THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.
At the very top of the winding footpath cut deeply into the
sandstone side of the East Cliff Hill at Hastings, a wooden seat,
set a little back from the road, invites the panting climber to rest
for five minutes after his steep ascent from the primitive fisher
village of Old Hastings, which nestles warmly in the narrow sun-smitten
gulley at his feet. On this seat, one bright July morning, Herbert
Le Breton lay at half length, basking in the brilliant open sunshine
and evidently waiting for somebody whom he expected to arrive by the
side path from the All Saints' Valley. Even the old coastguardsman,
plodding his daily round over to Ecclesbourne, noticed the obvious
expectation implied in his attentive attitude, and ventured to
remark, in his cheery familiar fashion, 'She won't be long a-comin'
now, sir, you may depend upon it: the gals is sure to be out
early of a fine mornin' like this 'ere.' Herbert stuck his double
eye-glass gingerly upon the tip of his nose, and surveyed the
bluff old sailor through it with a stony British stare of mingled
surprise and indignation, which drove the poor man hastily off, with
a few muttered observations about some people being so confounded
stuck up that they didn't even understand the point of a little
good-natured seafarin' banter.
As the coastguardsman disappeared round the corner of the flagstaff,
a young girl came suddenly into sight by the jutting edge of
sandstone bluff near the High Wickham; and Herbert, jumping up at
once from his reclining posture, raised his bat to her with stately
politeness, and moved forward in his courtly graceful manner
to meet her as she approached. 'Well, Selah,' he said, taking her
hand a little warmly (judged at least by Herbert Le Breton's usual
standard), 'so you've come at last! I've been waiting here for you
for fully half an hour. You see, I've come down to Hastings again
as I promised, the very first moment I could possibly get away
from my pressing duties at Oxford.'
The girl withdrew her hand from his, blushing deeply, but looking
into his face with evident pleasure and admiration. She was tall
and handsome, with a certain dashing air of queenliness about her,
too; and she was dressed in a brave, outspoken sort of finery,
which, though cheap enough in its way, was neither common nor wholly
wanting in a touch of native good taste and even bold refinement of
contrast and harmony. 'It's very kind of you to come, Mr. Walters,'
she answered in a firm but delicate voice. 'I'm so sorry I've
kept you waiting. I got your letter, and tried to come in time; but
father he's been more aggravating than usual, almost, this morning,
and kept saying he'd like to know what on earth a young woman could
want to go out walking for, instead of stopping at home at her work
and minding her Bible like a proper Christian. In HIS time young
women usen't to be allowed to go walking except on Sundays, and then
only to chapel or Bible class. So I've not been able to get away
till this very minute, with all this bundle of tracts, too, to give
to the excursionists on the way. Father feels a most incomprehensible
interest, somehow, in the future happiness of the Sunday excursionists.'
'I wish he'd feel a little more interest in the present happiness
of his own daughter,' Herbert said smiling. 'But it hasn't mattered
your keeping me waiting here, Selah. Of course I'd have enjoyed it
all far better in your society--I don't think I need tell you that
now, dear--but the sunshine, and the sea breeze, and the song of
the larks, and the plash of the waves below, and the shouts of the
fishermen down there on the beach mending their nets and putting
out their smacks, have all been so delightful after our humdrum
round of daily life at Oxford, that I only wanted your presence
here to make it all into a perfect paradise.--Why, Selah, how pretty
you look in that sweet print! It suits your complexion admirably.
I never saw you wear anything before so perfectly becoming.'
Selah drew herself up with the conscious pride of an unaffected
pretty girl. 'I'm so glad you think so, Mr. Walters,' she said,
playing nervously with the handle of her dark-blue parasol. 'You
always say such very flattering things.'
'No, not flattering,' Herbert answered, smiling; 'not flattering,
Selah, simply truthful. You always extort the truth from me with
your sweet face, Selah. Nobody can look at it and not forget the
stupid conventions of ordinary society. But please, dear, don't
call me Mr. Walters. Call me Herbert. You always do, you know, when
you write to me.'
'But it's so much harder to do it to your face, Mr. Walters,' Selah
said, again blushing. 'Every time you go away I say to myself, "I
shall call him Herbert as soon as ever he comes back again;" and
every time you come back, I feel too much afraid of you, the moment
I see you, ever to do it. And yet of course I ought to, you know,
for when we're married, why, naturally, then I shall have to learn
to call you Herbert, shan't I?'
'You will, I suppose,' Herbert answered, rather chillily: 'but
that subject is one upon which we shall be able to form a better
opinion when the time comes for actually deciding it. Meanwhile,
I want you to call me Herbert, if you please, as a personal favour
and a mark of confidence. Suppose I were to go on calling you Miss
Briggs all the time! a pretty sort of thing that would be! what
inference would you draw as to the depth of my affection? Well,
now, Selah, how have these dreadful home authorities of yours been
treating you, my dear girl, all the time since I last saw you?'
'Much the same as usual, Mr. Walters--Herbert, I mean,' Selah
answered, hastily correcting herself. 'The regular round. Prayers;
clean the shop; breakfast, with a chapter; serve in the shop all
morning; dinner, with a chapter; serve in the shop all afternoon;
tea, with a chapter; prayer meeting in the evening; supper, with a
chapter; exhortation; and go to bed, sick of it all, to get up next
morning and repeat the entire performance da capo, as they always
say in the music to the hymn-books. Occasional relaxations,--Sunday
at chapel three times, and Wednesday evening Bible class; mothers'
assembly, Dorcas society, missionary meeting, lecture on the Holy
Land, dissolving views of Jerusalem, and Primitive Methodist
district conference in the Mahanaim Jubilee meeting hall. Salvation
privileges every day and all the year round, till I'm ready to drop
with it, and begin to wish I'd only been lucky enough to have been
born one of those happy benighted little pagans in a heathen land
where they don't know the value of the precious Sabbath, and haven't
yet been taught to build Primitive Methodist district chapels for
crushing the lives out of their sons and daughters!'
Herbert smiled a gentle smile of calm superiority at this vehement
outburst of natural irreligion. 'You must certainly be bored
to death with it all, Selah,' he said, laughingly. 'What a funny
sort of creed it really is, after all, for rational beings! Who on
earth could believe that the religion these people use to render
your life so absolutely miserable is meant for the same thing as
the one that makes my poor dear brother Ronald so perfectly and
inexpressibly serene and happy? The formalism of lower natures, like
your father's, has turned it into a machine for crushing all the
spontaneity out of your existence. What a régime for a high-spirited
girl like you to be compelled to live under, Selah!'
'It is, it is!' Selah answered, vehemently. 'I wish you could only
see the way father goes on at me all the time about chapel, and so
on, Mr. Wal--Herbert, I mean. You wouldn't wonder, if you were to
hear him, at my being anxious for the time to come when you can
leave Oxford and we can get comfortably married. What between the
drudgery of the shop and the drudgery of the chapel my life's
positively getting almost worn out of me.'
Herbert took her hand in his, quietly. It was not a very small hand,
but it was prettily, though cheaply, gloved, and the plain silver
bracelet that encircled the wrist, though simple and inexpensive,
was not wanting in rough tastefulness. 'You're a bad philosopher,
Selah,' he said, turning with her along the path towards Ecclesbourne;
'you're always anxious to hurry on too fast the lagging wheels of
an unknown future. After all, how do you know whether we should
be any the happier if we were really and truly married? Don't you
know what Swinburne says, in "Dolores"--you've read it in the Poems
and Ballads I gave you--
Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives,
And marriage and death and division
Make barren our lives?'
'I've read it,' Selah answered, carelessly, 'and I thought it all
very pretty. Of course Swinburne always is very pretty: but I'm
sure I never try to discover what on earth he means by it. I suppose
father would say I don't read him tearfully and prayerfully--at
any rate, I'm quite sure I never understand what he's driving at.'
'And yet he's worth understanding,' Herbert answered in his clear
musical voice--'well worth understanding, Selah, especially for
you, dearest. If, in imitation of obsolete fashions, you wished
to read a few verses of some improving volume every night and
morning, as a sort of becoming religious exercise in the elements
of self-culture, I don't know that I could recommend you a better
book to begin upon than the Poems and Ballads. Don't you see the
moral of those four lines I've just quoted to you? Why should we
wish to change from anything so free and delightful and poetical
as lovers into anything so fettered, and commonplace, and prosaic,
and BANAL, as wives and husbands? Why should we wish to give up
the fanciful paradise of fluttering hope and expectation for the
dreary reality of housekeeping and cold mutton on Mondays? Why
should we not be satisfied with the real pleasure of the passing
moment, without for ever torturing our souls about the imaginary
but delusive pleasure of the unrealisable, impossible future?'
'But we MUST get married some time or other, Herbert,' Selah
said, turning her big eyes full upon him with a doubtful look
of interrogation. 'We can't go on courting in this way for ever
and ever, without coming to any definite conclusion. We MUST get
married by-and-by, now mustn't we?'
'Je n'en vois pas la nécessité, moi,' Herbert answered with just a
trace of cynicism in his curling lip. 'I don't see any MUST about
it, that is to say, in English, Selah. The fact is, you see, I'm
above all things a philosopher; you're a philosopher, too, but only
an instinctive one, and I want to make your instinctive philosophy
assume a rather more rational and extrinsic shape. Why should we
really be in any hurry to go and get married? Do the actual married
people of our acquaintance, as a matter of fact, seem so very much
more ethereally happy--with their eight children to be washed and
dressed and schooled daily, for example--than the lovers, like you
and me, who walk arm-in-arm out here in the sunshine, and haven't
yet got over their delicious first illusions? Depend upon it, the
longer you can keep your illusions the better. You haven't read
Aristotle in all probability; but as Aristotle would put it, it
isn't the end that is anything in love-making, it's the energy, the
active pursuit, the momentary enjoyment of it. I suppose we shall
have to get married some day, Selah, though I don't know when; but
I confess to you I don't look forward to the day quite so rapturously
as you do. Shall we feel more the thrill of possession, do you
think, than I feel it now when I hold your hand in mine, so, and
catch the beating of your pulse in your veins, even through the
fingers of your pretty little glove? Shall we look deeper into
one another's eyes and hearts than I look now into the very inmost
depths of yours? Shall we drink in more fully the essence of love
than when I touch your lips here--one moment, Selah, the gorse is
very deep here--now don't be foolish--ah, there, what's the use
of philosophising, tell me, by the side of that? Come over here to
the bench, Selah, by the edge of the cliff; look down yonder into
Ecclesbourne glen; hear the waves dashing on the shore below, and
your own heart beating against your bosom within--and then ask
yourself what's the good of living in any moment, in any moment
but the present.'
Selah turned her great eyes admiringly upon him once more. 'Oh,
Herbert,' she said, looking at him with a clever uneducated girl's
unfeigned and undisguised admiration for any cultivated gentleman
who takes the trouble to draw out her higher self. 'Oh, Herbert, how
can you talk so beautifully to me, and then ask me why it is I'm
longing for the day to come when I can be really and truly married
to you? Do you think I don't feel the difference between spending
my life with such a man as you, and spending it for years and years
together with a ranting, canting Primitive Methodist?'
Herbert smiled to himself a quiet, unobtrusive, self-satisfied
smile. 'She appreciates me,' he thought silently in his own heart,
'she appreciates me at my true worth; and, after all, that's a great
thing. Well, Selah,' he went on aloud, toying unreproved with her
pretty little silver bracelet, 'let us be practical. You belong to
a business family and you know the necessity for being practical.
There's a great deal to be said in favour of my hanging on at Oxford
a little longer. I must get a situation somewhere else as soon
as possible, in which I can get married; but I can't give up my
fellowship without having found something else to do which would
enable me to put my wife in the position I should like her to
occupy.'
'A very small income would do for me, with you, Herbert,' Selah
put in eagerly. 'You see, I've been brought up economically enough,
heaven knows, and I could live extremely well on very little.'
'But _I_ could not, Selah,' Herbert answered, in his colder tone.
'Pardon me, but I could not. I've been accustomed to a certain
amount of comfort, not to say luxury, which I couldn't readily
do without. And then, you know, dear,' he added, seeing a certain
cloud gathering dimly on Selah's forehead, 'I want to make my wife
a real lady.'
Selah looked at him tenderly, and gave the hand she hold in hers
a faint pressure. And then Herbert began to talk about the waves,
and the cliffs, and the sun, and the great red sails, and to quote
Shelley and Swinburne; and the conversation glided off into more
ordinary everyday topics.
They sat for a couple of hours together on the edge of the cliff,
talking to one another about such and other subjects, till, at last,
Selah asked the time, hurriedly, and declared she must go off at
once, or father'd be in a tearing passion. Herbert walked back
with her through the green lanes in the golden mass of gorse, till
he reached the brow of the hill by the fisher village. Then Selah
said lightly, 'Not any nearer, Herbert--you see I can say Herbert
quite naturally now--the neighbours will go talking about it
if they see me standing here with a strange gentleman. Good-bye,
good-bye, till Friday.' Herbert held her face up to his in his
hands, and kissed her twice over in spite of a faint resistance.
Then they each went their own way, Selah to the little green-grocer's
shop in a back street of the red-brick fisher village, and Herbert
to his big fashionable hotel on the Marine Parade in the noisy
stuccoed modern watering place.
'It's an awkward sort of muddle to have got oneself into.' he thought
to himself as he walked along the asphalte pavement in front of
the sea-wall: 'a most confoundedly awkward fix to have got oneself
into with a pretty girl of the lower classes. She's beautiful
certainly; that there's no denying; the handsomest woman on the
whole I ever remember to have seen at any time anywhere; and when
I'm actually by her side--though it's a weakness to confess it--I'm
really not quite sure that I'm not positively quite in love with
her! She'd make a grand sort of Messalina, without a doubt, a
model for a painter, with her frank imperious face, and her splendid
voluptuous figure; a Faustina, a Catherine of Russia, an Ann
Boleyn--to be fitly painted only by a Rubens or a Gustave Courbet.
Yet how I can ever have been such a particular fool as to go and
get myself entangled with her I can't imagine. Heredity, heredity;
it must run in the family, for certain. There's Ernest has gone and
handed himself over bodily to this grocer person somewhere down in
Devonshire; and I myself, who perfectly see the folly of his absurd
proceeding, have independently put myself into this very similar
awkward fix with Selah Briggs here. Selah Briggs, indeed! The very
name reeks with commingled dissent, vulgarity, and greengrocery. Her
father's deacon of his chapel, and goes out at night when there's
no missionary meeting on, to wait at serious dinner parties! Or
rather, I suppose he'd desert the most enticing missionary to earn
a casual half-crown at even an ungodly champagne-drinking dinner!
Then that's the difference between me and Ernest. Ernest's selfish,
incurably and radically selfish. Because this Oswald girl happens
to take his passing fancy, and to fit in with his impossible
Schurzian notions, he'll actually go and marry her. Not only will
he have no consideration for mother--who really is a very decent
sort of body in her own fashion, if you don't rub her up the wrong
way or expect too much from her--but he'll also interfere, without
a thought, with MY prospects and my advancement. Now, THAT I call
really selfish; and selfishness is a vulgar piggish vice that I
thoroughly abominate. I don't deny that I'm a trifle selfish myself,
of course, in a refined and cultivated manner--I flatter myself,
in fact, that introspective analysis is one of my strong points;
and I don't conceal my own failings from my own consciousness with
any weak girlish prevarications. But after all, as Hobbes very well
showed (though our shallow modern philosophers pretend to laugh at
him), selfishness in one form or another is at the very base of
all human motives; the difference really is between sympathetic
and unsympathetic selfishness--between piggishness and cultivated
feelings. Now _I_ will NOT give way to the foolish and selfish
impulses which would lead me to marry Selah Briggs. I will put a
curb upon my inclinations, and do what is really best in the end
for all the persons concerned--and for myself especially.'
He strolled down on to the beach, and began throwing pebbles
carelessly into the plashing water. 'Yes,' he went on in his internal
colloquy, 'I can only account for my incredible stupidity in this
matter by supposing that it depends somehow upon some incomprehensible
hereditary leaning in the Le Breton family idiosyncrasy. It's awfully
unlike me, I will do myself the justice to say, to have got myself
into such a silly dilemma all for nothing. It was all very well a
few years ago, when I first met Selah. I was an undergraduate in
those days, and even if somebody had caught me walking with a young
lady of unknown antecedents and doubtful aspirates on the East
Cliff at Hastings, it really wouldn't have much mattered. She was
beautiful even then--though not so beautiful as now, for she grows
handsomer every day; and it was natural enough I should have taken
to going harmless walks about the place with her. She attracted me
by her social rebelliousness--another family trait, in me passive
not active, contemplative not personal; but she certainly attracted
me. She attracts me still. A man must have some outlet for the
natural and instinctive emotions of our common humanity; and if a
monastic Oxford community imposes celibacy upon one with mediaeval
absurdity--why, Selah Briggs is, for the time being, the only
possible sort of outlet. One needn't marry her in the end; but for
the moment it is certainly very excellent fooling. Not unsentimental
either--for my part I could never care for mere coarse, commonplace,
venal wretches. Indeed, when I spoke to her just now about my wishing
to make my wife a lady, upon my word, at the time, I almost think
I was just then quite in earnest. The idea flitted across my mind
vaguely--"Why not send her for a year or two to be polished up
at Paris or somewhere, and really marry her afterwards for good
and always?" But on second thoughts, it won't hold water. She's
magnificent, she's undeniable, she's admirable, but she isn't
possible. The name alone's enough to condemn her. Fancy marrying
somebody with a Christian name out of the hundred and somethingth
psalm! It's too atrocious! I really couldn't inflict her for a
moment on poor suffering innocent society.'
He paused awhile, watching the great russet sails of the fishing
vessels flapping idly in the breeze as the men raised them to catch
the faint breath of wind, and then he thought once more, 'But how
to get rid of her, that's the question. Every time I come here now
she goes on more and more about the necessity of our getting soon
married--and I don't wonder at it either, for she has a perfect
purgatory of a life with that snivelling Methodistical father of
hers, one may be sure of it. It would be awfully awkward if any
Oxford people were to catch me here walking with her on the cliff over
yonder--some sniggering fellow of Jesus or Worcester, for example,
or, worse than all, some prying young Pecksniff of a third-year
undergraduate! Somehow, she seems to fascinate me, and I can't get
away from her; but I must really do it and be done with it. It's
no use going on this way much longer. I must stop here for a few
days more only, and then tell her that I'm called away on important
college business, say to Yorkshire or Worcestershire, or somewhere.
I needn't tell her in person, face to face: I can write hastily at
the last moment to the usual name at the Post Office--to be left
till called for. And as a matter of fact I won't go to Yorkshire
either--very awkward and undignified, though, these petty
prevarications; when a man once begins lowering himself by making
love to a girl in an inferior position, he lets himself in for
all kinds of disagreeable necessities afterwards;--I shall go to
Switzerland. Yes, no place better after the bother of running away
like a coward from Selah: in the Alps, one would forget all petty
human degradations; I shall go to Switzerland. Of course I won't
break off with her altogether--that would be cruel; and I really
like her; upon my word, even when she isn't by, up to her own
level, I really like her; but I'll let the thing die a natural
death of inanition. As they always put it in the newspapers, with
their stereotyped phraseology, a gradual coldness shall intervene
between us. That'll be the best and only way out of it.
'And if I go to Switzerland, why not ask Oswald of Oriel to go
with me? That, I fancy, wouldn't be a bad stroke of social policy.
Ernest WILL marry this Oswald girl; unfortunately he's as headstrong
as an allegory on the banks of the Nile; and as he's going to drag
her inevitably into the family, I may as well put the best possible
face upon the disagreeable matter. Let's make a virtue of necessity.
The father and mother are old: they'll die soon, and be gathered
to their fathers (if they had any), and the world will straightway
forget all about them. But Oswald will always be there en évidence,
and the safest thing to do will be to take him as much as possible
into the world, and let the sister rest upon HIS reputation for
her place in society. It's quite one thing to say that Ernest has
married the daughter of a country grocer down in Devonshire, and
quite another thing to say that he has married the sister of Oswald
of Oriel, the distinguished mathematician and fellow of the Royal
Society. How beautifully that warm brown sail stands out in a
curve against the cold grey line of the horizon--a bulging curve
just like the swell of Selah's neck, when she throws her head
back, so, and lets you see the contour of her throat, her beautiful
rounded throat--ah, that's not giving her up now, is it?--What a
confounded fool I am, to be sure! Anybody would say, if they could
only have read my thoughts that moment, that I was really in love
with this girl Selah!'