_Trial and Error_
At a very early stage in his career, before his theological training
had overtly begun, the moral consciousness of Mr. Trimblerigg was far
more accurately summed up in the words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’
than in the more generally accepted text which shone with symbolic rays
from an illuminated scroll hung over his bed. That text with its angel
faces and gold edgings did not pierce the joints of his harness, to the
discovery of vulnerable spots, with the same sharp efficiency as did
the dark watchful eye of Davidina.
As he entered into his ’teens with the instinct for spiritual adventure
growing strong, he had an uncomfortable sense of transparency where
Davidina was concerned--or rather where she was not concerned but chose
to intrude--which made him cease to feel a self-contained person. If
there was anyone in the world who knew him--not as he wished to be
known, but as in his more disconcerted moments he sometimes suspected
himself to be--it was Davidina. Under the fixture of her eye he lost
confidence; its calm quizzical gaze tripped his thoughts, and checked
the flow of his words: initiative and invention went out of him.
The result was truly grievous, for though he could do without
self-respect for quite long intervals, self-complacency was the
necessary basis for every action. Davidina deprived him of that.
Her power was horrible; she could do it in a momentary look, in
a single word; it seemed to be her mission in life, whenever he
whitewashed the window of his soul for better privacy, to scratch a
hole and look through.
When, for instance, he first experimented in kissing outside the
routine of family life, Davidina seemed by instinct to know of it.
Secretively, in the presence of their elders, she held him with her
eye, pursed her lips, and made the kissing sound; then, before he
could compose a countenance suitable to meet the charge, her glance
shot off and left him. For Davidina was a sleek adept in giving that
flick of the eye which does not wait for the repartee; though on other
occasions, when her eye definitely challenged him, there was no bearing
it down; it stabbed, it stuck, it went in, and came at his back.
It was in these wordless encounters that she beat him worst; till
Mr. Trimblerigg, conscious of his inferiority, went and practised at
the glass a gesture which he hoped thereby to make more effective--a
lifting of the nose, a slight closing of the eyelids, a polished
putting-off of the hands, deprecatory but bland; and a smile to show
that he was not hurt. But the first time he used it upon her was also
the last.
‘Did you practise that in the glass?’ said Davidina; and the gesture
died the death.
Truly at that time of her life he wanted her to die, and slightly
damped her shoes on the inside after they had been cleaned, that they
might help her to do so. But it was no good; without saying anything,
she damped his also, rather more emphatically, so that there could be
no mistake; whereas his damping was so delicately done that she ought
not to have found it out.
The most afflictive thing about these encounters was his constant
failure to score a victory; only once, in the affair of the
pocket-money already narrated, had he succeeded in holding his own.
Perhaps it was all for the good of his soul; for in matters of finance
his sense of probity remained in after years somewhat defective;
victory over Davidina in that respect had apparently done him no good.
But in other directions she continued to do her best to save his soul;
and though he was now committed to the ministry, and was himself to
become a soul-saving apparatus, he did not like her way of doing it;
temperamentally (and was there ever a character more largely composed
of temperament?) he would much rather have gone his own way and been
damned, than saved by Davidina on the lines she chose. She stung him
like a gad-fly in his weakest spots, till the unerring accuracy of
her aim filled him with a superstitious dread; and though never once
uttered in words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’ was the motive force
which thus early drove him so deeply and deviously into subterfuge
that it became an infection of his blood. And though against her it
availed little, in other directions, pricked to it by her incessant
skill, he had a quite phenomenal success, and was--up to a point--the
nimblest being that ever skipped from cover to open and from open to
cover, till, in the development of speed, he ceased to distinguish
which was which; and what he told would tell with the most complete
conviction that, if it told to his advantage, it must be truth; and
then, on occasion, would avail himself of the truth to such dazzling
effect that, lost in the blaze of his rectitude, he forgot those other
occasions when he had been truer to himself.
Of Davidina’s inspired pin-pricks here is an example, notable for the
early date of its delivery, when they were at the respective ages of
twelve and eleven. Brother and sister had fallen out in guessing at an
event as to which with probability all the other way, Davidina proved
to be right. Not believing this to be a guess, ‘You _knew_!’ he cried
indignantly.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied smoothly, ‘I only knew better.’
This was superfluous: it enabled Mr. Trimblerigg to get in with a
retort. ‘Even very conceited people,’ he said, ‘do sometimes manage to
guess right.’
Davidina recovered her ground. ‘I’m not as conceited as you,’ she
replied, ‘I never think myself good.’ It was the sticking-out of her
tongue, and adding ‘so there’! which gave the barb to those words.
At the earliest opportunity Mr. Trimblerigg retired to consider them.
It was evident that Davidina had penetrated another of his secrets; she
had discovered that he thought himself good. Many years after, when
asked by an American reporter what it felt like to be the greatest man
in the world, he replied that it made him feel shy, and then was ready
to bite his tongue out for having so aimed at modesty and missed. He
saw twenty reporters writing down the words, ‘It makes me feel shy’;
and within twelve hours it was all over the world--a mistake which he
couldn’t explain away. That was to be one of the worst moments of his
life; and this was another, that Davidina should have unearthed so
hidden and central a truth. He was deeply annoyed, partly with her for
having discovered it, much more with himself for having let it appear.
Yet his cogitations brought him in the end to a conclusion which had in
it a measure of comfort. ‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘I _am_ good
sometimes.’
It was that ‘sometimes,’ and the consciousness of it, that in the
future was to work havoc with his soul. He did know desperately well
that he was good sometimes; and the fervour of it used to spread
so far beyond the appointed limit that he ceased to know where his
goodness began, and where it left off. As from an oasis in the
wilderness exhales fragrance from the blossom of the rose, regaling
the dusty nostrils of sand-bound travellers, as into its airy horizon
ascends mirage from waters, and palm-trees, and temples, that are
real _somewhere_--but not in the place where they so phenomenally
display themselves--so from parts of him excellent, into other parts
less excellent, went the sense that he was ‘somehow good’; and he
never perceived, in spite of the very genuine interest he took in
himself that what made him more interesting than anyone else was the
extraordinary division of his character into two parts, a good and
a bad, so dexterously allied that they functioned together as one,
endowing him with that curious gift of sincerity to each mood while
it lasted, which kept him ever true to himself and the main chance,
even as the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope always shape to patterns,
however varied, having the same fixed centre--a haphazard orderliness
which no amount of shaking can destroy.
As has been hinted already, a time unavoidable for youth came in Mr.
Trimblerigg’s life when kisses began to have an attraction for him: in
his case it came rather early, and the attraction grew strong. But so
also grew his fear of them--or perhaps it would be more true to say his
fear lest Davidina should get wind of them. Davidina had an unlovable
scorn for kisses, which she paraded to the world; she kissed nobody
except her parents, and them only from a sense of duty, and became
known, in a country-side where kisses were easily come by, as the girl
from whom nobody could get a kiss.
Few tried; the first who did so had been made a warning for others.
It is likely enough--since moral emblems have their contrary
effect--that the impregnable barrier set up by Davidina was responsible
for the thing becoming so much a vogue in other quarters; and Lizzie
Seebohm, the prettiest small wench of the village, in pure derision of
Davidina’s aloofness, and under her very eyes, made open sale of her
kisses at a price which, starting from chocolates, rose to a penny and
thence to twopence.
For this amiable weakness she got from Davidina the nickname of
‘Tuppenny,’ and in view of the feud which thence arose, Mr. Trimblerigg
was instinctively advised of danger to his peace of mind if he put
himself on Tuppenny’s list. And so it came about that, whatever his
natural inclinations in the matter, he saved his pocket-money and did
not apply for her favours.
In this Lizzie Seebohm saw the influence of Davidina; for which reason
and sheer spitefulness, Mr. Trimblerigg became her quarry.
So one day a communication reached him, artfully told by the small
maiden commissioned thereto as a breach of confidence. She had heard
Lizzie say that Jonathan might have a kiss of her not merely for
nothing; she would give twopence to get it. A sense that he was really
attractive made him fail to see deep enough, and when the offer rose to
sixpence he succumbed.
Within an hour--Lizzie Seebohm had seen to it--Davidina got the news.
Her wrath and sense of humiliation were deep; in the great battle
of life which lay ahead for the possession of her brother’s soul,
she had lost a point, and that to an opponent whom she regarded as
insignificant. It was not a case for silence. Davidina descended upon
him before the sixpence in his pocket had had time to get warm. ‘You’ve
been kissing Tuppenny!’ she cried.
‘Who says?’ he demanded, scared at discovery so swift. Then, bettering
his defence: ‘Tuppenny, indeed! she’s not worth it. I haven’t given her
tuppence; I haven’t given her a penny. I haven’t given her anything, so
there! If she says I have, she’s a liar.’
This seemed almost conclusive; Davidina’s faith in the report wavered.
But whenever Jonathan was voluble she distrusted him; so now.
‘It isn’t her word I’m going by,’ she said. ‘Somebody saw you.’
Mr. Trimblerigg’s mind made an alert movement--very characteristic. He
was not ashamed of what he had done; he only didn’t like being caught.
‘You said Tuppenny,’ he retorted. ‘And I say--I didn’t give her
tuppence.’
Davidina pressed him along the track, as he meant her to. ‘Then what
did you give her?’
‘I didn’t give her anything; I’ve told you so already. She gave me
sixpence.’
His tone was triumphant, for now, in his own time and in his own way,
he had made a clean breast of it. Davidina’s face was a study.
‘Sold again!’ he said, watching the effect; and curiously he did not
mean himself, or his virtue, or anything else belonging to him; he
meant Davidina. Having got ahead of her with the facts, he considered
himself top-dog for that once at least.
But within a few hours of that avowal an amazing thing happened. It
happened during the night; for when he went to bed the sixpence was in
his trouser pocket, and when he got up in the morning it was gone; nor
did he dare to tax Davidina with the theft.
In chapel, the next Sunday, when the plate came round for foreign
missions, Davidina with ostentation put sixpence into it. Is it to be
wondered that, before the week was over, he had got sixpence back from
somewhere, and took care that Davidina should see him spending it.
Davidina meant well, I am sure; but it is to be questioned whether her
method of clipping his wings was the right one. He became tangential to
the orbit of her spells; they touched, but they did not contain him.
Meanwhile, without Davidina’s aid, even without her approval, Mr.
Trimblerigg’s call to the ministry was becoming more assured. And the
question mainly was whether, in that family of cramped means, money
could be found in the years lying immediately ahead to provide the
necessary training. It meant two years spent mainly away from home
at the Free Evangelical Training College; two years of escape from
Davidina for whole months at a time; it meant leaving home a boy and
coming back very nearly a man. Even had the ministry not appealed to
him, it would have been worth it for the peculiar attraction of those
circumstances.
Whether this could become practically possible depended mainly upon
old Uncle Trimblerigg--Uncle Trimblerigg whose investments in house
property had been inspired by holy scripture, but whose theological
tenets were of a kind for which up-to-date Free Evangelicalism no
longer provided the college or the training. Nor did he believe
that either college or training were necessary for the preaching of
the Word. He had done it himself for fifty years, merely by opening
the book where it wished to be opened and pondering what was thus
presented. The verbal inspiration of Scripture, not merely in its
writing but in its presentation to the sense of the true believer, was
the very foundation of his faith. The sect of ‘the True Believers’ had
of late years sadly diminished; for as all True Believers believed that
while they believed truly they could never make a mistake in their
interpretations of Scripture, it became as time went on dangerous for
them to meet often or to exchange pulpits, since, where one was found
differing from another, mutual excommunication of necessity followed
and they walked no more in each other’s ways. Only at their great
annual congress did they meet to reaffirm the foundation of their faith
and thunder with a united voice the Word which did not change.
Thus it came about that dotted over the country were many chapels of
True Believers cut off from friendly intercourse with any other by
mutual interdict; and the hill-side chapel of Uncle Trimblerigg--built
by himself for a congregation of some twenty families all told, his
tenants, or his dependents in the building trade--was one of them.
So among the True Believers there was small prospect of a career for
the budding Mr. Trimblerigg; and yet it was upon the financial aid and
favour of one of them that he depended for theological training in a
direction which they disapproved.
It speaks well for the sanguine temperament and courage of our own
Mr. Trimblerigg that the prospect did not dismay him, or even, in the
event, present much difficulty.