There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread.
--A. C. SWINBURNE.
A witty bishop was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of
his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly
alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which
archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It
would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the
episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where
we lay helpers should fear to tread. But it may be stated, without
laying ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine the Church,
that when the woman of forty in her turn acidly announces, as she not
infrequently does, that all young men seem to her exactly alike, she is
in a parlous condition.
Yet many women had said that Michael was exactly like every other young
man. And to all except the very few who knew him well he certainly did
appear to be--not an individual at all--but only an indistinguished unit
of a vast army.
His obvious good looks were like the good looks of others. He looked
well bred, but to look that is as common in a certain class as it is
rare in another. He had the spare, wiry figure, tall and lightly built,
square in the shoulders, and thin in the flank; he had the clear
weather-beaten complexion, the clean, nervous, capable hand, and the
self-effacing manner, which we associate with myriads of well-born,
machine-trained, perfectly groomed, expensively educated, uneducated
Englishmen. Our public schools turn them out by the thousand. The "lost
legion" is made up of them. The unburied bones of the pioneers of new
colonies are mostly theirs. They die of thirst in "the never never
country," under a tree, leaving their initials cut in its trunk; they
fall by hundreds in our wars. They are born leaders where acumen and
craft are not needed. Large game was made for them, and they for it.
They are the vermin destroyers of the universe. They throw life from
them with both hands, they play the game of life with a levity which
they never showed in the business of cricket and football.
They are essentially not of the stuff of which those dull persons, the
thinkers, the politicians, the educationalists, are made. No profession
knows them except the army. They have no opinions worth hearing. Only
the women who are to marry them listen to them. They are sometimes
squeezed into Parliament and are borne with there like children. About
one in a hundred of them can earn his own living, and then it is as a
land agent.
They make adorable country squires, and picturesque, simple-minded,
painstaking men of rank. They know by a sort of hereditary instinct how
to deal with a labouring man, and a horse, and how to break in a dog.
They give themselves no airs. We have _millions_ of men like this, and
it is doubtful whether the nation finds much use for them, except at
coronations, where they look beautiful; or on county councils, where
they can hold an opinion without the preliminary fatigue of forming it;
and on the bloodstained fringes of our empire, where they serenely meet
their dreadful deaths.
In the ranks of that vast army I descry Michael, and I wonder what it is
in him that makes me able to descry him at all. He is like thousands of
other men. In what is he unlike?
I think it must be something in his expression. Of many ugly men it has
been said with truth that one never observes their ugliness. Something
in the character redeems it. With Michael's undeniable good looks it was
the same. One did not notice them. They were not admired, except,
possibly, for the first moment, or across a room. His rather
insignificant grey eyes were the only thing one remembered him by, the
only part of him which seemed to represent him.
It was as if out of the narrow window of a fortress _our friend_ for a
moment looked out; that "friend of our infinite dreams" who in dreams,
but, alas! never by day, comes softly to us across the white fields of
youth; who, later on, in dreams but never by day, overtakes us with
unbearable happiness in his hand in which to steep our exhaustion on the
hillside; who when our hair is grey comes to us still in dreams but
never by day, down the darkening valley, to tell us that our worn out
romantic hopes are but the alphabet of his language.
Such a look there was in Michael's eyes, and what it meant who shall
say? Once and again at long intervals we pass in the thoroughfare of
life young faces which have the same expression, as if they saw beyond,
as if they looked past their own youth across to an immortal youth, from
their own life to an unquenchable, upwelling spring of life. When
Michael spoke, which was little, his words verged on the commonplace. He
explained the obvious with modest directness. He had thought out and
made his own a small selection of platitudes. It is at first a shock to
some of us when we discover that a beautiful spiritual nature is linked
with a tranquil commonplace mind and narrow abilities.
When Michael's eyes rested on anything his still glance seemed to pass
through it, into its essence. An inscrutable Fate had willed that his
eyes should not rest on any woman save Fay.
Was her little hand to rend his illusions from him; or did he perhaps
see her as she was, as her husband, her shrewd old grandmother, her
sister even, had never seen her? Fay had revealed to Michael that of
which many men who write glibly of passion die in ignorance, the wonder
and awe of love, clothed in a woman's form, walking the earth. And in a
reverent and grateful loyalty Michael would have laid down his life for
her, as gladly as Dante would have done for "his lady." But Michael
would have laid down his in silence, as one casts off a glove. He had
never read the "New Life." It is improbable that it would have made any
impression on him if he had read it. He never associated words or books
or poetry with feelings. What he felt he held sacred. He was
unconsciously by nature that which others of the artistic temperament
consciously are in a lesser degree, and are doomed to try to express.
Michael never wanted to express anything, had no impulse of
self-revelation, no interest in his own mental experiences.
While Fay was turning over her little _bric-a-brac_ assortment of
feelings, her toy renunciations, her imitation convictions, Michael was
slowly making the great renunciation without even taking himself into
his confidence. To go away. To see her no more. This was death by
inches. As he sat hour after hour in his little room behind the Embassy
it seemed to him as if, by some frightful exertion of his will, he were
wading with incredible slowness out to sea, over endless flats in
inch-deep water, which after an interminable journey would be deep
enough to drown him at last.
The nausea and horror of this slow death were upon him. Nevertheless, he
meant to move towards it. And where Michael's eye was fixed there his
foot followed. He was not of those who rend themselves by violent
conflict. If he had ever been asked to give his reason for any action of
his life, from the greatest to the smallest, he would have looked at the
questioner in mild surprise, and would have said: "It was the only thing
to do."
To him vacillation and doubt were unknown. A certain wisdom could never
be his, for he saw no alternatives. He never balanced two courses of
action against each other.
"There were no two ways about it," he said to his godfather, the Bishop
of Lostford, respecting a decision where there were several
alternatives, which he had endeavoured to set before Michael with
impartiality. But Michael saw only one course, and took it.
And now again he only saw one course, and he meant to take it. He
sickened under it, but his mind was made up. Fay's letter which duly
reached him only made him suffer. It did not alter his determination to
go. Certainly, he would see her again, if she desired it so intensely,
and had something vitally important to tell him, though he disliked the
suggestion of a clandestine meeting. Still it was Fay's suggestion, and
Fay could do no wrong. But he knew that nothing she could do or say,
nothing new that she could spring upon him would have power to shake his
decision to leave Rome on Friday. _It was the only thing to do._