One evening, about a fortnight after the attack of congestion in Bolton
Street, Canon and Mrs. Collingwood were sitting in their dining-room
lingering over their dessert. The butler had filled their claret-glasses
to the brim with water, and had left the room. It was a warm night in
mid-July, and the French window opening on to the garden was flung wide,
admitting breaths of soft and flower-scented air. The dusk was not yet
passed the bounding line between day and night, and the eye was led over
a cool, spacious square of grass, framed in flower-beds in which colour
still lingered, to a red brick wall at the end of the garden over which
rose the gray pinnacle of the Cathedral. It was still near enough to
midsummer to dine without candles if your dinner-hour was 7.45, and the
absence of them and decanters gave to the table a certain virginal and
ascetic air. Both the Canon and his wife were teetotalers, she of the
kind which we may call intemperate--that is to say, she regarded alcohol
not only as poison, but as an essentially immoral thing. Mrs.
Collingwood was a woman of strong will, and ruled her husband; and
though his own inclination would have been to set wine before his guests
when they were entertaining, her detestation of fermented liquids
overruled hospitality, and, unless one particular person was dining with
them, you would no more see a decanter on the table than you would see a
roulette board. But the exception was made in favour of their Bishop,
who was under doctor’s orders to drink the abominable thing, and on
these occasions a half bottle of Burgundy blushed before Mrs.
Collingwood’s eyes. How exactly it is possible to conceive of a natural
and lifeless product as being in itself wicked is a problem at which the
ordinary mind stumbles. But Mrs. Collingwood had solved it, and we
should show a more becoming modesty if we lamented our mediocrity of
grasp and silently envied Mrs. Collingwood’s extraordinary powers of
conception, than if we called her point of view unreasonable. It is
possible also that if a guest had produced a doctor’s certificate that
he must drink wine, he would have been accorded some of the Bishop’s
Burgundy, but his wine would be understood to be of the nature of
medicine, which custom has ordained that we shall not indulge in at the
dinner-table.
Now it was not the habit of Canon Collingwood or his wife to linger over
the pleasures of the table, but they were discussing a subject which had
probably been discussed at thirty or forty other tables that evening,
namely, the advent of Jeannie and Arthur to Wroxton.
“I don’t feel certain that she will be helpful,” said Mrs. Collingwood;
“to me she seemed not in earnest. There was no depth about her.”
And she put a hard piece of gingerbread into her rather wide mouth.
Canon Collingwood stroked his beard for a moment in silence.
“She is young,” he said, doubtfully.
“One can never be too young to be in earnest,” said his wife. “And I did
not like the look of the drawing-room. There were several books on the
table which I should never allow in my house, and there was an organ in
the hall.”
Canon Collingwood had been married many years, but even now his wife
occasionally puzzled him.
“Why not, my dear?” he said.
“Because an organ should only be used for sacred music,” said Mrs.
Collingwood, “and I have no doubt that they use it for other pieces.
Indeed, I saw some opera of Wagner’s standing open on it.”
“Did you call there to-day?” he asked.
“Yes, I paid a long call there. I tried to interest Miss Avesham in
various things, but I had to begin at the beginning. She did not even
know what G. F. S. meant. It is very strange how unreal life must be to
some people.”
“Is not their aunt staying with them?”
Mrs. Collingwood could not reply for a moment, for the gingerbread was
very hard.
“Yes, she is living with them for the present,” she said. “I am bound to
say that Miss Fortescue baffled me. I could make nothing whatever out
of her. She seemed to me at first most keenly interested in the
prevention of cruelty to animals, but when I spoke of the prevention of
cruelty to children--much more important, of course--she did not seem to
pay the slightest attention. And later, when we were speaking of
household matters, she urged Miss Avesham to see that the mulberries
from their tree in the garden were picked for making mulberry gin. She
asked me if I did not think it was delicious.”
“She could not know how you felt about such matters,” said the Canon,
apologetically.
“I should have thought that gin was not a subject usually mentioned,”
said Mrs. Collingwood. “No one can be ignorant of how terrible a curse
it is to so many households.”
Canon Collingwood sighed.
“I met Miss Avesham a day or two ago at the Lindsays’,” he said. “She
seemed to me a nice, pleasant girl, and very full of life.”
Mrs. Collingwood folded her napkin up in silence. Her husband’s remark
seemed to her fatuous. Either a person was earnest and helpful or not.
Any other quality, particularly that very dangerous quality known as
“life,” was only trimming, and a possible temptation. Earnestness and
helpfulness were to be rated by the desire to aid in good works. But as
she rose she made a great concession.
“If you mean energy by life, William,” she said, “I agree with you that
it is admirable as an instrument if properly used. You have not said
grace.”
To do her justice, Mrs. Collingwood’s time was spent in good works, and
her thoughts (when not thus occupied) in passing judgments on other
people. Her favourite text, the text by which her life was conducted,
was, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” In her youth she must have been
remarkably handsome, but she had got over that, which was lucky, since
she now tended to consider that good looks, if not actually the
invention of the evil one, were an open door by which he entered,
bringing with him pride, vanity, and self-esteem. Like alcohol and
tobacco, she regarded them as almost more than dangerous, as something
in themselves not right. But with what might be hastily considered as
inconsistent, she thought it her duty to admire the beauties of nature
when not exhibited in human beings. The green of forest trees, the level
lines of the sunset, the Gothic architecture, particularly when seen
from a Cathedral close, and thus, as it were, chastely framed, she
thought were meant to lead one’s aspirations heavenward. These things
(the trees and light, at any rate) had been at the Creation pronounced
good, and that was enough for Mrs. Collingwood, who, if she could pin a
text on to any conclusion, put it away in a drawer as proved. Her
drawers were full of such. Similarly, man had fallen, and his face was
the face of a fallen thing.
Thus this evening, when she and her husband left the dining-room, and he
retired to his study to finish his sermon for the next day, she stood a
full minute at the open window of the drawing-room looking at the view.
Then she sat down at her davenport to finish writing a paper on the
Downward Tendency of Modern Fiction, which she was to read at a meeting
of the Wroxton Ladies’ Literary Union next week. She proposed to deal
more particularly with novels which discuss theological problems, and
were so upsetting to the faith of the weaker, for what is known as the
Higher Criticism seemed to Mrs. Collingwood to be synonymous with the
temptation of the devil. But she was a just woman, and one of her
sentences began, “What a very clever book we all feel this to be, but
how immoral!” Mrs. Collingwood found literary composition presented no
difficulties, and she looked upon it, provided the motive of it was
earnest and helpful, as an agreeable relaxation. Her style was
conversational, and there was a good deal of “dear friends” in it.
The view on which she so resolutely turned her back in order to give
this timely warning to the literary ladies of Wroxton against
theological, or rather infidel, novels, justified her minute’s
contemplation. The lawn, a cool, restful space of sober green, sloped
down to a prattling tributary of the chalk stream which ran through the
town, and in the dusk the flower-beds (the Canon’s hobby was gardening)
glowed with subdued and darkening colour. The scent of the
tobacco-plant (like Adam and Eve, still in its garden innocence) came
floating in through the window, dominating all other perfumes. Thrushes
still called to each other from the bushes, or crossed the lawn with
quick, scudding steps, and an owl floated by with a flute-like note. To
the right rose the gray piled mass of the Cathedral in all the dignity
and sobriety of Norman work, set there, it might seem, like the rainbow,
a pledge to the benignity of the circling seasons, serene and steadfast
with centuries of service. From here, too, for the drawing-room was on
the second floor, it was possible to see over the bounding garden-wall,
and westward the river lay in sheets and pools of cloud-reflected
crimson. Patches of light mist lay like clothes to dry over the
water-meadows through which it ran, but beyond the great chalk down lay
clear and naked. The sky at the horizon was cloudless, and the evening
star hung like a jewel on blue velvet. Peaceful, protected stability was
the keynote of the scene.
Canon Collingwood had been at Wroxton for twenty mildly useful but not
glorious years. From the years between the ages of twenty and forty he
had lived entirely at Cambridge as Fellow and subsequently classical
tutor of his college. The effect, if not the object, of his life had
been uneventfulness, and twenty years of looking over pieces of Latin
verse and prose had been succeeded by twenty years of busy indolence as
Canon of Wroxton. To keep one’s hands and heart moderately clean in this
random business of life is a sufficient task for the most of mankind,
and if Canon Collingwood had not experienced the braver joys of
adventure, or even the rapture of mere living, it is not to be assumed
that his life was useless. He set an admirable pattern of unruffled
serenity and complete inoffensiveness, and though he could never set the
smallest stream on fire, his passage through the world was bordered with
content. At Wroxton, apart from the merely animal needs of sleep and
exercise, his time was fairly equally divided between hardy annuals and
an extensive though not profound study of patristic literature. Eight
times in the year he delivered a sermon from the Cathedral pulpit, and
never failed to give careful preparation to it. In the summer he and
his wife always spent a month at the lakes, but otherwise they seldom
slept a night outside their own house. He got up every morning at half
past seven, and breakfasted at a quarter past eight. He attended
Cathedral service at ten, and read or wrote in his study till a quarter
past one. Three-quarters of an hour brought him to lunch-time, and a
walk along one of three roads or two hours among his flowers prepared
him for tea. His dinner he earned by two hours’ more reading, and his
rest at night was the natural sequel to this wholesomely spent day,
rounded off by three-quarters of an hour’s Patience in the drawing-room,
or, if the game proved very exciting, it sometimes extended to a full
hour.
Mrs. Collingwood, as has been stated, was somewhat given to passing
judgment on other people, but these judgments were never of a gossipy or
malicious nature, and she judged without being in any way critical. Her
judgments were straightforward decisions, of the jury rather than the
judge, as to whether the prisoner at the bar was guilty or not guilty.
To be not guilty, it need hardly be indicated, meant to be earnest and
helpful. Now, whether she could, with her hand on her heart, say that
her husband was earnest or helpful is doubtful, but no decision was
necessary, and for this reason: Though he took no part in her good
works, nor even organized Christian associations, he was a Canon. To be
a Canon implied to live in a close, and to live in a close (if we run
Mrs. Collingwood to ground) meant to be not guilty. Furthermore, in what
we may call her more Bohemian moments, she would have acknowledged that
life could be looked at from more than one point of view. She would even
have allowed that it might be possible to live otherwise than she lived,
and yet be saved at the last. Yet some people had been known to think
her narrow!
Mrs. Collingwood, it must be considered, was not ill content with
living. Her aims were too definite, and her devotion to them too
complete to allow her to indulge in any vague dissatisfactions. She
could lament the wickedness of the world, yet find the antidote for the
sorrow the thought had caused in efforts to remedy it. Further, in the
sphere of inevitable and intimate things, she and her husband had
perhaps only one weak spot, so to speak, in the armour in which they met
the world. She, at any rate, went armed like a dragoon through the
routine of life, armed against danger and difficulty and snares of the
evil one. But this weak spot was in a vital place. She had a son, now
some twenty-five years old, who did not live in a close, or anywhere
near one. He was an artist--not a landscape painter, for Mrs.
Collingwood could have borne that--but a painter of men and women, a
recorder of human beauty. That he was rising and successful in his
profession was no consolation to his mother, but rather the reverse, and
she had before now hesitated whether the text, “I also have seen the
wicked in great prosperity,” was not to be pinned to him, for that he
was essentially sober and straight in his life she could scarcely
believe. He seldom came to Wroxton, for his profession, at which he
worked very hard, naturally kept him in London, but he was going to
spend a week or two with them in September, after their return from the
lakes, and she always found his visits trying. In the first place, it
was quite certain that, though he did not smoke in the house out of
deference to his mother’s abhorrence of the act, he did smoke in the
garden; and in the second, though he never alluded to wine at lunch or
dinner, a half-empty bottle of whisky had been found in his bed-room
after he had gone. It often seemed cruel to Mrs. Collingwood that she
should have had such a son, and in her own mind she was disposed to
regard him as but a dubious gift, partaking more of the nature of a
cross than of a crown.
Jeannie Avesham that afternoon had spoken of him to his mother, saying
that, though she did not know him personally, he had been at Oxford with
her brother, and the mention of those Oxford days had roused terrible
memories in the mind of Mrs. Collingwood, and made her attack on modern
fiction bitter and incisive. For he had gone to Oxford with the object
of reading theology, and eventually of taking orders, but a day came
when he wrote to his father saying he could not do so. He wanted to talk
it all over with him, but he feared his decision was irrevocable.
Now it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that his mother would sooner
have seen him in his coffin than that he should have written such a
letter. It was a complete break-up of her hopes. Her world, hard and
narrow as it might be, was all the world she had, and it was overturned.
The last straw had been added when he decided to become an artist, and
on that occasion she had said to her husband, and had meant it, “He will
go to the devil.”
Time, of course, had done something to heal the wound, and in the five
years which had passed since then Mrs. Collingwood had in a way grown
used to it. But she was naturally rigid and incapable of adapting
herself, for any change meant a change in her principles. She prayed for
him with her accustomed fervour, but as long as he did not give up his
profession she was forced to believe that her prayers, if answered, were
answered in a way beyond her comprehension.
By half past nine she had finished her warning against infidel novels,
and her husband had finished his sermon for the next day. He read
prayers in the dining-room, and afterward they went up together to the
drawing-room again, and he played Patience till half past ten. The town
was already settling itself to sleep, and only a faint hum of living
came in through the windows. They talked for a few minutes on
indifferent subjects, and by eleven the house was dark.