A human spirit cast ashore after a storm of grief takes a long time to
recover full consciousness. It lies in a ‘no-man’s-land’ out of reach of
the waves, but incapable of movement.
For six months after Arthur’s death Jim’s world was submerged in
disaster. Flickering thoughts came to him of going to the bad. Evil had
no particular attraction for him, but there seemed nowhere else to go.
The results of wrong-doing seemed as formidable as the results of doing
right, and they required less effort.
It was not grief alone that had unseated his will, but the crueller
sense of having lost an object of worship. Jim had made an idol of Mrs.
Bligh and worshipped her. God is a jealous God, who, for the sake of the
worshipper, destroys idols; and when an idol falls, all that it stands
for falls with it. The sense of the invisible had receded from Jim; he
craved for the hardness of the material world.
He hated beauty now; he wanted brutal things that he could fight. He did
not want to be guided by Arthur’s memory; if Arthur had left him a
single condition with his inheritance, Jim would have refused it.
But Arthur had left no conditions; he had simply left all he had in
Jim’s strong, young hands, as if it was certain Jim would know what to
do with it. His trust was like a hand laid on Jim’s shoulder. Jim
couldn’t shake it off, because he loved it.
After a few disconsolate, desultory weeks, he went to Cambridge, because
Arthur had always said he wanted Jim to go to Cambridge.
There was none of the sharpness of life to be found within its old gray
walls, but it was restful there.
The unharassing, ancient customs, the kind, wise, old scholars, with
their accessible knowledge, soothed and stimulated Jim.
They were as impersonal as stones, but intellectually they kindled
fires.
Scholars are an unobtrusive, kindly race. They will not come out of
their shells unless attacked by intelligence; but they never fail to
respond to intelligence when it attacks them.
Jim’s questions roused his professor’s interest, and he gave him the
best he had—an effortless patience with detail, an inescapable
obedience to fact and rather more reliance on reason than Jim had yet
discovered in human beings. The professor cared about truth, and this
lonely, surly, brooding boy cared also for truth. Jim did not want
friendship. He was afraid of being helped or hurt, or moved any more.
There was a weight upon his heart as heavy as time. He shrank from the
laughter and youthfulness of his fellows, and refused to respond to the
tentative advances which were made to him.
He settled down to work in a room which looked out upon a narrow street,
enclosed by two high old walls. At the end of the street was the river.
Jim could not see it from his windows, but he knew that, in a moment, he
could be standing on a gray bridge and looking into vistas of hanging
trees and over flat green fields, with here and there a solid stone
building which had placidly held the youth and history of England for
centuries.
It was easier for Jim to feel part of the place than part of the life
within it. He felt akin to all the ancient landmarks. He was content, as
they were, to brood unobtrusively over the stream of laughing youth
which passed between those walls without check or trace. They were not
personally involved in short adventures; they, like Jim, were out upon a
quest for finality.
Jim took a purely practical view of education; he wanted to find out if
one or two things were true, and then change his life to meet them.
Christianity, for instance—did it shrink away from fact with the light
scorn of a good woman from a sin she did not understand? Or was it a
consoling dream fit for delicate and irresponsible beings who couldn’t
stand life without the padding of dreams? He asked several of the
Cambridge scholars for evidences of Christianity, and they gave him all
they had, both for and against. Even the theological professor, who was
one of the greatest scholars of his age, and wanted Christianity to be
true, handled its difficulties with an unfettered reverence for fact. He
never asked Jim to accept anything on authority. But it was different
when Jim wanted to apply religion to modern life. All the delicate,
deliberate researches of Cambridge seemed to fail at this further demand
upon them. Nobody wanted to deal with a fact once they had proved it.
The sense of the long, slow, chain of history blinded their eyes to the
urgency of life. They could lay their fingers admirably upon the causes
of modern evils, but they took them away again afterwards.
Jim could not take his fingers away. He had the instinct of the
reformer. He wanted to cry aloud like Peter, ‘Lord, not my feet only,
but my hands and my head.’
He could not wait to find out any more before he acted upon it. The
professor advised him, a little vaguely, to find out what social work
the church was doing in Cambridge, but the church did not help Jim very
much; its social efforts were dignified and ineffectual. Trying to find
life in it was like putting your ear to a shell and listening to the
far-off murmur of the sea. It is not the real voice of the sea which
carried the delusive sound, but only the reverberation from within the
drum of the ear.
There were good men to be found m the church, and very good women, but
there was no ardour to turn the world upside down, and without ardour
nothing turns upside down, not even a thimble.
Jim felt he couldn’t bear to go on behaving as if the origins of
Christianity and the upkeep of church services ought to take up all your
time, when the world was breaking itself to pieces for lack of the
practice of Christian principles. He found himself more in tune with a
set of young and violent sceptics, who cared passionately to change
life, but didn’t believe in Christianity.
They wanted to free the world, and would have died to do it. They did
run certain risks and gave up the minor conveniences of life.
Jim was secretly amused at the value they attached to giving up comforts
he had never had, but he admired their spirit. It was their choice of
weapons for carrying on their warfare which struck him as
unsatisfactory.
He thought their creed brittle and unthrifty. Jim knew life at first
hand, and he had been brought up surrounded by evil.
He did not believe that even justice could cure vice. Nothing ever
really sets human nature free but self-control. Easier conditions were
the simpler half of the problem, but even if that were solved, what you
were to do with the human heart still remained.
The men who thought they could legislate evil off the map didn’t really
know what evil was; they only knew the defects of incomplete goodness.
In the hour of disaster their childish improvements would slip into
nothingness, like sand swallowed up by the sea. They wouldn’t look at
Christianity because they thought it was old, and all the good sucked
out of it by tyrants; but Jim wanted them to look at it, because he
believed that nobody had sucked the good out of it, and that these
particular violent young men, full of free love and blasphemy, were the
stuff out of which Christians can be made. Jim had been dumb for two
years, but one evening he found himself addressing the debating society
in a queer flurry of opportunity and inspiration. Nobody knew who he was
before this occasion, but after his first speech he became a name in
Cambridge. Jim had a knowledge which was a new angle of vision to those
who had always seen life through books, and a burning conviction which
amazed spirits whose enthusiasms were light as thistledown.
At first Jim was conscious of perpetual pitfalls, clumsiness, and
inexperience, and an odd innocence of other people’s views forced him
into dire mistakes, but he developed a curious grip upon his audience
which kept them spellbound till he stopped speaking. He was never
fettered to his own ideas—he wanted to convince himself, and no one who
heard him ever went away with any sense of unfairness or glibness. When
Jim came up to a difficulty, he tackled it like a football, as an object
to batter through a goal after a hard struggle, taking his field with
him. He never gave any sense of a man who knew things on authority, or
who stood above the crowd. Jim’s professor took a mild interest in his
efforts, though he warned him that few scholars ever shone in debate.
‘They tell me you are on the side of violence,’ he observed one day.
‘That is a pity. Temper is always a confession of fear. Uncertainty of
faith is the explanation of all the persecutions.
‘It would be as well for you to remember that your opponent is never
dangerous, only facts are dangerous. If your facts are safe it is an act
of cowardice to lose your temper, and if your facts are not safe the
sooner you find out and change them the better.’
‘But if my opponent twists my facts?’ Jim objected.
‘Learn to put your facts,’ said the Professor, with a gleam in his mild
eyes, ‘so that they can’t be twisted. You must try to be as agile as if
you were unfair, but you must never be unfair.’
Into this safe world of intellectual research and experiment life broke
like a careless blunder and reset Jim’s mind.
It was on one of the last days of term when Jim’s landlady told him that
there was a lady to see him, a lady who wouldn’t give her name.
A wild hope caught at Jim’s heart. He thought he had put relentlessly
behind him the image of Mrs. Bligh, but there is no finality to visions,
and what he saw now was a vision of Mrs. Bligh, repentant, kindly, ready
once more to set his life to music. The very thought of her unloosed his
spirit as if he had been tied to a stake.
He ran into his dusty, book-filled, little room, with his heart on a
wave of ecstasy, but the figure which rose to meet him was not Mrs.
Bligh.
Eliza looked precisely as she had done when she left him last in
Trafalgar Square. She took the protective colour of her surroundings
upon her so that she never seemed out of place. But though her
appearance was unaltered, her behaviour was more cordial.
She turned her rather hard pink cheek for a fraternal kiss.
‘Well,’ she said with sisterly ease, ‘this does seem a piece of all
right, doesn’t it? I’ve just heard of your legacy and I was wondering
what you’d do with it. I’m glad you’ve taken my advice. There’s nothing
like education when you can afford it, and what I say is, you can always
have one kind or another if you put your mind to it. My word! What a
queer place Cambridge is, isn’t it? How much did old Mr. Atkinson leave
you?’
Eliza asked this question without reproachfulness, but there was a shade
in her manner which implied that she had more than a right to know.
After all, if she hadn’t so conveniently left the field to Jim, their
parts might have been reversed. He owed her something for her
considerate flight.
Jim hesitated a moment before he said, ‘Three hundred a year.’ He said
it a little dryly, for he saw it was all Eliza had come for. Then he
asked her why she had never made him a sign for all these years? Eliza
waived the question. She didn’t say that, when she’d seen him last, he
hadn’t been worth it. She only looked around her at the simplicity of
horsehair sofas and antimacassars which still surrounded Jim’s
undiscerning path. Her eyes wandered over the pale blue vases on the
mantelpiece, flanked by brown, undogmatic china animals before she said,
‘That’s all right for a single man, for a beginning. If you’ll use sense
you’ll soon be in the way of earning more. I do better than this without
an education.’
Jim hung his head. The memory of what Eliza did was always with him. He
dreamed about it by night, and by day it entered into him and crushed
him, so that he hesitated on the brink of his enthusiasms. Eliza’s
profession was the sharpest of his spiritual handicaps.
He was always asking himself if he hadn’t, by his own violence,
contributed to it.
If he hadn’t broken up their home would Eliza have ever gone beyond her
dreams of feather boas, into her admirable extractions?
He looked up from under his heavy brows and measured himself against
Eliza.
Her eyes, shining and impenetrable, were set flatly in her head; they
never changed their impersonal but friendly watchfulness. She knew that
he wanted to change her life, but as long as the struggle between them
was not physical, she knew, as she had known long ago in her swiftly
developing girlhood, that she had nothing to fear.
Jim had only brute strength, which he was too soft to use; he was, as
far as Eliza was concerned, negligible as a danger.
She smiled at the gravity of his challenging eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked lightly ‘Are you too grand for me now?’
He put off the struggle with a sense of shame in his cowardice.
‘I don’t suppose I’m grand enough,’ he said. ‘What would you like to do?
Take a look round Cambridge, now you’re here—go on the river——?’
‘The river’ll do nicely,’ said Eliza with decision. ‘I saw quite enough
of the place coming up from the station. Poky, that’s what these old
buildings are. I don’t say one couldn’t do something with all the
flighty boys running about loose—but it’s not in my line, of course.
Besides, I shouldn’t dream of interfering with you. I quite see we must
stand or fall together.’
Jim held the door open for her. ‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ he
observed a little grimly. ‘It’s what I’ve been thinking of myself, but
we’ll wait to talk over what we mean by it till we get to a more private
place.’
Eliza nodded in a friendly way. She tripped between the historic walks
with unseeing eyes. She, too, had a point to make. Occasionally she shot
a glance at the man beside her. He still wasn’t as smart as he might
have been. His clothes were badly cut, he walked like a man who has done
manual work. But he had improved greatly. He wasn’t so different from
the other bareheaded youths who passed them, not without glances of
admiration for Jim’s companion, which Eliza returned with her discreet,
furtive eyes narrowed a little, but full of wavering light.
Eliza was young, and she enjoyed her youth. She calculated what it
brought her in, with the least possible expenditure of power.
She was a woman, and that too was an asset. But she did nothing to
obtrude her sex upon her companion. She knew better than that with Jim.
She merely hoodwinked him with ease until they reached the river.
The willows, gold and thin, leaned low on the banks. They had nothing
behind them but the sky—deep into the water their reflections flung
back at them an answering life.
The flat, low lands which had crouched and clenched themselves away
under the breath of the long winter winds lay relaxed and green now,
with buttercups in a flood of golden bronze spread above them.
Far away across the plain the cliff of Ely rose with its cathedral like
a gray tethered cloud, launched into the sky. It was an autumn day with
no movement in it but the infrequent fall of leaves and the swift, short
flights of robins, shaking out their sweet and fitful songs.
Jim found a boat and pulled out silently on to the stream.
Eliza leaned back against the cushions with a curious movement of
relaxation.
‘Eliza,’ Jim said at last, ‘I’m glad you’ve come here. I’m glad you said
you wanted us to act together. It’s been on my mind like all these
years. I have an idea. I daresay it sounds nonsense to you, but I can’t
work it out without you. I want to stand for people like we
were—without a chance. You know how it was. Girls like you with no
education, and fathers like ours. Well, it was bound to tell on us—it
did me, in one way, and you another. But we can get out again. I won’t
say much about religion; it hasn’t come your way, perhaps, but it’s what
made me feel there was a way out. There’s people, too, who think they
haven’t got any religion, and have enough to try to help others. That’s
what I’m after. Education shows one how to do things, and how to make
other men do them. I’ll get all I can.
‘When I’m finished will you give up your way of life and help me?’
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a row-boat before,’ Eliza remarked
reflectively, ‘except once on the Serpentine of a summer evening. There
were some people about then. It’s a bit too quiet for my taste on this
river.’
‘You and I,’ Jim persisted, ‘ought to be pals. I haven’t had a pal—not
for a long time. Have you?’
Eliza answered this question. ‘I don’t know that I have,’ she said,
‘except as you might say, professionally, and these I trust just as far
as I can see them.’
‘Do you trust me?’ Jim asked urgently.
‘I don’t suppose I should be sitting here if I didn’t,’ said Eliza
cautiously. ‘I know you’ll not give me away.’
‘No, I suppose I shan’t do that,’ Jim agreed reluctantly. ‘But I don’t
like your way of life, Eliza, I don’t like it at all. You’re clever
enough to get on and yet play square—why don’t you do it?’
‘That’s where you’re mistaken,’ said Eliza equably. ‘I hadn’t any
capital except my wits. Work wouldn’t have kept me in gloves. It
doesn’t. What about you—and you’re a man? You were working when I saw
you last, weren’t you? Well, your hands weren’t even clean.’
Jim flinched before Eliza’s recollection. He didn’t want to make a
personal protest—personal protests weaken argument, but he wished to
explain to her why his hands hadn’t been clean.
‘Still,’ he said at last, ‘I’d rather work on anyhow and keep straight.
It pays in the long run.’
Eliza shook her head. ‘There’s straight people in the work-house now,’
she observed. ‘I don’t say there aren’t crooked ones too, but anyhow
they’ve had their good times.’
‘I don’t believe you have such a good time,’ said Jim firmly. ‘You look
like a chased cat. Anyhow, don’t you believe in right and wrong, Eliza?’
‘I don’t know what you mean by believe in it,’ said Eliza defensively.
‘I know I’ll go to prison if I’m caught out, if that’s what you mean.
‘It’s quite true it’s an exhausting life; now and again I do get tired,
but you’d have to make it worth my while to drop it.’
Jim was silent; something in his flesh and blood was as wounded by Eliza
as if he had been personally attacked. Virtue had gone out of him, but
it was not transferred. Eliza had started some spiritual leak in his
soul, which left him weakened and bereft of words.
‘What would be worth your while?’ he said at last without looking up at
her.
‘Five hundred a year,’ said Eliza promptly, ‘with what I’ve managed to
save, would be worth my while, not less.’
‘I haven’t got it,’ said Jim desperately, ‘and if I had I wouldn’t give
it to you. What’s the use of bribing you to keep straight?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know if you don’t,’ said Eliza serenely.
‘I’d like to get out of being ashamed, that’s all,’ Jim muttered, ‘and I
don’t want to see you nabbed, and one of these days you will be
nabbed—you know that as well as I do. But it isn’t prison that matters
most; it’s the thing, the dirty thing, that puts you there.’
Jim spat into the river.
He could not express his loathing of dishonesty; it rose up and
overwhelmed him, like the knowledge of some horrible physical disease.
‘I don’t say I don’t like being honest myself,’ said Eliza calmly, after
a short pause. ‘All I say is, I can’t afford it. You can’t either, it
seems. Well, then, it’s no use making a fuss about what you can’t help,
is it? I’ve had a nice quiet afternoon anyway, and now I’d like my tea.
Do you think it would go too much against your principles to lend me a
tenner? I’ve got to get to Glasgow to-morrow, and my pal’s left me
uncommonly short.’
‘I thought you said,’ Jim grumbled, ‘that you’d got capital put away?’
‘So I have,’ said Eliza, ‘but not in the way you mean. It’s stones, and
they have to go on to the market carefully. Just now wouldn’t suit me to
sell at all.’
Jim continued to grumble, but before they had got back he produced the
ten-pound note. Eliza fingered it thoughtfully. It had just been worth
her while to come down to Cambridge.
Jim gave her a very handsome tea in a tea-shop full of innocent,
admiring young men.
Jim’s mouth had a good-natured twist, and his eyes met Eliza’s in a
friendly twinkle when he heard one of these deluded boys referring to
her in an undertone as an angel. Eliza looked reflective; she came to
the conclusion that she had better, some day, come back to Cambridge by
herself.
Jim saw her to the station, and on to the train with a curious sinking
at his heart.
He had asked for real life, and now even before his work upon books was
over, real life had broken through and granted his request. It was a
hard and heavy substance, and Jim was conscious that he hadn’t done very
much with it. In some curious but perfectly final way it was he himself
who yielded to this experience. He found, as he walked back to his
lodgings, that he had decided not to stay up and try for a fellowship.
He had singularly failed in his effort to convert Eliza, but he could
not accept a life which had nothing to do with Eliza’s.