If anyone had told Mr Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous
path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first
notable interest of his life in the calling and the country to which
even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any
woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far
enough back in accounting for this one would arrive at the female sort,
sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented
the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who
had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from
babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend--the mature
respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire
village whence he came. With such as these relations, actual or
imagined, could only be of the most practical kind, matters to be
arranged on grounds of expediency, and certainly not of the first
importance. The things of first importance--what you could do with your
energy and your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the
world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it of value to
yourself--left little room for the feminine consideration in Finlay’s
eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any
significance. Woman in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter
of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps
a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an
initiation to perceive her--a process to which Finlay would have been
as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute
of ideals about women--they would have formed in that case a strange
exception to his general outlook--but he saw them on a plane detached
and impersonal, concerned with the preservation of society the
maintenance of the home, the noble devotions of motherhood. Women had
been known, historically, to be capable of lofty sentiments and fine
actions: he would have been the last to withhold their due from women.
But they were removed from the scope of his imagination, partly by the
accidents I have mentioned and partly, no doubt, by a simple lack in him
of the inclination to seek and to know them.
So that Christie Cameron, when she came to stay with his aunt in Bross
during the few weeks after his ordination and before his departure for
Canada, found a fair light for judgement and more than a reasonable
disposition to acquiesce in the scale of her merits, as a woman, on the
part of Hugh Finlay. He was familiar with the scale of her merits before
she came; his Aunt Lizzie did little but run them up and down. When she
arrived she answered to every item she was a good height, but not too
tall; a nice figure of a woman, but not what you would call stout;
a fresh-faced body whose excellent principles were written in every
feature she had. She was five years older than Hugh, but even that he
came to accept in Aunt Lizzie’s skilful exhibition as something to the
total of her advantages. A pleasant independent creature with a hundred
a year of her own, sensible and vigorous and good-tempered, belonging as
well to the pre-eminently right denomination. She had virtues that might
have figured handsomely in an advertisement had Aunt Lizzie, in
the plenitude of her good will, thought fit to take that measure on
Christie’s behalf. But nothing was farther from Aunt Lizzie’s mind.
We must, in fairness, add Christie Cameron to the sum of Finlay’s
acquaintance with the sex; but even then the total is slender, little to
go upon.
Yet the fact which Mr Finlay would in those days have considered so
unimaginable remained; it had come into being and it remained. The chief
interest of his life, the chief human interest, did lie in his relations
with Advena Murchison. He might challenge it, but he could not move it;
he might explain, but he could not alter it. And there had come no point
at which it would have occurred to him to do either. When at last he
had seen how simple and possible it was to enjoy Miss Murchison’s
companionship upon unoccupied evenings he had begun to do it with
eagerness and zest, the greater because Elgin offered him practically no
other. Dr Drummond lived, for purposes of intellectual contact, at the
other end of the century, the other clergy and professional men of the
town were separated from Finlay by all the mental predispositions that
rose from the virgin soil. He was, as Mrs Murchison said, a great gawk
of a fellow; he had little adaptability; he was not of those who spend
a year or two in the New World and go back with a trans-Atlantic
accent, either of tongue or of mind. Where he saw a lack of dignity,
of consideration, or of restraint, he did not insensibly become less
dignified or considerate or restrained to smooth out perceptible
differences; nor was he constituted to absorb the qualities of those
defects, and enrich his nature by the geniality, the shrewdness, the
quick mental movement that stood on the other side of the account. He
cherished in secret an admiration for the young men of Elgin, with their
unappeasable energy and their indomitable optimism, but he could not
translate it in any language of sympathy and but for Advena his soul
would have gone uncomforted and alone.
Advena, as we know, was his companion. Seeing herself just that,
constantly content to be just that, she walked beside him closer than he
knew. She had her woman’s prescience and trusted it. Her own heart, all
sweetly alive, counselled her to patience; her instincts laid her in
bonds to concealment. She knew, she was sure; so sure that she could
play sometimes, smiling, with her living heart--
The nightingale was not yet heard
For the rose was not yet blown,
she could say of his; and what was that but play, and tender laughter,
at the expense of her own? And then, perhaps, looking up from the same
book, she would whisper, alone in her room--
Oh, speed the day, thou dear, dear May,
and gaze humbly through tears at her own face in the glass loving it on
his behalf. She took her passion with the weight of a thing ordained;
she had come upon it where it waited for her, and they had gone on
together, carrying the secret. There might be farther to go, but the way
could never be long.
Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary;
and Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was
accomplished quickly, even summer.
“Except perhaps civilization.” she added. They were both young enough to
be pleased with cleverness for its specious self.
“Oh, that is slow everywhere,” he observed; “but how you can say so,
with every modern improvement staring you in the face--”
“Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t the products,”
and she laughed. “But the thing itself, the precious thing; that never
comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art of
choice--”
“If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?” he
demanded. “Anaemia.”
“Oh, I don’t quarrel with the logic of it. I only point out the fact.
To do that is to acquiesce, really. I acquiesce; I have to. But one may
long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life
has gone on longer.”
“I imagine,” Finlay said, “that to wish truly and ardently for such
things is to possess them. If you didn’t possess them you wouldn’t
desire them! As they say, as they say--”
“As they say?”
“About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is
to be fatally infected.”
“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.
“Some novelist. I--I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat
confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon
the verandah. “I don’t write novels,” he said.
“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena. “I mean, of course,” she
added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”
“Heaven forbid!”
“Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it
comes into your scope. You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it;
you can’t feel it without living it. I don’t write novels either, but I
experience--whole publishers’ lists.”
“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date. You
see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern
moral sophistications--?”
“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied. “I often do.”
“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stories of pain”--he
looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms
were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her
adoration--“and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the
human heart. At least one likes to hope so.”
“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”
Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they
had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient
always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison
he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost irritably. “I only meant that I
see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle.
There’s reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more
delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think
that you don’t half realize, in a country like this, how much there is
to make up.”
“Is there anything really to make up?” she asked.
“Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the
absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as
education! Here you can’t even conceive it--the schools have been on
logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over
there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion;
here it doesn’t even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the
united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct
of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With
anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. ‘By all mean let the
ministers serve education on the School Boards,’ they would say, ‘by
election like other people’--an opportunity, by the way, which has just
been offered to me. I’m nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett,
the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too;
there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls’
playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring.”
“You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes there is
something in a fresh start: we’re on the straight road as a nation,
in most respects; we haven’t any picturesque old prescribed lanes to
travel. So you think that makes up?”
“It’s one thing. You might put down space--elbow-room.”
“An empty horizon,” Advena murmured.
“For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England
has filled hers up. She has now--these,” and he nodded at a window open
to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.
“Oh, if you have a creative imagination,” she said “like Wallingham’s.
But even then your vision must be only political economic, material. You
can’t conceive the--flowers--that will come out of all that. And if you
could it wouldn’t be like having them.”
“And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered
by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in
England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid,
buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the
plenty of things!”
“I am to be consoled because apples are cheap.”
“You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn’t it console you
to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense
amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?”
“No,” said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle
didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look
at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said--
“And those things aren’t all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the
human spirit, as it is set free in these wide unblemished spaces, may be
something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is
good and beautiful--”
He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no
more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful
blush.
“I am glad you are so well satisfied,” she said, and then, as if her
words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.
Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.