said Parsons, settling himself luxuriously in the deepest
armchair, ‘I will take a cup of tea, though I should prefer a whisky and
soda. And what might we be going to improve ourselves with to-night? the
religious opinions of Swinburne, or the relation of the Ego to the
non-Ego?’
‘You are incurably flippant, Ned,’ said Gerald, with an indulgent smile.
‘Here we all are, burning to be enlightened,’ continued Parsons. ‘Pray
don’t deny us the tonic of stimulating conversation.’
‘I’ve been wondering,’ innocently struck in a large rowing man, whom Ned
described as having ‘aspirations after higher things,’ ‘what it is that
keeps us all together, when we’ve so little in common, and I’ve come to
the conclusion it must be our sense of humour.’
‘Quite right, Og; no doubt it is,’ said Parsons approvingly. ‘And you
and Newby are specially rich in it; and so is Sainty over there in the
corner, though he is funny by stealth and blushes to find it fame.’
The room was growing full of smoke and of the buzz of voices; Newby was
holding forth to a small knot of admirers. ‘The Radicalism of Mill,’ he
was saying, ‘is as dead as the dodo; all the things that were vital to
his generation have been attained----’
‘How about female suffrage?’ Parsons asked.
‘But there is a newer Radicalism,’ Gerald went on, without paying any
attention, ‘which is not incompatible with Imperialism in its best
forms----’
‘All Radicalism,’ said the rowing man sententiously, with the air of
making a valuable contribution to contemporary thought, ‘tends to
Socialism----’
‘Well, yes, in a way you may say it does,’ assented Newby politely; ‘but
that in my mind is not altogether an objection. The word Socialism used
to be a bugbear to frighten children with; but there is a new Socialism
as there is a new Radicalism. If you come to think of it, all
interference by the State is a form of Socialism; it is the community
at work for the good of the community, instead of the individual making
weak and isolated effort for his own good----’
‘Poor dear Mill!’ interjected Ringwood, a young man who in those days
would have been called ‘æsthetic,’ ‘it is a pity he is so _vieux jeu_;
he had such a nice refined face, and learned Greek as a baby, and it was
so nice and unconventional of him to want women in parliament. Perhaps
in time parliament may come to be all women, and men be free to look
after things that really matter.’
‘Such as old china,’ said Parsons.
‘Women,’ said the rowing man, ‘should stick to woman’s province; her
home and children should be enough for any woman.’
‘And suppose she hasn’t got any?’ asked Ned.
‘But I see what Ringwood means,’ said the rowing man. ‘Of course
politics are very important and all that; far be it from me to deny it.
For my part I’m a Conservative, and I don’t care who knows it. But the
thing that really matters is no doubt the intellectual life.’
Even Newby smiled discreetly.
‘No doubt, no doubt,’ he said. ‘There is a great deal in what you say;
but it is essential that politics should not be left to inferior men, or
what becomes of the nation? Look at America with her venal professional
politicians, and see what it has brought her to. Depend upon it, it is
the intellectual element in parliament that leavens the lump. Our
thinkers must not shut themselves up from public life; we must go down
into the arena and put the result of our thought into action, if we hope
to do any good in our generation.’
This magnificent sentiment was applauded as it deserved to be, but Newby
had not nearly had his innings. He had much more to say about the new
Radicalism and the new Socialism, and he talked so beautifully of the
wickedness of being a hermit that Sainty resolved to widen his horizon
by asking Ned Parsons to lunch next day, and proceeded at once to ‘put
the result of his thought into action.’
It was not often that he indulged in the luxury of entertaining. He had
none of that genial desire for presiding which to many a man makes the
top of his own table such an exciting position; moreover, he had been
trained in the practice of the most careful economy, and had been
accustomed to hear his mother condemn unnecessary profusion as hardly
less sinful than irreligion.
The question of his allowance had been carefully discussed between his
guardians, and the sum eventually decided on, although it would have
been treated as quite inadequate by most young men of his position,
seemed to him so ridiculously large that he was always endeavouring to
conceal the amount of it from his poorer companions. He did so entirely
from a feeling of delicacy; but it need hardly be said that his motives
were frequently misconstrued, and he was firmly believed by many to be
of a penurious and miserly disposition. As a matter of fact, if little
of it went in ostentatious hospitality, he spent still less upon
himself. Arthur early discovered that his brother was ‘a safer draw for
cash than the mater,’ and Claude, if he asked for help less often and
with more circumlocution, also found Sainty a convenient banker. Lady
Eva’s son was studying with a well-known coach for diplomacy, and though
he lived with his mamma, ‘found life in London,’ as he wrote to his
cousin, ‘horribly expensive.’ ‘I wear my gloves till people look
sympathetic when they shake hands with me, thinking I am in mourning,
and should as soon think of taking a hansom as a coach and four. But
cigarettes I must have; they are literally the breath of my nostrils,
and no matter how skilfully I hide them, mamma will find them and smoke
them when I’m out. If it were not for Sunborough House, I believe I
should starve. How, when, and where my revered parent feeds I am wholly
unable to discover; but there is never anything to eat at home. Luckily,
I am in high favour with grandmamma. I tell her she is the most
beautiful woman in London, and that if I wasn’t her grandson I should be
frantically in love with her, and she swallows it all. We are the best
of friends, but I don’t get much out of her, except food and an
occasional back seat in her opera-box; and of course I have to make her
little presents _de temps en temps_. I ask myself, my dear Saint, how on
earth all the young men I see about, smiling and spruce, contrive to
live in this wicked costly place. They can’t _all_ be millionaires.’
This was the burthen of many letters. Belchamber smiled indulgently; he
couldn’t help being amused by them; they were certainly better reading
than the ill-spelt scrawls in which Arthur announced he was ‘infernal
hard-up.’ ‘What with subscriptions, and one thing and another, a fellow
had such lots of expenses at Eton, it was perfectly beastly, and the
mater kept him so precious tight, and always seemed to think because you
were at school you were a kid, and had no need of money.’ Unlike as were
their styles, the upshot of all the letters was the same: the youthful
writer was in pressing need of funds, and would ‘dear old Sainty’ kindly
supply the deficiency? And ‘dear old Sainty’ usually did.
It is no doubt a very bad thing to be in want of money, but it is almost
worse to be the quarry at which the impecunious let fly all their
shafts; to know when you see a beloved handwriting on an envelope, that
it is hunger and not love that has set the pen travelling, and dictated
the letter that lies within. It is an experience that only comes to most
of us later in life; boys of Sainty’s age are not often called upon to
taste that half humorous bitterness. This was one of the few troubles
about which Sainty did not consult Gerald Newby. He knew instinctively
that his virtuous friend would have little sympathy with his supplying
the funds of luxury and extravagance. The double drain, of which neither
the amount nor the recurrence could ever be accurately foretold, kept
the boy perpetually anxious about money matters. Perhaps it really did
tend to make him, as people thought, unduly careful in his daily
expenditure; and, though he took infinite pains to conceal the fact, he
liked to be able to help humbler unfortunates than his brother or
cousin.
Another eccentricity which showed his unfitness for the state of life
to which he had the misfortune to be born, was his exaggerated
propensity for work; he had a real aptitude for scholarship, a love of
erudition for its own sake. No pains seemed too great to him, no
research too profound, for the illustration of a curious expression or
the elucidation of an obscure passage. There was a danger that his
health, never robust, might suffer from such close application. ‘If you
were a poor student,’ Newby said to him, ‘with your way to make in the
world, having come up from Glasgow with a bag of oatmeal, I should think
it most meritorious of you to peg away as you do, but for _you_ to go
injuring your health by overwork is worse than unnecessary--it’s wrong.’
‘My health does not seem to me such an unusually fine specimen that all
risk of injury to it must be avoided at any cost,’ Sainty answered.
‘Besides, what am I to do, if I don’t work? I know few people, and the
men I do know are all busy. I can’t play games or ride; when I am not
working I loaf, and you are always inveighing against loafing as the
root of all evil.’
‘You should come out more, have more air,’ persisted Gerald.
‘In the summer I am out a good deal, as you know,’ Sainty answered, ‘but
at this time of year I can’t sit out, and I can only do a very moderate
amount of walking without getting tired.’
‘Why don’t you start a cart and pony?’ his friend asked.
Sainty looked scared. ‘It costs such a lot to keep a cart and pony,’ he
said. ‘I do hire one sometimes,’
‘What nonsense!’ Newby protested. ‘In your position it’s absurd to talk
as if you couldn’t afford a trifling thing like that. That’s the sort of
thing that makes fellows say you are screwy----’ He stopped rather
abruptly, having said more than he intended.
Sainty froze instantly. ‘Oh! they say that, do they?’ he said, with an
expression which would have recalled Lady Charmington to Newby, had he
enjoyed the privilege of her acquaintance. ‘Perhaps I am the best judge
of what I can afford.’
Like many people who are theoretically in favour of independence, Gerald
resented it in his disciples. ‘For all your false air of humility,’ he
said, ‘one has only to scratch you to find the aristocrat.’
It seemed to Sainty one more proof of the irony of fate that even such
qualities as his application to study and careful ordering of life’s
economy, which would have been held as highest virtues in many of his
fellow-students, by a curious process of inversion became almost faults
in him, faults too for which he must be rebuked by the mouth of Gerald
Newby, the great apostle of industry and frugality, and the one person
in the University whose praise would have been sweet and valuable to
him.
‘The things you reproach me with are hardly aristocratic vices,’ he
said, with a sad little smile; ‘but are you quite consistent? You
lecture Parsons on his laziness, and Ringwood on his extravagance, and
then you come and try to drive me into being an idler and a spendthrift,
who have no gifts in those directions.’
‘Of course, if you resent advice,’ Newby said, ‘I’m sorry; I have no
business to _lecture_ you at all.’
‘Ah Gerald!’ said Sainty, stretching a protesting hand; but Mentor was
nettled and would not immediately be mollified. It was on the tip of
Sainty’s tongue to explain his need of economy, but the story of his
mother’s long struggle to restore its solvency to their house seemed too
sacred and intimate to be told even to his dearest friend. The unveiling
of his own soul was only a personal immodesty, but his mother’s thrift
and Arthur’s premature dissipation could not be touched upon without a
sense of disloyalty to them from which he shrank.
‘Let us go and get a trap and have a drive,’ he said.
‘Thanks; I’m busy; I’m afraid I haven’t time,’ Newby said stiffly. ‘Did
you think I was hinting that I wanted to be taken out driving?’ and the
offended sage strode across the court to his own rooms. Sainty heard
the man in the rooms below him, to whom a scholarship was a dire
necessity, being dragged forth to football by clamorous companions who
would take no denial. ‘Well, I won’t go and drive in an east wind and
get neuralgia all alone,’ he concluded, as he turned again to his table
piled up with learned commentaries.