BACK IN ZION PLACE
The shame of that wild unfaithfulness burned in Theophil's soul for many
days. It humiliated him like a physical degradation. To have been so
drunkenly untrue! It was one of those shocks to the moral nature from
which it never quite recovers, and Theophil's face lost some of its
steadfastness, his walk some of its firmness, for this perfidy
towards Jenny.
There was only one way to make the sense of it endurable, and he threw
himself into his work with a wasting vehemence. Where was his ambition?
There was so much yet to do. New Zion had long since moved and hummed,
and whizzed, the neighbouring towns had in a measure begun to dance to
his piping, but it must be a long while yet ere his name was to London
and to the world what it was already to Coalchester,--that mere
microcosm of his fame.
And till London knew him as well as Coalchester, there was no real
monument to Jenny. London--no longer the city of Isabel--must learn to
say "Theophilus Londonderry" so naturally, that it would some day serve
as an unforgettable remembrance of Jenny. He must become a great man,
because a great name is the one shrine in which love's memory may escape
oblivion. In the arms of his name Jenny would then be carried down the
years, one woman-star saved from the night of death. Again, the world,
for which in one way he had so little care, was to help him indirectly
to keep his troth to Jenny.
In a sense, the mountain was already coming to this young prophet; for
with the winter some of London's finest spirits were now and again to be
met in that incongruous Zion Place, as visiting lecturers to New Zion.
And each one, as he came, was impressed as Isabel had been on that old
evening when she had discovered her colony of surprise-people. Each
realised in that gravely masterful young minister a power and a force of
attraction which could not long remain hidden in that little country
town. Meanwhile, their visits enabled him to test his own calibre by
comparison with theirs, and to realise that his instincts had not
befooled him, but that he too had been called to the stage of the
great world.
It was in the operation of this method of inviting the mountain that the
French poet, with a reference to whom we began this history, made his
fantastic appearance in Zion Place. It is to be feared that it was a
conscious love of paradox that prompted an invitation from which indeed
New Zion must derive the most mystical of benefits and the most
imaginary of delights; but it was Theophil's whim to crown the
Renaissance in Coalchester by this _reductio ad absurdum._ The
subtlest poetic art of France should come in person to Coalchester, and
after days should tell that Theophilus Londonderry, while still a young
country minister, had bidden Paris sing her loveliest siren-song in the
musty little lecture-hall of New Zion. It is thus power bends the bow of
the world till the ends meet, and shoots the arrow of his name among
the stars.
With the reawakening of his ambition, Theophil began to realise that his
work at New Zion was nearing its end, and that before long he must seek
that larger stage. Yet all his heart remained in that dull little Zion
Place, and while Jenny's old mother lived he could not conceive tearing
himself away. Could he indeed even bring himself to say good-bye to
these mean little romantic streets along which Jenny had tripped? Could
he bear to think of the commonplace little house which Jenny had
transfigured to a shrine being desecrated with vulgar occupation? If he
could only raze it to the ground, as a cup from which a queen has drunk
is shattered lest it should be soiled with usage of common lips! Some
day he might have grown rich enough to buy it, and set it apart for
ever, as a little house sacred to love and youth; but, meanwhile, with
what ugly and noisome presences would it have been defiled!
He would stand in Jenny's room with its quiet books and flowers, and his
heart would ache to think that some day harsh hands must noisily break
in upon that sacred silence, and strip it of all its delicate memories.
Jenny's room the lair of wild beasts, a nest of foulness and serpents!
Sometimes he was thus haunted with the ghosts of those who were to riot
up and down these stairs when Jenny's memory had quite died out of these
walls like a fragrance of musk overborne with coarse odours.
Yes! in this perhaps are the rich most enviable of the poor, that they
can afford chapels for their memories, and their houses, thus saved from
external taint from generation to generation, become temples of which
the very walls breathe nobleness, whereas the very birthplace of genius
itself becomes a butcher's shop; and though that genius be Shakespeare,
and the old house be some day purified seventy times seven, and
garnished as you please, the smell of slaughtered beasts will still
cling about its rooms, and the butcher insist upon immortality too.
Jenny's old mother was soon to turn into a memory also. She had from
time to time declared that she would not see another May, and had indeed
on one occasion named the day on which she would die, with a curious
precision, as though she had seen it written somewhere in a book, or
learnt it from private or unimpeachable information. Latterly she had
met Jenny twice in full daylight on the stairs, and it was evident that
the old woman would soon complete that little family circle in Paradise.
But she still kept about, and whereas her old husband had grown sleepier
as his end neared, she seemed to be growing more active again, fidgety
and restless. She slept badly, and returned to her old habit of being
first down in the morning and lighting the kitchen fire, in spite of
remonstrances. Indeed, she might sometimes be heard up in the middle of
the night, making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. The kitchen had
been her world, and she was already beginning to haunt it.
There it was one wintry morning they found her sitting in the old
arm-chair in which her husband had died, and then they recalled her
words, for she had died on the very day she had predicted.
She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very
antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways
of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as
insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which
gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive
as lying closer to the Mother.
At all events, old Mrs. Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences
from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears. Hers had
been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are
sometimes revealed.
Her death was more of a loss to her son-in-law than he might have
conceived, for not only was she the last of Jenny's flesh and blood, but
she was the only one else in the world who missed Jenny as he missed
her. Others might, through sympathy, share his sorrow, but she and he
were partners in an actual loss. Something had definitely gone from
each. Jenny seemed to be twice dead with the death of her mother, and
Theophil's loneliness suddenly became more absolute and cut off than
ever before.
There was now no one left who could involuntarily recall remembered
words and traits of Jenny, and who would for their own sakes want to sit
down and talk of her. All that was left that really knew Jenny was the
old house itself. That remembered and talked of her still in its dumb
way; and as he realised this, his mood once more changed. He forgot his
aspirations toward a broader world, and felt that, not only would it be
a sort of unfaithfulness to leave Zion Place, but that to do so, and to
break up this familiar harmony of home, this little cosmos of friendly
furniture in accustomed relations,--pictures hung so from time
immemorial, rooms dedicated to this use and no other,--would be to
destroy the one mirror from which could come to him still glimpses of
Jenny's living face. In just that look of the rooms was the best
portrait he possessed of Jenny.
Though he had always been fond of Mr. Moggridge, it had not before
occurred to Theophil to make of him a companion; but about this time, as
Mr. Moggridge would drop in of an evening to discuss church matters, the
young minister would be surprised to note how lonely he felt when he had
gone. Indeed Mr. Moggridge possessed that great undefinable gift of
companionability.
What is needed in a companion is not brilliance of conversation, but the
power to make you feel that you are not quite alone in the universe.
Dogs and even children possess this quality for some happily constituted
individuals, but for others it is a necessity that the companion be a
human being.
A human being, the quieter the better, if possible a rather large man,
diffusing a sense of warmth and safety, with perhaps no other gifts than
kindliness and a pipe; and sometimes you have the best of company. And
Mr. Moggridge, as we know, had brains too, and interesting instincts
for new things. But his best gift was his humanity. Thus Theophil
encouraged his evening calls and contrived to prolong them, though the
two would often sit almost silent by the hour, their pipes alone making
a sort of conversation.
Sometimes the young lions of "The Dawn" would come to supper, as in the
old days, as Theophil called a year ago; but supper was a poor thing
without Mrs. Talbot popping in and out of the room, though she had
seemed comparatively unimportant then,--not to speak of eager little
Jenny,--not to think of Isabel.
Yes! the sparkle had gone out of their meetings, which began to have an
air of make-believe youth about them. Theophil's interest was indeed
centred in the purlieus of New Zion, but it was entirely retrospective;
and though outwardly New Zion was more alive than ever, it seemed to him
that activity which once started goes on of itself, and he realised that
in his heart he cared nothing for the work itself, but only for the
music to which it had once been set in motion. Incomplete as in one
sense it was, in another and more personal sense his life seemed already
complete; and while in some moods he would dream of its resounding
continuance, in others he would sigh that it might end.
However, for a while he would still go on living with the shadows he
loved; and as he sat alone of an evening in that silent house, he would
sometimes half fancy that he heard the other occupants moving about or
walking overhead. That was Mrs. Talbot with a creaking basket of clean
linen on the stairs, and surely that was the opening and closing of a
drawer in Jenny's room. Perhaps it was only Mr. Talbot moving his chair
in the kitchen.