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 earling. 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.