"In the winter, when all the flowers are dead, the experienced Bee
Keeper places before His hive a saucer of beer and treacle to
sustain the inmates during the frost. And some of the less active
bees, who have not used their wings, but have heard about honey,
taste the compound, and finding it wonderfully sustaining and
exactly suited to their aspirations, they religiously store it,
dark and sticky, in waxen cells, as if it were what they genuinely
believe it to be--the purest honey.
"But the other surly, unsympathetic bees with worn-out wings
contend that honey is not come by as easily as that: that you must
fly far, and work hard, and penetrate many flower-cups to acquire
it. This naturally arouses the indignation of the beer and treacle
gatherers.
"And the Bee Keeper as He passes His hive hears His little people
buzzing within, and--smiles."--M. N.
"And now," said Aunt Harriet, the same evening,--"now that we have made
Mr. Stirling's acquaintance and been to tea with him, and may expect to
see him frequently, I think we ought to take a little course of his
books. What do you say, Maria? Eh! Annette? You seem strangely apathetic
and inert this evening, my dear. So different from me at your age. I was
gaiety and energy itself until my health failed. You might read aloud
some extracts from _The Magnet_, instead of the _Times_. It is a book
which none of us can afford to disregard. How I cried over it when it
came out! I wrote to him after I had finished it, even though I did not
know him. Authors like it, don't they, Maria? I felt very audacious, but
I am a child of impulse. I have never been able to bind myself down with
conventional ideas as I see others do. I felt I simply must tell him
what that book had been to me, what it had done for me, coming like a
ray of light into a darkened room."
Mrs. Stoddart had read aloud _The Magnet_ to Annette at Teneriffe, and
it was intimately associated with her slow reawakening to life. It had
had a part, and not a small part, in sending her back humbled and
contrite to her aunts. But she felt a deep repugnance to the thought of
hearing their comments upon it.
She took the offered book reluctantly, but Aunt Harriet's long thin
finger was already pointing to a paragraph.
"Begin at 'How we follow Self at first,' the top of the page," she said.
And she leaned back among her cushions. Aunt Maria took up her knitting,
and Annette began to read:--
"How we follow Self at first! How long we follow her! How pallid, how
ephemeral is all else beside that one bewitching form! We call her by
many beautiful names--our career, our religion, our work for others. The
face of Self is veiled, but we follow that mysterious rainbow-tinted
figure as some men follow art, as some men follow Christ, leaving all
else behind. We follow her across the rivers. If the stepping-stones
are alive and groan beneath our feet, what of that? We follow her across
the hills. Love weeps and falls behind, but what of that? The love which
will not climb the hills with us is not the love we need. Our friends
appeal to us and one by one fall behind. False friends! Let them go. Our
ideals are broken and left behind. Miserable impediments and hindrances!
Let them go too.
"For some of us Self flits veiled to the last, and we trudge to our
graves, looking ever and only at her across the brink. But sometimes she
takes pity on us. Sometimes she turns and confronts us in a narrow
place, and lifts her veil. We are alone at last with her we love. The
leprous face, the chasms where the eyes should be, the awful discoloured
hand are revealed to us, the crawling horror of every fold of that
alluring drapery.
"Here is the bride. Take her!
"And we turn, sick unto death, and flee for our lives.
"After that day, certain easy self-depreciations we say never again
while we have speech. After that day our cheap admission of our egotism
freezes on our lips. For we have seen. We know."
"We have seen. We know," repeated Aunt Harriet solemnly. "That last bit
simply changed my life. If I had a talent for writing like you, Maria,
which of course I have not, that is just the kind of thing I should have
said myself to help other sufferers. Unselfishness, that must be the
key-note of our lives. If the stepping-stones are alive and groan
beneath our feet, what of that? How often I have said those words to
myself when the feet of the world have gone over me, poor
stepping-stone, trying hard, trying so hard not to groan. And if I am to
be perfectly honest just for once, you know, dear Maria, you and Annette
_do_ trample somewhat heavily at times. Of course you are absorbed in
your work, and Annette is young, and you don't either of you mean it. I
know that, and I make allowances for you both. I am making allowances
all the time. But I sometimes wish you could remember that the poor
stepping-stone is alive."
There was a moment's silence. Annette got up and gently replaced the
_couvre-pied_ which had slipped from the stepping-stone's smart
high-heeled shoes. Aunt Harriet wiped away a delicious tear.
"Our ideals are broken and left behind," she went on. "Only the invalid
knows how true _that_ is. Dear me! When I think of all the high ideals I
had when I was your age, Annette, who don't seem to have any! But
perhaps it is happier for you that you haven't. Though Mr. Stirling
looks so strong I feel sure that he must at one time have known a
sofa-life. Or perhaps he loved some one like Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
who was as great a prisoner to her couch as I am. He simply couldn't
have written those lines otherwise. I often think as I lie here in
solitude, hour after hour, how different my life might have been if
anyone like Browning had sought me out--had---- But it's no use
repining: all these things are ordered for the best. Go on, my dear, go
on."
When the reading was over and Aunt Harriet, still emotional, had gone to
bed, after embracing them both with unusual fervour, Annette opened the
window as her custom was, and let in the soft night air. Aunt Harriet
was a lifelong foe to fresh air. Aunt Maria gave a sigh of relief. She
was stout and felt the heat.
The earth was resting. The white pinks below the window gave forth their
scent. The low moon had laid a slanting black shadow of the dear old
house and its tall chimney-stacks upon the silvered grass.
Annette's heart throbbed. Must she leave it all? She longed to go to her
own room and think over what had happened, but she had an intuitive
feeling that Aunt Maria had been in some mysterious way depressed by the
reading aloud, and was in need of consolation.
"I think," said Aunt Maria after a time, "that Mr. Stirling rather
exaggerates, don't you?--that he has yielded to the temptation of
picturesque overstatement in that bit about following Self."
"It seems to me--just right."
"You don't feel he is writing for the sake of effect?"
"No. Oh no."
"I am afraid I do a little. But then the picture is so very highly
coloured, and personally I don't care much for garish colouring."
Annette did not answer.
"I should like to know what you think about it, Annette."
Whenever Aunt Maria used that phrase, she wanted confirmation of her own
opinion. Annette considered a moment.
"I think he has really seen it exactly as he says. I think perhaps he
was selfish once, and--and had a shock."
"He is quite right to write from his experience," continued Aunt Maria.
"I have drawn largely from mine in my books, and I am thankful I have
had such a deep and rich experience to draw from. Experience, of course,
must vary with each one of us. But I can't say I have ever felt what he
describes. Have you?"
"Yes."
"The veiled figure meeting you in a narrow place and raising its veil?"
"Yes."
Aunt Maria was momentarily taken aback. When our opinions do not receive
confirmation from others we generally feel impelled to restate them at
length.
"I have never looked at selfishness like that," she said, "as something
which we idealize. I have always held that egotism is the thing of all
others which we ought to guard against. And egotism seems to me
ugly--not beautiful or rainbow-tinted at all. I tried to show in _Crooks
and Coronets_ what an obstacle it is to our spiritual development, and
how happiness is to be found in little deeds of kindness, small
sacrifices for the sake of others, rather than in always considering
ourselves."
Annette did not answer. She knew her aunt's faith in spiritual
homoeopathy.
"I have had hundreds of letters," continued the homoeopath uneasily,
"from my readers, many of them perfect strangers, thanking me for
pointing out the danger of egotism so fearlessly, and telling me how
much happier they have been since they followed the example of Angela
Towers in _Crooks and Coronets_ in doing a little act of kindness every
day."
If Aunt Maria were alive now she would have been thrilled by the
knowledge that twenty years after she had preached it the Boy Scouts
made that precept their own.
"Perhaps the man who was following the veiled figure did little
kindnesses too, in order to feel comfortable," said Annette half to
herself. Fortunately her aunt did not hear her.
"I yield to no one in my admiration of Mr. Stirling," continued Miss
Nevill, "but he suggests no remedy for the selfishness he describes. He
just says people flee for their lives. Now, my experience is that they
don't flee, that they don't see how selfish they are, and need helpful
suggestions to overcome it. That is just what I have tried to do in my
books, which I gather he has never opened."
There was a subdued bitterness in her aunt's voice which made Annette
leave her seat by the window and sit down beside her.
"You have plenty of readers without Mr. Stirling," she said soothingly.
It was true. Miss Nevill had a large public. She had never lived, she
had never come in close contact with the lives of others, she had no
perception of character, and she was devoid of humour. She had a meagre,
inflexible vocabulary, no real education, no delicacy of description, no
sense of language, no love of nature. But she possessed the art of
sentimental facile narration, coupled with a great desire to preach, and
a genuine and quenchless passion for the obvious. And the long
succession of her popular novels, each exactly like the last, met what a
large circle of readers believed to be its spiritual needs: she appealed
to the vast society of those who have never thought, and who crave to be
edified without mental effort on their part. Her books had demanded no
mental effort from their author, and were models of unconscious tact in
demanding none from their readers, and herein, together with their
evident sincerity, had lain part of the secret of their success. Also,
partly because her gentle-people--and her books dealt mainly with
them--were not quite so unlike gentle-people as in the majority of
novels. If she did not call a spade a spade, neither did she call an
earl an earl. Old ladies adored her novels. The Miss Blinketts preferred
them to Shakespeare. Canon Wetherby dipped into them in his rare moments
of leisure. Cottage hospitals laid them on the beds of their
convalescents. Clergymen presented them as prizes. If the great Miss
Nevill had had a different temperament, she might have been a happy as
she was a successful woman; for she represented culture to the
semi-cultivated, and to succeed in doing that results in a large income
and streams of flattering letters. But it does not result in recognition
as a thinker, and that was precisely what she hankered after. She craved
to be regarded as a thinker, without having thought. It chagrined her
that her books were not read by what she called "the right
people,"--that, as she frequently lamented, her work was not recognized.
In reality it was recognized--at first sight. The opening chapter, as
Mr. Stirling had found that morning, was enough. The graver reviews
never noticed her. No word of praise ever reached her from the masters
of the craft. She had to the full the adulation of her readers, but she
wanted adulation, alas! from the educated, from men like Mr. Stirling
rather than Canon Wetherby. Mr. Stirling had not said a word about her
work this afternoon, though he had had time to refresh his memory of it,
and she had alluded to it herself more than once. For the hundredth time
Aunt Maria felt vaguely disturbed and depressed. The reading aloud of
_The Magnet_ had only accentuated that depression.
Annette's hand felt very soft and comforting in hers. The troubled
authoress turned instinctively towards possible consolation nearer at
hand.
"I will own," she said tentatively, "that when I see you, my dear
Annette, so different from what you were when you left us two years ago,
so helpful, and so patient with poor Harriet, who is trying beyond
words, so considerate and so thoughtful for others, I will own that I
have sometimes hoped that the change might have been partly, I don't say
entirely, but partly brought about by _Crooks and Coronets_, which I
sent to you at Teneriffe, and into which I had poured all that was best
in me. When you rejoined us here it seemed as if you had laid its
precepts to heart." Aunt Maria looked at her niece almost imploringly.
Annette was not of those who adhere to a rigid truthfulness on all
occasions.
She stroked her aunt's hand.
"It was borne in on me at Teneriffe, after I was ill there, how selfish
I had been," she said, and her voice trembled. "I ought never to have
left you all. If only I had not left you all! Then I should not be--I
shouldn't have--but I was selfish to the core. And my eyes were only
opened too late."
"No, my dear, not too late. Just in the nick of time, at the very moment
we needed you most, after dear Cathie's death. You don't know what a
comfort you have been to us."
"Too late for Aunt Cathie," said Annette hoarsely. "Poor, kind, tired
Aunt Cathie, who came to me in my room the last night and asked me not
to leave her, told me she needed my help. But my mind was absolutely set
on going. I cried, and told her that later on I would come back and take
care of her, but that I must go. Self in her rainbow veil beckoned
and--and I followed. If Aunt Cathie was the stepping-stone which groaned
beneath my feet, what of that? What did I care? I passed over it, I
trampled on it without a thought."
The subdued passion in Annette's voice stirred anew the vague trouble in
Aunt Maria's mind.
For a moment her own view of life, even her heroine's puny and
universally admired repentance, tottered, dwindled. For a brief moment
she saw that the writer of _The Magnet_ made a great demand on his
reader, and that Annette had passionately responded to it. For a moment
Mr. Stirling's gentle, ruthless voice seemed to overthrow her whole
position, to show her to herself as petty and trivial. For a moment she
even doubted whether _Crooks and Coronets_ had really effected the great
change she perceived in Annette, and the doubt disheartened her still
more. She withdrew resolutely into the stronghold of her success, and
rose slowly to her feet.
"Well," she said, "it's time to go to bed. Close the shutters, Annette.
It's very natural you should be impressed by _The Magnet_. I should have
been at your age. Young people are always attracted by eloquence. But as
one gets older I find one instinctively prefers plainer language, as one
prefers plainer clothes, less word-painting, and more spiritual
teaching."
It was already late, but Annette sat up still later writing a long
letter to Mrs. Stoddart.