The reader has, doubtless, by this time judged with much severity not
only Catharine, but Mr. Cardew. It is admitted to the full that they are
both most unsatisfactory and most improbable. Is it likely that in a
sleepy Midland town, such as Eastthorpe, knowing nothing but the common
respectabilities of the middle of this century, the daughter of an
ironmonger would fall in love with a married clergyman? Perhaps to their
present biographer it seems more remarkable than to his readers. He
remembers what the Eastern Midlands were like fifty years ago and they do
not. They are thinking of Eastthorpe of the present day, of its
schoolgirls who are examined in Keats and Shelley, of the Sunday morning
walks there, and of the, so to speak, smelling acquaintance with
sceptical books and theories which half the population now boasts. But
Eastthorpe, when Mr. Cardew was at Abchurch, was totally different. It
knew what it was for parsons to go wrong. It had not forgotten a former
rector and the young woman at the Bell. What talk there was about that
affair! Happily his friends were well connected: they exerted
themselves, and he obtained a larger sphere of usefulness two hundred
miles away. Mr. Cardew, however, was not that rector, and Catharine was
not the pretty waitress, and it is time now to tell the promised early
history of Mr. Cardew.
He was the son of a well-to-do London merchant, who lived in Stockwell,
in a large, white house, with a garden of a couple of acres, shaded by a
noble cedar in its midst. There were four children, but he was the only
boy. His mother belonged to an old and very religious family, and
inherited all its traditions of Calvinistic piety and decorum. Her love
for this boy was boundless, and she had a double ambition for him, which
was that he might become a minister of God's Word, and in due time might
marry Jane Berdoe, the only daughter of the Reverend Charles Berdoe,
M.A., and Euphemia, her dearest friend. Mrs. Cardew had heard so much of
the contamination of boys' schools that Theophilus was educated at home
and sent straight from home to Cambridge. At the University he became a
member of the ultra-evangelical sect of young men there, and devoted
himself entirely to theology. He thus passed through youth and early
manhood without any intercourse with the world so called, and he lacked
that wholesome influence which is exercised by healthy companionship with
those who differ from us and are not afraid to oppose us. Of course he
married Jane Berdoe. His mother was always contriving that Jane should
be present when he was at home; he was young; he had never known what it
was to go astray with women, and he was unable to stand at a distance
from her and ask himself if he really cared for her. He fell in love
with himself, married himself, and soon after discovered that he did not
know who his wife was. After his marriage he became wholly unjust to
her, and allowed her defects to veil the whole of her character.
The ultra-evangelical school in the Church preserved at that time the
religious life of England, although in a very strange form. They
believed and felt certain vital truths, although they did not know what
was vital and what has not. They had real experience, and their roots
lay, not upon the surface, but went deep down to the perennial springs,
and the articles of their creed became a vehicle for the expression of
the most real emotions. Evangelicalism, however, to Mr. Cardew was
dangerous. He was always prone to self-absorption, and the tendency was
much increased by his religion. He lived an entirely interior life, and
his joys and sorrows were not those of Abchurch, but of another sphere.
Abchurch feared wet weather, drought, ague, rheumatism, loss of money,
and, on Sundays, feared hell, but Mr. Cardew's fears were spiritual or
even spectral. His self-communion produced one strange and perilous
result, a habit of prolonged evolution from particular ideas uncorrected
by reference to what was around him. If anything struck him it remained
with him, deduction followed deduction in practice unfortunately as well
as in thought, and he was ultimately landed in absurdity or something
worse. The wholesome influence of ordinary men and women never permits
us to link conclusion to conclusion from a single premiss, or at any rate
to act upon our conclusions, but Mr. Cardew had no world at Abchurch save
himself. He saw himself in things, and not as they were. A sunset was
just what it might happen to symbolise to him at the time, and his
judgments upon events and persons were striking, but they were frequently
judgments upon creations of his own imagination, and were not in the
least apposite to what was actually before him. The happy, artistic,
Shakespearean temper, mirroring the world like a lake, was altogether
foreign to him.
When he saw Catharine a new love awoke in him instantaneously. Was it
legitimate or illegitimate? In many cases of the same kind the answer
would be that the question is one which cannot be put. No matter how
pure the intellectual bond between man and woman may be, it is certain to
carry with it a sentiment which cannot be explained by the attraction of
mere mental similarity. A man says to a man, "Do you really believe it?"
and, if the answer is "yes," the two become friends; but if it is a woman
who responds to him, something follows which is sweeter than friendship,
whether she be bound or free. It cannot be helped; there is no reason
why we should try to help it, provided only we do no harm to others, and
indeed these delicate threads are the very fairest in the tissue of life.
With Mr. Cardew it was a little different. Undoubtedly he was drawn to
Catharine because her thoughts were his thoughts. St. Paul and Milton in
him saluted St. Paul and Milton in her. But he did not know where to
stop, nor could he look round and realise whither he was being led. Any
other person in six weeks would have noticed the milestones on the road,
and would have determined that it was time to turn, but he gaily walked
forward with his head in the clouds. If anybody at that particular
moment when he left the bridge could have made him comprehend that he was
making love to a girl; that what he was doing was an ordinary,
commonplace criminal act, or one which would justifiably be interpreted
as such, he not only would have been staggered and confounded, but would
instantly have drawn back. As it was, he was neither staggered nor
confounded, and went home to his wife with but one image in his brain,
that of Catharine Furze.
Catharine was one of those creatures whose life is not uniform from
sixteen to sixty, a simple progressive accumulation of experiences, the
addition of a ring of wood each year. There had come a time to her when
she had suddenly opened. The sun shone with new light, a new lustre lay
on river and meadow, the stars became something more than mere luminous
points in the sky, she asked herself strange questions, and she loved
more than ever her long wanderings at Chapel Farm. This phenomenon of a
new birth is more often seen at some epochs than at others. When a
nation is stirred by any religious movement it is common, but it is also
common in a different shape during certain periods of spiritual activity,
such as the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of
the nineteenth in England and Germany. Had Catharine been born two
hundred years earlier, life would have been easy. All that was in her
would have found expression in the faith of her ancestors, large enough
for any intellect or any heart at that time. She would have been happy
in the possession of a key which unlocks the mystery of things, and there
would have been ample room for emotion. How impatient she became of
those bars which nowadays restrain people from coming close to one
another! Often and often she felt that she could have leaped out towards
the person talking to her, that she could have cried to him to put away
his circumlocutions, his forms and his trivialities, and to let her see
and feel what he really was. Often she knew what it was to thirst like
one in a desert for human intercourse, and she marvelled how those who
pretended to care for her could stay away so long: she could have
humiliated herself if only they would have permitted her to love them and
be near them. Poor Catharine! the world as it is now is no place for
people so framed! When life runs high and takes a common form men can
walk together as the disciples walked on the road to Emmaus. Christian
and Hopeful can pour out their hearts to one another as they travel
towards the Celestial City and are knit together in everlasting bonds by
the same Christ and the same salvation. But when each man is left to
shift for himself, to work out the answers to his own problems, the
result is isolation. People who, if they were believers, would find the
richest gift of life in utter confidence and mutual help are now
necessarily strangers. One turns to metaphysics; another to science; one
takes up with Rousseau's theory of existence, and another with Kant's;
they meet; they have nothing to say; they are of no use to one another in
trouble; one hears that the other is sick; what can be done? There is a
nurse; he does not go; his old friend dies, and as to the funeral--well,
we are liable to catch cold. Not so Christian and Hopeful! for when
Christian was troubled "with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits,
even on the borderland of Heaven--oh, Bunyan! Hopeful kept his brother's
head above water, and called upon him to turn his eyes to the Gate and
the men standing by it to receive him." My poor reader-friend, how many
times have you in this nineteenth century, when the billows have gone
over you--how many times have you felt the arm of man or woman under you
raising you to see the shining ones and the glory that is inexpressible?
Had Catharine been born later it would have been better. She would
perhaps have been able to distract herself with the thousand and one
subjects which are now got up for examinations, or she would perhaps.
have seriously studied some science, which might at least have been
effectual as an opiate in suppressing sensibility. She was, however, in
Eastthorpe before the new education, as it is called, had been invented.
There was no elaborate system of needle points, Roman and Greek history,
plain and spherical trigonometry, political economy, ethics, literature,
chemistry, conic sections, music, English history, and mental philosophy,
to draw off the electricity within her, nor did she possess the
invaluable privilege of being able, after studying a half-crown handbook,
to unbosom herself to women of her own age upon the position of Longland
as an English poet.
Shakespeare or Wordsworth might have been of some use to her, but to
Shakespeare she was not led, although there was a brown, dusty,
one-volume edition at the Terrace; and of Wordsworth nobody whom she knew
in Eastthorpe had so much as heard. A book would have turned much that
was vague in her into definite shape; it would have enabled her to
recognise herself; it would have given an orthodox expression to cloud
singularity, and she would have seen that she was a part of humanity in
her most extravagant and personal emotions. As it was, her position was
critical because she stood by herself, affiliated to nothing, an
individual belonging to no species, so far as she knew. She then met Mr.
Cardew. It was through him the word was spoken to her, and he was the
interpreter of the new world to her. She was in love with him--but what
is love? There is no such thing: there are loves, and they are all
different. Catharine's was the very life of all that was Catharine,
senses, heart, and intellect, a summing-up and projection of her whole
selfhood. He was more to her than she to him--was any woman ever so much
to a man as a man is to a woman? She was happy when she was near him.
When she was in ordinary Eastthorpe society she felt as a pent-up lake
might feel if the weight of its waters were used in threading needles,
but when Mr. Cardew talked to her, and she to him, she rejoiced in the
flow of all her force, and that horrible oppression in her chest
vanished.
Nevertheless, the fear, the shudder, came to her and not to him; the
wrench came from her and not from him. It was she and not he who watched
through the night and found no motive for the day, save a dull, miserable
sense that it was her duty to live through it.