She reached home in the evening. She thought to find her father in his
study. But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great
drawing-room. She opened the door softly. The room was dark save for a
flicker of firelight; she could see nothing. Nor was there any sound.
"Dad," she cried, "are you here?"
He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.
"It is you," he said. He seemed a little dazed.
She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.
"Give me a hug, Dad," she commanded. "A real hug."
He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in
his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.
"I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it," she laughed, when at last
he released her. "Do you know, you haven't hugged me, Dad, since I was
five years old. That's nineteen years ago. You do love me, don't you?"
"Yes," he answered. "I have always loved you."
She would not let him light the gas. "I have dined--in the train," she
explained. "Let us talk by the firelight."
She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the
floor between his knees. "What were you thinking of when I came in?" she
asked. "You weren't asleep, were you?"
"No," he answered. "Not that sort of sleep." She could not see his
face. But she guessed his meaning.
"Am I very like her?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered. "Marvellously like her as she used to be: except for
just one thing. Perhaps that will come to you later. I thought, for the
moment, as you stood there by the door . . . " He did not finish the
sentence.
"Tell me about her," she said. "I never knew she had been an actress."
He did not ask her how she had learnt it. "She gave it up when we were
married," he said. "The people she would have to live among would have
looked askance at her if they had known. There seemed no reason why they
should."
"How did it all happen?" she persisted. "Was it very beautiful, in the
beginning?" She wished she had not added that last. The words had
slipped from her before she knew.
"Very beautiful," he answered, "in the beginning."
"It was my fault," he went on, "that it was not beautiful all through. I
ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she
found what giving it up meant to her. The world was narrower then than
it is now; and I listened to the world. I thought it another voice."
"It's difficult to tell, isn't it?" she said. "I wonder how one can?"
He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.
"Did you ever see her act?" asked Joan.
"Every evening for about six months," he answered. A little flame shot
up and showed a smile upon his face.
"I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me
in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on
teaching. It was the only way she knew."
Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the
poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of
jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music
turned to waste.
"How did she come to fall in love with you?" asked Joan. "I don't mean
to be uncomplimentary, Dad." She laughed, taking his hand in hers and
stroking it. "You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were
young. And you must always have been strong and brave and clever. I can
see such a lot of women falling in love with you. But not the artistic
woman."
"It wasn't so incongruous at the time," he answered. "My father had sent
me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had
ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up
youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with
the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the
man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was
touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and
followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought
a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn't run
there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them,
held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going
back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet. I didn't
give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death
anyhow, that. And I'd have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting
for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I'd died she'd have gone
back with them, and killed him."
Joan did not speak for a time. She could see him grave--a little
pompous, in his Sunday black, his footsteps creaking down the
stone-flagged aisle, the silver-edged collecting bag held stiffly in his
hand.
"Couldn't you have saved a bit, Daddy?" she asked, "of all that wealth of
youth--just enough to live on?"
"I might," he answered, "if I had known the value of it. I found a cable
waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had
to return immediately."
"And so you married her and took her drum away from her," said Joan. "Oh,
the thing God gives to some of us," she explained, "to make a little
noise with, and set the people marching."
The little flame died out. She could feel his body trembling.
"But you still loved her, didn't you, Dad?" she asked. "I was very
little at the time, but I can just remember. You seemed so happy
together. Till her illness came."
"It was more than love," he answered. "It was idolatry. God punished me
for it. He was a hard God, my God."
She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face
was very close to his. "What has become of Him, Dad?" she said. She
spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend.
"I do not know," he answered her. "I don't seem to care."
"He must be somewhere," she said: "the living God of love and hope: the
God that Christ believed in."
"They were His last words, too," he answered: "'My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken me?'"
"No, not His last," said Joan: "'Lo, I am with you always, even unto the
end of the world.' Love was Christ's God. He will help us to find Him."
Their arms were about one another. Joan felt that a new need had been
born in her: the need of loving and of being loved. It was good to lay
her head upon his breast and know that he was glad of her coming.
He asked her questions about herself. But she could see that he was
tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so
late. She would talk about herself to-morrow. It would be Sunday.
"Do you still go to the chapel?" she asked him a little hesitatingly.
"Yes," he answered. "One lives by habit."
"It is the only Temple I know," he continued after a moment. "Perhaps
God, one day, will find me there."
He rose and lit the gas, and a letter on the mantelpiece caught his eye.
"Have you heard from Arthur?" he asked, suddenly turning to her.
"No. Not since about a month," she answered. "Why?"
"He will be pleased to find you here, waiting for him," he said with a
smile, handing her the letter. "He will be here some time to-morrow."
Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her
father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had
been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love
with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly
somewhat committal. Joan replied to them--when she did not forget to do
so--in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for
unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter
announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where
his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday
evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning.
Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.
"It only came an hour or two ago," her father explained. "If he wrote to
you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived."
"So long as he doesn't think that I came down specially to see him, I
don't mind," said Joan.
They both laughed. "He's a good lad," said her father.
They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room. She found it
just as she had left it. A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table.
Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself.
Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper.
A place had been laid for him. He flushed with pleasure at seeing her;
but was not surprised.
"I called at your diggings," he said. "I had to go through London. They
told me you had started. It is good of you."
"No, it isn't," said Joan. "I came down to see Dad. I didn't know you
were back." She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell.
"How are you?" she added, holding out her hand. "You've grown quite good-
looking. I like your moustache." And he flushed again with pleasure.
He had a sweet, almost girlish face, with delicate skin that the Egyptian
sun had deepened into ruddiness; with soft, dreamy eyes and golden hair.
He looked lithe and agile rather than strong. He was shy at first, but
once set going, talked freely, and was interesting.
His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks. He
described the life of the people, very little different from what it must
have been in Noah's time. For months he had been the only white man
there, and had lived among them. What had struck him was how little he
had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over
the first shock. He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum
and hunted with them. Provided one was a little hungry and tired with
toil, a stew of goat's flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down
with wine out of a sheep's skin, made a feast; and after, there was music
and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather
round him his rapt audience. Paris had only robbed women of their grace
and dignity. He preferred the young girls in their costume of the
fourteenth dynasty. Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate
life and render it less enjoyable. All the essentials of happiness--love,
courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse,
and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking.
Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man's happiness as more
important to him than his self-development. It was not what we got out
of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain. Its luxuries
and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us. But the
pursuit of them was good. It called forth thought and effort, sharpened
our wits, strengthened our brains. Primitive man, content with his
necessities, would never have produced genius. Art, literature, science
would have been stillborn.
He hesitated before replying, glancing at her furtively while crumbling
his bread. When he did, it was in the tone that one of her younger
disciples might have ventured into a discussion with Hypatia. But he
stuck to his guns.
How did she account for David and Solomon, Moses and the Prophets? They
had sprung from a shepherd race. Yet surely there was genius,
literature. Greece owed nothing to progress. She had preceded it. Her
thinkers, her poets, her scientists had draws their inspiration from
nature, not civilization. Her art had sprung full grown out of the soil.
We had never surpassed it.
"But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would
not so utterly have disappeared," suggested Mr. Allway. "Unless you
reject the law of the survival of the fittest."
He had no qualms about arguing with his uncle.
"So did Archimedes disappear," he answered with a smile. "The nameless
Roman soldier remained. That was hardly the survival of the fittest."
He thought it the tragedy of the world that Rome had conquered Greece,
imposing her lower ideals upon the race. Rome should have been the
servant of Greece: the hands directed by the brain. She would have made
roads and harbours, conducted the traffic, reared the market place. She
knew of the steam engine, employed it for pumping water in the age of the
Antonines. Sooner or later, she would have placed it on rails, and in
ships. Rome should have been the policeman, keeping the world in order,
making it a fit habitation. Her mistake was in regarding these things as
an end in themselves, dreaming of nothing beyond. From her we had
inherited the fallacy that man was made for the world, not the world for
man. Rome organized only for man's body. Greece would have legislated
for his soul.
They went into the drawing-room. Her father asked her to sing and Arthur
opened the piano for her and lit the candles. She chose some ballads and
a song of Herrick's, playing her own accompaniment while Arthur turned
the leaves. She had a good voice, a low contralto. The room was high
and dimly lighted. It looked larger than it really was. Her father sat
in his usual chair beside the fire and listened with half-closed eyes.
Glancing now and then across at him, she was reminded of Orchardson's
picture. She was feeling sentimental, a novel sensation to her. She
rather enjoyed it.
She finished with one of Burns's lyrics; and then told Arthur that it was
now his turn, and that she would play for him. He shook his head,
pleading that he was out of practice.
"I wish it," she said, speaking low. And it pleased her that he made no
answer but to ask her what he should sing. He had a light tenor voice.
It was wobbly at first, but improved as he went on. They ended with a
duet.
The next morning she went into town with them. She never seemed to have
any time in London, and wanted to do some shopping. They joined her
again for lunch and afterwards, at her father's suggestion, she and
Arthur went for a walk. They took the tram out of the city and struck
into the country. The leaves still lingered brown and red upon the
trees. He carried her cloak and opened gates for her and held back
brambles while she passed. She had always been indifferent to these
small gallantries; but to-day she welcomed them. She wished to feel her
power to attract and command. They avoided all subjects on which they
could differ, even in words. They talked of people and places they had
known together. They remembered their common love of animals and told of
the comedies and tragedies that had befallen their pets. Joan's regret
was that she had not now even a dog, thinking it cruel to keep them in
London. She hated the women she met, dragging the poor little depressed
beasts about at the end of a string: savage with them, if they dared to
stop for a moment to exchange a passing wag of the tail with some other
little lonely sufferer. It was as bad as keeping a lark in a cage. She
had tried a cat: but so often she did not get home till late and that was
just the time when the cat wanted to be out; so that they seldom met. He
suggested a parrot. His experience of them was that they had no regular
hours and would willingly sit up all night, if encouraged, and talk all
the time. Joan's objection to running a parrot was that it stamped you
as an old maid; and she wasn't that, at least, not yet. She wondered if
she could make an owl really happy. Minerva had an owl.
He told her how one spring, walking across a common, after a fire, he had
found a mother thrush burnt to death upon her nest, her charred wings
spread out in a vain endeavour to protect her brood. He had buried her
there among the blackened thorn and furze, and placed a little cross of
stones above her.
"I hope nobody saw me," he said with a laugh. "But I couldn't bear to
leave her there, unhonoured."
"It's one of the things that make me less certain than I want to be of a
future existence," said Joan: "the thought that animals can have no part
in it; that all their courage and love and faithfulness dies with them
and is wasted."
"Are you sure it is?" he answered. "It would be so unreasonable."
They had tea at an old-fashioned inn beside a stream. It was a favourite
resort in summer time, but now they had it to themselves. The wind had
played pranks with her hair and he found a mirror and knelt before her,
holding it.
She stood erect, looking down at him while seeming to be absorbed in the
rearrangement of her hair, feeling a little ashamed of herself. She was
"encouraging" him. There was no other word for it. She seemed to have
developed a sudden penchant for this sort of thing. It would end in his
proposing to her; and then she would have to tell him that she cared for
him only in a cousinly sort of way--whatever that might mean--and that
she could never marry him. She dared not ask herself why. She must
manoeuvre to put it off as long as possible; and meanwhile some opening
might occur to enlighten him. She would talk to him about her work; and
explain to him how she had determined to devote her life to it to the
exclusion of all other distractions. If, then, he chose to go on loving
her--or if he couldn't help it--that would not be her fault. After all,
it did him no harm. She could always be gracious and kind to him. It
was not as if she had tricked him. He had always loved her. Kneeling
before her, serving her: it was evident it made him supremely happy. It
would be cruel of her to end it.
The landlady entered unexpectedly with the tea; but he did not rise till
Joan turned away, nor did he seem disconcerted. Neither did the
landlady. She was an elderly, quiet-eyed woman, and had served more than
one generation of young people with their teas.
They returned home by train. Joan insisted on travelling third class,
and selected a compartment containing a stout woman and two children.
Arthur had to be at the works. An important contract had got behindhand
and they were working overtime. She and her father dined alone. He made
her fulfil her promise to talk about herself, and she told him all she
thought would interest him. She passed lightly over her acquaintanceship
with Phillips. He would regard it as highly undesirable, she told
herself, and it would trouble him. He was reading her articles in the
_Sunday Post_, as also her Letters from Clorinda: and of the two
preferred the latter as being less subversive of law and order. Also he
did not like seeing her photograph each week, displayed across two
columns with her name beneath in one inch type. He supposed he was old-
fashioned. She was getting rather tired of it herself.
"The Editor insisted upon it," she explained. "It was worth it for the
opportunity it gives me. I preach every Sunday to a congregation of over
a million souls. It's better than being a Bishop. Besides," she added,
"the men are just as bad. You see their silly faces everywhere."
"That's like you women," he answered with a smile. "You pretend to be
superior; and then you copy us."
She laughed. But the next moment she was serious.
"No, we don't," she said, "not those of us who think. We know we shall
never oust man from his place. He will always be the greater. We want
to help him; that's all."
"But wasn't that the Lord's idea," he said; "when He gave Eve to Adam to
be his helpmeet?"
"Yes, that was all right," she answered. "He fashioned Eve for Adam and
saw that Adam got her. The ideal marriage might have been the ideal
solution. If the Lord had intended that, he should have kept the match-
making in His own hands: not have left it to man. Somewhere in Athens
there must have been the helpmeet God had made for Socrates. When they
met, it was Xanthippe that she kissed."
A servant brought the coffee and went out again. Her father lighted a
cigar and handed her the cigarettes.
"Will it shock you, Dad?" she asked.
"Rather late in the day for you to worry yourself about that, isn't it?"
he answered with a smile.
He struck a match and held it for her. Joan sat with her elbows on the
table and smoked in silence. She was thinking.
Why had he never "brought her up," never exacted obedience from her,
never even tried to influence her? It could not have been mere weakness.
She stole a sidelong glance at the tired, lined face with its steel-blue
eyes. She had never seen them other than calm, but they must have been
able to flash. Why had he always been so just and kind and patient with
her? Why had he never scolded her and bullied her and teased her? Why
had he let her go away, leaving him lonely in his empty, voiceless house?
Why had he never made any claim upon her? The idea came to her as an
inspiration. At least, it would ease her conscience. "Why don't you let
Arthur live here," she said, "instead of going back to his lodgings? It
would be company for you."
He did not answer for some time. She had begun to wonder if he had
heard.
"What do you think of him?" he said, without looking at her.
"Oh, he's quite a nice lad," she answered.
It was some while again before he spoke. "He will be the last of the
Allways," he said. "I should like to think of the name being continued;
and he's a good business man, in spite of his dreaminess. Perhaps he
would get on better with the men."
She seized at the chance of changing the subject.
"It was a foolish notion," she said, "that of the Manchester school: that
men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum."
To her surprise, he agreed with her. "The feudal system had a fine idea
in it," he said, "if it had been honestly carried out. A master should
be the friend, the helper of his men. They should be one family."
She looked at him a little incredulously, remembering the bitter periods
of strikes and lock-outs.
"Did you ever try, Dad?" she asked.
"Oh, yes," he answered. "But I tried the wrong way." "The right way
might be found," he added, "by the right man, and woman."
She felt that he was watching her through his half-closed eyes. "There
are those cottages," he continued, "just before you come to the bridge.
They might be repaired and a club house added. The idea is catching on,
they tell me. Garden villages, they call them now. It gets the men and
women away from the dirty streets; and gives the children a chance."
She knew the place. A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming
three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered
trees in the centre. Ever since she could remember, they had stood there
empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens
overgrown with weeds.
"Are they yours?" she asked. She had never connected them with the
works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might
have learnt that they were known as "Allway's Folly."
"Your mother's," he answered. "I built them the year I came back from
America and gave them to her. I thought it would interest her. Perhaps
it would, if I had left her to her own ways."
"Why didn't they want them?" she asked.
"They did, at first," he answered. "The time-servers and the hypocrites
among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and
chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I
thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents
and share of profits. And then the Union came, and that of course
finished it."
So he, too, had thought to build Jerusalem.
"Yes," he said. "I'll sound him about giving up his lodgings."
Joan lay awake for a long while that night. The moon looked in at the
window. It seemed to have got itself entangled in the tops of the tall
pines. Would it not be her duty to come back--make her father happy, to
say nothing of the other. He was a dear, sweet, lovable lad. Together,
they might realize her father's dream: repair the blunders, plant gardens
where the weeds now grew, drive out the old sad ghosts with living
voices. It had been a fine thought, a "King's thought." Others had
followed, profiting by his mistakes. But might it not be carried further
than even they had gone, shaped into some noble venture that should serve
the future.
Was not her America here? Why seek it further? What was this unknown
Force, that, against all sense and reason, seemed driving her out into
the wilderness to preach. Might it not be mere vanity, mere egoism.
Almost she had convinced herself.
And then there flashed remembrance of her mother. She, too, had laid
aside herself; had thought that love and duty could teach one to be other
than one was. The Ego was the all important thing, entrusted to us as
the talents of silver to the faithful servant: to be developed, not for
our own purposes, but for the service of the Master.
One did no good by suppressing one's nature. In the end it proved too
strong. Marriage with Arthur would be only repeating the mistake. To be
worshipped, to be served. It would be very pleasant, when one was in the
mood. But it would not satisfy her. There was something strong and
fierce and primitive in her nature--something that had come down to her
through the generations from some harness-girded ancestress--something
impelling her instinctively to choose the fighter; to share with him the
joy of battle, healing his wounds, giving him of her courage, exulting
with him in the victory.
The moon had risen clear of the entangling pines. It rode serene and
free.
Her father came to the station with her in the morning. The train was
not in: and they walked up and down and talked. Suddenly she remembered:
it had slipped her mind.
"Could I, as a child, have known an old clergyman?" she asked him. "At
least he wouldn't have been old then. I dropped into Chelsea Church one
evening and heard him preach; and on the way home I passed him again in
the street. It seemed to me that I had seen his face before. But not
for many years. I meant to write you about it, but forgot."
He had to turn aside for a moment to speak to an acquaintance about
business.
"Oh, it's possible," he answered on rejoining her. "What was his name?"
"I do not know," she answered. "He was not the regular Incumbent. But
it was someone that I seemed to know quite well--that I must have been
familiar with."
"It may have been," he answered carelessly, "though the gulf was wider
then than it is now. I'll try and think. Perhaps it is only your
fancy."
The train drew in, and he found her a corner seat, and stood talking by
the window, about common things.
"What did he preach about?" he asked her unexpectedly.
She was puzzled for the moment. "Oh, the old clergyman," she answered,
recollecting. "Oh, Calvary. All roads lead to Calvary, he thought. It
was rather interesting."
She looked back at the end of the platform. He had not moved.