Austin Merrick had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an
unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a
younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even
anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was
helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He
had loitered through college, fitting himself for no career, talking
vaguely of a literary life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was
still pursuing it, very placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the
contrary, by the fact that his pursuit implied that other people's
apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merrick's
attitude had always been what it now was--a calm down-smiling from a
hill-top upon other people's dulness.
After travelling for some years, during which he published in the lesser
reviews a few little articles of incoherent scepticism--the one book, as
sceptical and even more incoherent, was of later date--Austin married a
pretty American girl, who had a very small fortune.
Felicia Grey came from a little New England town, and after the death of
a sternly practical father, a passionately transcendental mother, she
seized upon an aunt, colourless and submissive, and came to Europe to
see life.
She was highly educated and vastly ignorant. She intended to see life
steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness she certainly attained;
she was fearless, eager, full of faith.
Austin Merrick met her at a Paris _pension_ and his essentially
irresolute soul was stirred by Miss Grey's resolute eyes, eyes large and
clear, like a boy's. He stayed on at the _pension_ and made Miss Grey's
acquaintance, an easy matter, for she had little conception of risks or
of formalities, and regarded all individuals as offering deeply
interesting experiences. The aunt sat reading _Flaubert_, with a
dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty dimly alarming, and
refreshing it by reversions to Emerson, while her niece went
sight-seeing with the young Englishman whom the elder Miss Grey
described in home letters as "very cultivated and high-minded," adding
that she imagined him to belong to an "aristocratic family."
Felicia Grey's crudeness, crisp and sparkling, Austin did not recognize;
he thought wonderful in her what was only derivation, the absolute
impartiality and courage of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent
to conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world's weights
and measures. Austin, conscious in his inmost soul of being anything but
indifferent and uninfluenced, leaned upon the support of her ignorant
valour. She was as serene and strong as he pretended to be.
With her serenity and her indifference, she was immensely enthusiastic
about the things she cared for. Humanity, Freedom, Progress,--these
words with capital letters--that he already felt it to be the fashion to
scoff at a little if one wanted to keep abreast of the latest
scorn--were burning realities to Miss Grey, and as he was already in
love with her, he did not dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had
not much sense of humour, and did not understand subtle scorns. He was
in love, glorying in the abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely
unaware that had Miss Grey not been modestly equipped with dollars he
would not so have abandoned himself. It was, indeed, a very modest
equipment, but with his own tiny allowance, that didn't do at all--he
was always in debt--would lift him above the material restrictions that
had so long irked him. His indifference might really, then, equal hers.
He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the
reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking
contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom,
and of making her own living by teaching. "It seems to me that one would
face life more directly--more truly--like that," remarked Miss Grey.
He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days
argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its
responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she
was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of
life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr.
Merrick very "cultivated and high-minded"; she equipped him further with
a "great soul," and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him,
too, very beautiful in his wise persuasiveness.
He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be
lived with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life
should be lived with him.
So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her
husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to
Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather
pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin passed
fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years.
She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great
meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like
routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull
country-side, but her husband's character. She never doubted the great
soul, but she never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted;
he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not
know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she
was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of
his character was an agile vanity that sprang to defend him from any
attack that might mean self-revelation. He was always clever enough to
see her worth, but not clever enough to see that her intelligence grew
blurred and groping when it turned its light upon the objects of her
affection.
Her husband's idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it,
or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its
pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than
the lives of any of the neighbouring squires--if as much. What did she
and Austin _do_ in the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like
question.
She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick's mind was a
lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be
surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive
criticism, he found the attitude of superiority more attainable by
opposition. He did most of his thinking in youth, when the current of
scientific agnosticism caught him; he had gone with it, not helping it
in any way, merely borne along, and he had gone no farther than it had
gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of its once flowing tide, unable
to follow it into deepened channels. His mental development had stopped
at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of natural law and the
ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr. Merrick had
not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The
largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a
lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant
optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his
own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for
him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty
ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a
looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of
a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did
not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But
with all his complacencies, indolences, and attitudes, Austin Merrick
was intelligent, dependent and affectionate, soured only by
indifference, angered only by ridicule, and his wife in her relation to
him knew nothing worse than that abiding sense of perplexity. She saw
with difficulty the ironic side of life; the deepest draught of
bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that life was tragic. Her
small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque as well as
tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her with a
radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young
girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick
braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head,
looked hardly more than twenty when she died.
Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness,
with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had
never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender,
very loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the
uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due
to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia
remembered the naïvely sententious aphorisms with which she armed her.
"In this life to fail is to triumph," was one, and the pathos to Felicia
was in seeing that the aphorism was an unrealized truth in her mother's
own life. She had indeed "carried her soul like a white bird," through
the painful deserts of disillusion, a disillusion that only her daughter
apprehended.
She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also
ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did
not trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she
thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more
foolish than he should criticize him. She never mistook jackasses for
lions, and her only title to commendation in her own eyes was that she,
at all events, did not bray.