THE LINEN-DRAPER.
But there was yet another class amongst those who on that second day
heard the curate testify what honestly he might, and no more, concerning
Jesus of Nazareth. So far as he learned, however, that class consisted
of one individual.
On the following Tuesday morning he went into the shop of the chief
linen-draper of Glaston, for he was going to a funeral, and wanted a new
pair of gloves that he might decline those which would be offered him.
A young woman waited on him, but Mr. Drew, seeing him from the other end
of the shop, came and took her place. When he was fitted, had paid for
his purchase, and was turning to take his leave, the draper, with what
appeared a resolution suddenly forced from hesitation, leaned over the
counter and said:
“Would you mind walking up stairs for a few minutes, sir? I ask it as a
great favour. I want very much to speak to you.”
“I shall be most happy,” answered Wingfold--conventionally, it must be
allowed, for in reality he anticipated expostulation, and having in his
public ministrations to do his duty against his own grain, he had no
fancy for encountering other people’s grain as well in private. Mr.
Drew opened certain straits in the counter, and the curate followed him
through them, then through a door, up a stair, and into a comfortable
dining-room, which smelt strongly of tobacco. There Mr. Drew placed for
him a chair, and seated himself in front of him.
The linen-draper was a middle-aged, middle-sized, stoutish man, with
plump rosy cheeks, keen black eyes, and features of the not uncommon
pug-type, ennobled and harmonized by a genuine expression of kindly
good-humour, and an excellent forehead. His dark hair was a little
streaked with gray. His manner, which, in the shop, had been of the
shop, that is, more deferential and would-be pleasing than Wingfold
liked, settled as he took his seat into one more resembling that of a
country gentleman. It was courteous and friendly, but clouded with a
little anxiety.
An uncomfortable pause following, Wingfold stumbled in with the
question, “I hope Mrs. Drew is well,” without reflecting whether he had
really ever heard of a Mrs. Drew.
The draper’s face flushed.
“It is twenty years since I lost her, sir,” he returned. In his tone and
manner there was something peculiar.
“I beg your pardon,” said Wingfold, with self-accusing sincerity.
“I will be open with you sir,” continued his host: “she left me--with
another--nearly twenty years ago.”
“I am ashamed of my inadvertence,” rejoined Wingfold. “I have been such
a short time here, and--”
“Do not mention it, sir. How could you help it? Besides, it was not here
the thing took place, but a hundred miles away. I hope I should before
long have referred to the fact myself. But now I desire, if you will
allow me, to speak of something different.”
“I am at your service,” answered Wingfold.
“Thank you, sir.--I was in your church last Sunday,” resumed the draper
after a pause. “I am not one of your regular hearers, sir; but your
sermon that day set me thinking, and instead of thinking less when
Monday came, I have been thinking more and more ever since; and when I
saw you in the shop, I could not resist the sudden desire to speak to
you. If you have time, sir, I hope you will allow me to come to the
point my own way?”
Wingfold assured him that his time was at his own disposal, and could
not be better occupied. Mr. Drew thanked him and went on.
“Your sermon, I must confess, sir, made me uncomfortable--no fault of
yours, sir--all my own--though how much the fault is, I hardly know:
use and custom are hard upon a man, sir, and you would have a man go by
other laws than those of the world he lives in. The earth is the Lord’s
and the fulness thereof--you will doubtless say. That is over the Royal
Exchange in London, I think; but it is not the laws of the Lord that are
specially followed inside for all that. However, it is not with other
people we have to do, but with ourselves--as you will say. Well then it
is for myself I am troubled now. Mr. Wingfold, sir, I am not altogether
at ease in my own mind as to the way I have made my money--what little
money I have--no great sum, but enough to retire upon when I please. I
would not have you think me worse than I am, but I am sincerely desirous
of knowing what you would have me do.”
“My dear sir,” returned Wingfold, “I am the very last to look to for
enlightenment. I am as ignorant of business as any child. I am not
aware that I ever bought anything except books and clothes, or ever
sold anything except a knife to a schoolfellow. I had bought it the
day before for half-a-crown, but there was a spot of rust on one of the
blades, and therefore I parted with it for twopence. The only thing I
can say is: if you have been in the way of doing anything you are no
longer satisfied with, don’t do it any more.”
“But just there comes my need of help. You must do something with your
business, and DON’T DO IT, don’t tell me what to do. Mind I do not
confess to having done anything the trade would count inadmissible,
or which is not done in the largest establishments. What I now make a
question of I learned in one of the most respectable of London houses.”
“You imply that a man in your line who would not do certain things the
doing of which has contributed to the making of your fortune, would by
the ordinary dealer be regarded as Quixotic?”
“He would; but that there may be such men I am bound to allow, for here
am I wishing with all my heart that I had never done them. Right gladly
would I give up the money I have made by them to be rid of them. I am
unhappy about it. But I should never have dared to confess it to you,
sir, or, I believe, to anyone, but for the confession you made in the
pulpit some time ago. I was not there, but I heard of it. I foolishly
judged you unwise to accuse yourself before an unsympathizing
public--but here am I in consequence accusing myself to you!”
“To no unsympathising hearer, though,” said the curate.
“It made me want to go and hear you preach,” pursued the draper; “for no
one could say but it was plucky--and we all like pluck, sir,” he added,
with a laugh that puckered his face, showed the whitest of teeth,
and swept every sign of trouble from the half-globe of his radiant
countenance.
“Then you know sum and substance of what I can do for you, Mr. Drew: I
can sympathize with you;--not a whit more or less am I capable of. I
am the merest beginner and dabbler in doing right myself, and have more
need to ask you to teach me than to set up for teaching you.”
“That’s the beauty of you!--excuse me, sir,” cried the draper
triumphantly. “You don’t pretend to teach us anything, but you make us
so uncomfortable that we go about ever after asking ourselves what we
ought to do. Till last Sunday, I had always looked upon myself as an
honest man: let me see: it would be more correct to say I looked on
myself as a man QUITE HONEST ENOUGH. That I do not feel so now, is
your doing, sir. You said in your sermon last Sunday, and specially
to business men: ‘Do you do to your neighbour as you would have your
neighbour do to you? If not, how can you suppose that the lord of
Christians will acknowledge you as a disciple of his, that is, as a
Christian?’ Now I was even surer of being a Christian than of being an
honest man. You will hardly believe it, and what to think of it myself
I now hardly know, but I had satisfied myself, more or less, that I had
gone through all the necessary stages of being born again, and it is now
many years since I was received into a Christian church--dissenting of
course, I mean; for what I count the most important difference after all
between church and dissent is that the one, right or wrong, requires
for communion a personal profession of faith, and credible proof of
conversion--which I believed I gave them, and have been for years, I
shame to say it, one of the deacons of that community. But it shall not
be for long. To return to my story, however: I was indignant at being
called upon from a church-pulpit to raise in myself the question whether
or not I was a Christian;--for had I not put my faith in the--? But I
will avoid theology, for I have paid more regard to that than has proved
good for me. Suffice it to say that I was now driven from the tests of
the theologians to try myself by the words of the Master: he must be
the best theologian after all, mustn’t he, sir?--and so there and then I
tried the test of doing to your neighbour AS. But I could NOT get it to
work; I could not see how to use it, and while I was trying how to make
it apply, you were gone, and I lost all the rest of the sermon.
“Now whether it was anything you had said coming back to me, I cannot
tell, but next day, that was yesterday, all at once, in the shop here,
as I was serving Mrs. Ramshorn, the thought came to me: How would Jesus
Christ have done if he had been a draper instead of a carpenter? When
she was gone, I went up to my room to think about it. And there it
seemed--that first I must know how he did as a carpenter. But that
we are told nothing about. I could get no light upon that. And so my
thoughts turned again to the original question.--How would he have done
had he been a draper? And, strange to say, I seemed to know far more
about that than the other, and to have something to go upon. In fact I
had a sharp and decisive answer concerning several things of which I had
dared to make a question.”
“The vision of the ideal woke the ideal in yourself,” said Wingfold
thoughtfully.
“I don’t know that I quite understand that,” returned Mr. Drew; “but the
more I thought the more dissatisfied I became. And, in a word, it has
come to this, that I must set things right, or give up business.”
“That would be no victory,” remarked the curate.
“I know it, and shall not yield without a struggle, I promise you. That
same afternoon, taking the opportunity of having overheard one of them
endeavouring to persuade an old farmer’s wife to her disadvantage, I
called all my people, and told them that if ever I heard one of them do
such a thing, I would turn him or her away at once. But when I came to
look at it, I saw how difficult it would be to convict of the breach of
such a vague law; and unfortunately too I had some time ago introduced
the system of a small percentage to the sellers, making it their
interest to force sales. That however is easily rectified, and I shall
see to it at once. But I do wish I had a more definite law to follow
than that of doing AS!”
“Would not more light inside do as well as clearer law outside?”
suggested Wingfold.
“How can I tell till I have had a chance of trying?” returned the
draper with a smile, which speedily vanished as he went on: “Then again,
there’s about profits! How much ought I to take? Am I to do as others
do, and always be ruled by the market? Am I bound to give my customers
the advantage of any special bargain I may have made? And then
again--for I do a large wholesale business with the little country
shops--if I learn that one of my customers is going down hill, have I,
or have I not, a right to pounce upon him, and make him pay me, to the
detriment of his other creditors? There’s no end of questions, you see,
sir.”
“I am the worst possible man to ask,” returned Wingfold again. “I might,
from very ignorance, judge that wrong which is really right, or that
right which is really wrong. But one thing I begin to see, that before
a man can do right by his neighbour, he must love him as himself. Only I
am such a poor scholar in these high things that, as you have just said,
I cannot pretend to teach anybody. That sermon was but an appeal to
men’s own consciences whether they kept the words of the Lord by whose
name they called themselves. Except in your case, Mr. Drew, I am not
aware that one of the congregation has taken it to heart.”
“I am not sure of that,” returned the draper. “Some talk amongst my own
people has made me fancy that, perhaps, though talk be but froth, the
froth may rise from some hot work down below. Never man could tell from
the quiet way I am talking to you, how much I have felt these few days
past.”
Wingfold looked him in the face: the earnestness of the man was plain in
his eyes, and his resolve stamped on every feature. The curate thought
of Zacchaeus; thought of Matthew at the receipt of custom; thought
with some shame of certain judgments concerning trade, and shopkeepers
especially, that seemed somehow to have bred in him like creeping
things--for whence they had come he could not tell.
Now it was clear as day that--always provided the man Christ Jesus can
be and is with his disciples always to the end of the world--a tradesman
might just as soon have Jesus behind the counter with him, teaching him
to buy and sell IN HIS NAME, that is, as he would have done it, as an
earl riding over his lands might have him with him, teaching him how to
treat his farmers and cottagers--all depending on how the one did his
trading and the other his earning. A mere truism, is it? Yes, it is, and
more is the pity; for what is a truism, as most men count truisms? What
is it but a truth that ought to have been buried long ago in the lives
of men--to send up for ever the corn of true deeds and the wine of
loving kindness,--but instead of being buried in friendly soil, is
allowed to lie about, kicked hither and thither in the dry and empty
garret of their brains, till they are sick of the sight and sound of it,
and to be rid of the thought of it, declare it to be no living truth but
only a lifeless truism! Yet in their brain that truism must rattle until
they shift it to its rightful quarters in their heart, where it will
rattle no longer but take root and be a strength and loveliness. Is a
truth to cease to be uttered because no better form than that of some
divine truism--say of St. John Boanerges--can be found for it? To the
critic the truism is a sea-worn, foot-trodden pebble; to the obedient
scholar, a radiant topaz, which, as he polishes it with the dust of its
use, may turn into a diamond.
“Jesus buying and selling!” said Wingfold to himself. “And why not?
Did Jesus make chairs and tables, or boats perhaps, which the people of
Nazareth wanted, without any admixture of trade in the matter? Was there
no transaction? No passing of money between hands? Did they not pay his
father for them? Was his Father’s way of keeping things going in the
world, too vile for the hands of him whose being was delight in the will
of that Father? No; there must be a way of handling money that is noble
as the handling of the sword in the hands of the patriot. Neither the
mean man who loves it, nor the faithless man who despises it, knows how
to handle it. The former is one who allows his dog to become a nuisance,
the latter one who kicks him from his sight. The noble man is he who so
truly does the work given him to do that the inherent nobility of that
work is manifest. And the trader who trades nobly is nobler surely than
the high-born who, if he carried the principles of his daily life into
trade, would be as pitiful a sneak as any he that bows and scrapes
falsely behind that altar of lies, his counter.”--All flat truisms I
know, but no longer such to Wingfold to whom they now for the first time
showed themselves truths.
He had taken a kindly leave of the draper, promising to call again soon,
and had reached the room-door on his way out, when he turned suddenly
and said,
“Did you think to try praying, Mr. Drew? Men, whose minds, if I may
venture to judge, seem to me, from their writings, of the very highest
order, have really and positively believed that the loftiest activity
of a man’s being lay in prayer to the unknown Father of that being, and
that light in the inward parts was the certain consequence--that, in
very truth, not only did the prayer of the man find the ear of God, but
the man himself found God Himself. I have no right to an opinion, but I
have a splendid hope that I shall one day find it true. The Lord said a
man must go on praying and not lose heart.”
With the words he walked out, and the deacon thought of his many prayers
at prayer-meetings and family-worships. The words of a young man who
seemed to have only just discovered that there was such a thing as
prayer, who could not pretend to be sure about it, but hoped splendidly,
made him ashamed of them all.