The house where Sherman and his mother lived was one of those bare
houses so common in country towns. Their dashed fronts mounting above
empty pavements have a kind of dignity in their utilitarianism. They
seem to say, ‘Fashion has not made us, nor ever do its caprices pass
our sand-cleaned doorsteps.’ On every basement window is the same dingy
wire blind; on every door the same brass knocker. Custom everywhere!
‘So much the longer,’ the blinds seem to say, ‘have eyes glanced
through us’; and the knockers to murmur, ‘And fingers lifted us.’
No. 15, Stephens’ Row, was in no manner peculiar among its twenty
fellows. The chairs in the drawing-room facing the street were of heavy
mahogany with horsehair cushions worn at the corners. On the round
table was somebody’s commentary on the New Testament laid like the
spokes of a wheel on a table-cover of American oilcloth with stamped
Japanese figures half worn away. The room was seldom used, for Mrs.
Sherman was solitary because silent. In this room the dressmaker sat
twice a year, and here the rector’s wife used every month or so to
drink a cup of tea. It was quite clean. There was not a fly-mark on the
mirror, and all summer the fern in the grate was constantly changed.
Behind this room and overlooking the garden was the parlour, where
cane-bottomed chairs took the place of mahogany. Sherman had lived here
with his mother all his life, and their old servant hardly remembered
having lived anywhere else; and soon she would absolutely cease to
remember the world she knew before she saw the four walls of this
house, for every day she forgot something fresh. The son was almost
thirty, the mother fifty, and the servant near seventy. Every year they
had two hundred pounds among them, and once a year the son got a new
suit of clothes and went into the drawing-room to look at himself in
the mirror.
On the morning of the 10th of December Mrs. Sherman was down before her
son. A spare, delicate-featured woman, with somewhat thin lips tightly
closed as with silent people, and eyes at once gentle and distrustful,
tempering the hardness of the lips. She helped the servant to set the
table, and then, for her old-fashioned ideas would not allow her to
rest, began to knit, often interrupting her knitting to go into the
kitchen or to listen at the foot of the stairs. At last, hearing a
sound upstairs, she put the eggs down to boil, muttering the while,
and began again to knit. When her son appeared she received him with a
smile.
‘Late again, mother,’ he said.
‘The young should sleep,’ she answered, for to her he seemed still a
boy.
She had finished her breakfast some time before the young man, and
because it would have appeared very wrong to her to leave the table,
she sat on knitting behind the tea-urn: an industry the benefit of
which was felt by many poor children--almost the only neighbours she
had a good word for.
‘Mother,’ said the young man, presently, ‘your friend the _locum
tenens_ is off to-day.’
‘A good riddance.’
‘Why are you so hard on him? He talked intelligently when here, I
thought,’ answered her son.
‘I do not like his theology,’ she replied, ‘nor his way of running
about and flirting with this body and that body, nor his way of
chattering while he buttons and unbuttons his gloves.’
‘You forget he is a man of the great world, and has about him a manner
that must seem strange to us.’
‘Oh, he might do very well,’ she answered, ‘for one of those Carton
girls at the rectory.’
‘That eldest girl is a good girl,’ replied her son.
‘She looks down on us all, and thinks herself intellectual,’ she
went on. ‘I remember when girls were content with their catechism
and their Bibles and a little practice at the piano, maybe, for an
accomplishment. What does any one want more? It is all pride.’
‘You used to like her as a child,’ said the young man.
‘I like all children.’
Sherman having finished his breakfast, took a book of travels in one
hand and a trowel in the other and went out into the garden. Having
looked under the parlour window for the first tulip shoots, he went
down to the further end and began covering some sea-kale for forcing.
He had not been long at work when the servant brought him a letter.
There was a stone roller at one side of the grass plot. He sat down
upon it, and taking the letter between his finger and thumb began
looking at it with an air that said: ‘Well! I know what you mean.’ He
remained long thus without opening it, the book lying beside him on the
roller.
The garden--the letter--the book! You have there the three symbols of
his life. Every morning he worked in that garden among the sights and
sounds of nature. Month by month he planted and hoed and dug there. In
the middle he had set a hedge that divided the garden in two. Above
the hedge were flowers; below it, vegetables. At the furthest end from
the house, lapping broken masonry full of wallflowers, the river said,
month after month to all upon its banks, ‘Hush!’ He dined at two with
perfect regularity, and in the afternoon went out to shoot or walk.
At twilight he set night-lines. Later on he read. He had not many
books--a Shakespeare, Mungo Park’s travels, a few two-shilling novels,
_Percy’s Reliques_, and a volume on etiquette. He seldom varied his
occupations. He had no profession. The town talked of it. They said:
‘He lives upon his mother,’ and were very angry. They never let him
see this, however, for it was generally understood he would be a
dangerous fellow to rouse; but there was an uncle from whom Sherman had
expectations who sometimes wrote remonstrating. Mrs. Sherman resented
these letters, for she was afraid of her son going away to seek his
fortune--perhaps even in America. Now this matter preyed somewhat on
Sherman. For three years or so he had been trying to make his mind up
and come to some decision. Sometimes when reading he would start and
press his lips together and knit his brows for a moment.
It will now be seen why the garden, the book, and the letter were
the three symbols of his life, summing up as they did his love of
out-of-door doings, his meditations, his anxieties. His life in the
garden had granted serenity to his forehead, the reading of his few
books had filled his eyes with reverie, and the feeling that he was not
quite a good citizen had given a slight and occasional trembling to his
lips.
He opened the letter. Its contents were what he had long expected.
His uncle offered to take him into his office. He laid it spread
out before him--a foot on each margin, right and left--and looked at
it, turning the matter over and over in his mind. Would he go? would
he stay? He did not like the idea much. The lounger in him did not
enjoy the thought of London. Gradually his mind wandered away into
scheming--infinite scheming--what would he do if he went, what would he
do if he did not go?
A beetle, attracted by the faint sunlight, had crawled out of its hole.
It saw the paper and crept on to it, the better to catch the sunlight.
Sherman saw the beetle but his mind was not occupied with it. ‘Shall I
tell Mary Carton?’ he was thinking. Mary had long been his adviser and
friend. She was, indeed, everybody’s adviser. Yes, he would ask her
what to do. Then again he thought--no, he would decide for himself. The
beetle began to move. ‘If it goes off the paper by the top I will ask
her--if by the bottom I will not.’
The beetle went off by the top. He got up with an air of decision and
went into the tool-house and began sorting seeds and picking out the
light ones, sometimes stopping to watch a spider; for he knew he must
wait till the afternoon to see Mary Carton. The tool-house was a
favourite place with him. He often read there and watched the spiders
in the corners.
At dinner he was preoccupied.
‘Mother,’ he said, ‘would you much mind if we went away from this?’
‘I have often told you,’ she answered, ‘I do not like one place better
than another. I like them all equally little.’
After dinner he went again into the tool-house. This time he did not
sort seeds--only watched the spiders.