remained speechless before them, and she did not disturb his thoughts.
At last he said:
“I am ready to go. I have said farewell to them all. I know nothing
more wonderful than being among a number of fine pictures. It is almost
overwhelming. Once expects nature to be grand, but one does not expect
man to be grand.”
“You know we don’t agree there,” she answered. “_I_ expect everything
grand and great from man.”
They went out of the gallery, and into Trafalgar Square. It was a
scorching afternoon in August, but there was some cooling comfort in
seeing the dancing water of the fountains sparkling so brightly in the
sunshine.
“Do you mind stopping here a few minutes?” he said. “I should like to
sit down and watch. There is so much to see.”
She led the way to a seat, one end of which was occupied by a workman,
who was sleeping soundly, and snoring too, his arms folded tightly
together. He had a little clay pipe in the corner of his mouth; it
seemed to be tucked in so snugly that there was not much danger of its
falling to the ground. At last Helen spoke to her companion.
“What do you mean by saying that you will not be able to finish your
picture? Perhaps you are not well. Indeed, you don’t look well. You make
me anxious, for I have a great regard for you.”
“I am ill and suffering,” he answered, quietly. “I thought I should have
died yesterday; but I made up my mind to live until I saw you again, and
I thought I would ask you to spend the afternoon with me, and go with
me to Westminster Abbey, and sit with me in the cloisters. I do not
feel able to go by myself, and I know of no one to ask except you; and
I believed you would not refuse me, for you have been very kind to me.
I do not quite understand why you have been kind to me, but I am
wonderfully grateful to you. Today I heard some one in the gallery say
that you were plain. I turned round and I said, ‘I beg your pardon; _I_
think she is very beautiful.’ I think they laughed, and that puzzled me;
for you have always seemed to me a very beautiful person.”
At that moment the little clay pipe fell from the workman’s mouth and
was broken into bits. He awoke with a start, gazed stupidly at the old
man and his companion, and at the broken clay pipe.
“Curse my luck!” he said, yawning. “I was fond of that damned little
pipe.”
The old man drew his own pipe and his own tobacco-pouch from his pocket.
“Take these, stranger,” he said. “I don’t want them. And good luck to
you.”
The man’s face brightened up as he took the pipe and pouch.
“You’re uncommon kind,” he said. “Can you spare them?” he added, holding
them out half reluctantly.
“Yes,” answered the old man; “I shall not smoke again. You may as well
have these matches too.”
The labourer put them in his pocket, smiled his thanks, and walked some
little distance off; and Helen watched him examine his new pipe, and
then fill it with tobacco and light it.
Mr. Lindall proposed that they should be getting on their way to
Westminster, and they soon found themselves in the abbey. They sat
together in the Poets’ Corner; a smile of quiet happiness broke over
the old man’s tired face as he looked around and took in all the solemn
beauty and grandeur of the resting-place of the great.
“You know,” he said, half to himself, half to his companion, “I have no
belief of any kind, and no hopes and no fears; but all through my life
it has been a comfort to me to sit quietly in a church or a cathedral.
The graceful arches, the sun shining through the stained windows,
the vaulted roof, the noble columns, have helped me to understand the
mystery which all our books of philosophy cannot make clear, though we
bend over them year after year, and grow old over them, old in age and
in spirit. Though I myself have never been outwardly a worshipper, I
have never sat in a place of worship but that, for the time being, I
have felt a better man. But directly the voice of doctrine or dogma was
raised the spell was broken for me, and that which I hoped was being
made clear had no further meaning for me. There was only one voice
which ever helped me, the voice of the organ, arousing me, thrilling
me, filling me with strange longing, with welcome sadness, with solemn
gladness. I have always thought that music can give an answer when
everything else is of no avail. I do not know what you believe.”
“I am so young to have found out,” she said, almost pleadingly.
“Don’t worry yourself,” he answered, kindly. “Be brave and strong, and
let the rest go. I should like to live long enough to see what you will
make of your life. I believe you will never be false to yourself or to
any one. That is rare. I believe you will not let any lower ideal take
the place of your high ideal of what is beautiful and noble in art, in
life. I believe that you will never let despair get the upper hand of
you. If it does you may as well die; yes, you may as well. And I entreat
you not to lose your entire faith in humanity. There is nothing like
that for withering up the very core of the heart. I tell you, humanity
and nature have so much in common with each other that if you lose part
of your pleasure in the latter; you will see less beauty in the trees,
the flowers, and the fields, less grandeur in the mighty mountains and
the sea. The seasons will come and go, and you will scarcely heed their
coming and going: winter will settle over your soul, just as it settled
over mine. And you see what I am.”
They had now passed into the cloisters, and they sat down in one of
the recesses of the windows, and looked out upon the rich plot of
grass which the cloisters enclose. There was not a soul there except
themselves; the cool and the quiet and the beauty of the spot refreshed
these pilgrims, and they rested in calm enjoyment.
Helen was the first to break the silence.
“I am glad you have brought me here,” she said; “I shall never grumble
now at not being able to afford a fortnight in the country. This is
better than anything else.”
“It has always been my summer holiday to come here,” he said. “When
I first came I was like you, young and hopeful, and I had wonderful
visions of what I intended to do and to be. Here it was I made a vow
that I would become a great painter, and win for myself a resting place
in this very abbey. There is humour in the situation, is there not?”
“I don’t like to hear you say that,” she answered. “It is not always
possible for us to fulfil all our ambitions. Still, it is better to have
had them, and failed of them, than not to have had them at all.”
“Possibly,” he replied, coldly. Then he added, “I wish you would tell me
about yourself. You have always interested me.”
“I have nothing to tell you about myself,” she answered, frankly. “I am
alone in the world, without friends and without relations. The very name
I use is not a real name. I was a foundling. At times I am sorry I do
not belong to any one, and at other times I am glad. You know I am fond
of books and of art, so my life is not altogether empty; and I find my
pleasure in hard work. When I saw you at the gallery I wished to know
you, and I asked one of the students who you were. He told me you were
a misanthrope. Then I did not care so much about knowing you, until one
day you spoke to me about my painting, and that was the beginning of our
friendship.”
“Forty years ago,” he said, sadly, “the friend of my boyhood deceived
me. I had not thought it possible that he could be false to me. He
screened himself behind me, and became prosperous and respected at the
expense of my honour. I vowed I would never again make a friend. A few
years later, when I was beginning to hold up my head, the woman whom
I loved deceived me. Then I put from me all affection and all love.
Greater natures than mine are better able to bear these troubles, but my
heart contracted and withered up.”
He paused for a moment, many recollections overpowering him. Then he
went on telling her the history of his life, unfolding to her the story
of his hopes and ambitions, describing to her the very home where he was
born, and the dark-eyed sister whom he had loved, and with whom he had
played over the daisied fields, and through the carpeted woods, and all
among the richly tinted bracken. One day he was told she was dead, and
that he must never speak her name; but he spoke it all the day and all
the night,--Beryl, nothing but Beryl,--and he looked for her in the
fields and in the woods and among the bracken. It seemed as if he had
unlocked the casket of his heart, closed for so many years, and as
if all the memories of the past and all the secrets of his life were
rushing out, glad to be free once more, and grateful for the open air of
sympathy.
“Beryl was as swift as a deer!” he exclaimed. “You would have laughed
to see her on the moor. Ah, it was hard to give up all the thoughts of
meeting her again. They told me I should see her in heaven, but I did
not care about heaven. I wanted Beryl on earth, as I knew her, a merry
laughing sister. I think you are right: we don’t forget; we become
resigned in a dead, dull kind of way.”
Suddenly he said, “I don’t know why I have told you all this. And yet it
has been such a pleasure to me. You are the only person to whom I could
have spoken about myself, for no one else but you would have cared.”
“Don’t you think,” she said gently, “that you made a mistake in letting
your experiences embitter you? Because you had been unlucky in one or
two instances it did not follow that all the world was against you.
Perhaps you unconsciously put yourself against all the world, and
therefore saw every one in an unfavourable light. It seems so easy to
do that. Trouble comes to most people, doesn’t it? And your philosophy
should have taught you to make the best of it. At least, that is my
notion of the value of philosophy.”
She spoke hesitatingly, as though she gave utterance to these words
against her will.
“I am sure you are right, child,” he said, eagerly.
He put his hands to his eyes, but he could not keep back the tears.
“I have been such a lonely old man,” he sobbed; “no one can tell what a
lonely, loveless life mine has been. If I were not so old and so tired I
should like to begin all over again.”
He sobbed for many minutes, and she did not know what to say to him of
comfort; but she took his hand within her own, and gently caressed
it, as one might do to a little child in pain. He looked up and smiled
through his tears.
“You have been very good to me,” he said, “and I dare say you have
thought me ungrateful. You mended my coat for me one morning, and not a
day has passed but that I have looked at that darn and thought of you.
I liked to remember that you had done it for me. But you have done
far more than this for me: you have put some sweetness into my life.
Whatever becomes of me hereafter, I shall never be able to think of my
life on earth as anything but beautiful, because you thought kindly of
me and acted kindly for me. The other night, when this terrible pain
came over me, I wished you were near me; I wished to hear your voice.
There is very beautiful music in your voice.”
“I would have come to you gladly,” she said, smiling quietly at him.
“You must make a promise that when you feel ill again you will send for
me. Then you will see what a splendid nurse I am, and how soon you will
become strong and well under my care, strong enough to paint many more
pictures, each one better than the last. Now will you promise?”
“Yes,” he said, and he raised her hand reverently to his lips.
“You are not angry with me for doing that?” he asked, suddenly. “I
should not like to vex you.”
“I am not vexed,” she answered, kindly.
“Then perhaps I may kiss it once more?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered; and again he raised her hand to his lips.
“Thank you,” he said quietly; “that was kind of you. Do you see that
broken sun-ray yonder? Is it not golden? I find it very pleasant to sit
here; and I am quite happy, and almost free from pain. Lately I have
been troubled with a dull thudding pain near my heart; but now I feel so
strong that I believe I shall finish that Andrea del Sarto after all.”
“Of course you will,” she answered, cheerily, “and I shall have to
confess that yours is better than mine! I am quite willing to yield the
palm to you.”
“I must alter the expression of the mouth,” he replied. “That is the
part which has worried me. I don’t think I told you that I have had a
commission to copy Rembrandt’s ‘Old Jew.’ I must set to work on that
next week.”
“But you have given me your palette and brushes!” she laughed.
“You must be generous enough to lend them to me,” he said, smiling. “By
the way, I intend to give you my books, all of them. Some day I must
show them to you. I especially value my philosophical books; they have
been my faithful companions through many years. I believe you do not
read Greek. That is a pity, because you would surely enjoy Aristotle. I
think I must teach you Greek; it would be an agreeable legacy to leave
you when I pass away into the Great Silence.”
“I should like to learn,” she said, wondering to hear him speak so
unreservedly. It seemed as if some vast barrier had been rolled aside,
and as if she were getting to know him better, having been allowed to
glance into his past life, to sympathise with his past mistakes, and
with the failure of his ambitions, and with the deadening of his heart.
“You must read AEschylus,” he continued, enthusiastically; “and, if I
mistake not, the Agamemnon will be an epoch in your life. You will find
that all these studies will serve to ennoble your art, and you will be
able to put mind into your work, and not merely form and colour. Do
you know, I feel so well that I believe I shall not only live to finish
Andrea del Sarto, but also to smoke another pipe?”
“You have been too rash to-day,” she laughed, “giving away your pipe and
pouch, your palette and brushes, in this reckless manner! I must get
you a new pipe to-morrow. I wonder you did not part with your venerable
Lucretius.”
“That reminds me,” he said, fumbling in his pocket; “I think I have
dropped my Lucretius. I fancy I left it somewhere in the Poets’ Corner.
It would grieve me to lose that book.”
“Let me go and look for it,” she said, and she advanced a few steps, and
then came back to him.
“You have been saying many kind words to me,” she said, as she put her
hand on his arm, “and I have not told you that I value your friendship,
and am grateful to you for letting me be more than a mere stranger
to you. I have been very lonely in my life, for I am not one to make
friends easily, and it has been a great privilege to me to talk with
you. I want you to know this: for if I have been anything to you, you
have been a great deal to me. I have never met with much sympathy from
those of my own age: I have found them narrow and unyielding, and they
found me dull and uninteresting. They had passed through few experiences
and knew nothing about failure or success, and some of them did not even
understand the earnestness of endeavour, and laughed at me when I spoke
of a high ideal. So I withdrew into myself, and should probably have
grown still more isolated than I was before, but that I met you, and, as
time went on, we became friends. I shall always remember your teaching,
and I will try to keep to a high ideal of life and art and endeavour,
and I will not let despair creep into my heart, and I will not lose my
faith in humanity.”
As she spoke a lingering ray of sunshine lit up her face and gently
caressed her soft brown hair; slight though her form, sombre her
clothes, and unlovely her features, she seemed a gracious presence
because of her earnestness.
“Now,” she said, cheerily, “you rest here until I come back with your
Lucretius, and then I think I must be getting on my way home. But
you must fix a time for our first Greek lesson, for we must begin
to-morrow.”
When she had gone he walked in the cloisters, holding his hat in his
hand and his stick under his arm. There was a quiet smile on his face,
which was called forth by pleasant thoughts in his mind, and he did not
look quite so shrunken and shrivelled as usual. His eyes were fixed on
the ground, but he raised them, and observed a white cat creeping toward
him. It came and rubbed itself against his foot, and, purring with all
its might, seemed determined to win some kind of notice from him. The
old man stooped down to stroke it, and was just touching its sleek coat
when he suddenly withdrew his hand and groaned deeply. He struggled to
the recess, and sank back. The stick fell on the stone with a clatter,
and the battered hat rolled down beside it, and the white cat fled away
in terror; but realising that there was no cause for alarm, it came
back and crouched near the silent figure of the old man, watching him
intently. Then it stretched out its paw and played with his hand, doing
its utmost to coax him into a little fun; but he would not be coaxed,
and the cat lost all patience with him, and left him to himself.
Meanwhile Helen Stanley was looking for the lost Lucretius in the Poets’
Corner. She found it laying near Chaucer’s tomb, and was just going to
take it to her friend when she saw the workman to whom they had spoken
in Trafalgar Square. He recognised her at once, and came toward her.
“I’ve been having a quiet half-hour here,” he said. “It does me a sight
of good to sit in the abbey.”
“You should go into the cloisters,” she said, kindly. “I have been
sitting there with my friend. He will be interested to hear that you
love this beautiful abbey.”
“I should like to see him again,” said the workman. “He had a kind way
about him, and that pipe he gave me is an uncommon good one. Still, I am
sorry I smashed the little clay pipe. I’d grown used to it. I’d smoked
it ever since my little girl died and left me alone in the world. I used
to bring my little girl here, and now I come alone. But it isn’t the
same thing.”
“No, it could not be the same thing,” said Helen, gently. “But you find
some comfort here?”
“Some little comfort,” he answered. “One can’t expect much.”
They went together into the cloisters, and as they came near the recess
where the old man rested Helen said:
“Why, he has fallen asleep! He must have been very tired. And he has
dropped his hat and stick. Thank you. If you will put them down there, I
will watch by his side until he wakes up. I don’t suppose he will sleep
for long.”
The workman stooped down to pick up the hat and stick, and glanced
at the sleeper. Something in the sleeper’s countenance arrested his
attention. He turned to the girl, and saw that she was watching him.
“What is it?” she asked anxiously. “What is the matter with you?”
He tried to speak, but his voice failed him, and all he could do was to
point with trembling hand to the old man.
Helen looked, and a loud cry broke from her lips. The old man was dead.
THE OMNIBUS, By Quiller-Couch
All that follows was spoken in a small tavern, a stone’s throw from
Cheapside, the day before I left London. It was spoken in a dull voice,
across a greasy table-cloth, and amid an atmosphere so thick with the
reek of cooking that one longed to change it for the torrid street
again, to broil in an ampler furnace. Old Tom Pickford spoke it, who has
been a clerk for fifty-two years in Tweedy’s East India warehouse,
and in all that time has never been out of London, but when he takes a
holiday spends it in hanging about Tweedy’s, and observing that unlovely
place of business from the outside. The dust, if not the iron, of
Tweedy’s has entered into his soul; and Tweedy’s young men know him
as “the Mastodon.” He is a thin, bald septuagenarian, with sloping
shoulders, and a habit of regarding the pavement when he walks, so that
he seems to steer his way by instinct rather than sight. In general
he keeps silence while eating his chop; and on this occasion there was
something unnatural in his utterance, a divorce of manner between the
speaker and his words, such as one would expect in a sibyl disclaiming
under stress of the god. I fancied it had something to do with a black
necktie that he wore instead of the blue bird’s-eye cravat familiar to
Tweedy’s, and with his extraordinary conduct in refusing to-day the chop
that the waiter brought, and limiting his lunch to cheese and lettuce.
Having pulled the lettuce to pieces, he pushed himself back a
little from the table, looked over his spectacles at me, then at the
table-cloth, and began in a dreamy voice:
“Old Gabriel is dead. I heard the news at the office this morning,
and went out and bought a black tie. I am the oldest man in Tweedy’s
now--older by six years than Sam Collins, who comes next; so there is no
mistake about it. Sam is looking for the place; I saw it in his eye
when he told me, and I expect he’ll get it. But I’m the oldest clerk in
Tweedy’s. Only God Almighty can alter that, and it’s very satisfactory
to me. I don’t care about the money. Sam Collins will be stuck up over
it, like enough; but he’ll never write a hand like Gabriel’s, not if
he lives to be a hundred; and he knows it, and knows I’ll be there to
remind him of it. Gabriel’s was a beautiful fist--so small, too, if he
chose. Why, once, in his spare hours, he wrote out all the Psalms, with
the headings, on one side of a folio sheet, and had it framed and hung
up in his parlour, out at Shepherd’s Bush. He died in the night--oh yes,
quite easily. He was down at the office all yesterday, and spoke to me
as brisk as a bird. They found him dead in his bed this morning.
“I seem cut up about it? Well, not exactly. Ah, you noticed that
I refused my chop to-day. Bless your soul, that’s not on Gabriel’s
account. I am well on in years, and I suppose it would be natural of me
to pity old men, and expect pity. But I can’t; no, _it’s only the young
that I pity_. If you _must_ know, I didn’t take the chop to-day because
I haven’t the money in my pocket to pay for it. You see, there was this
black tie that I gave eighteenpence for; but something else happened
this morning that I’ll tell you about.
“I came down in a ‘bus, as usual. You remember what muggy weather it was
up to ten o’clock--though you wouldn’t think it, to feel the heat now.
Well, the ‘bus was packed, inside and out. At least, there was just room
for one more inside when we pulled up by Charing Cross, and there he got
in--a boy with a stick and a bundle in a blue handkerchief.
“He wasn’t more than thirteen; bound for the docks, you could tell at a
glance; and by the way he looked about you could tell as easily that in
stepping outside Charing Cross station he’d set foot on London stones
for the first time. God knows how it struck him--the slush and drizzle,
the ugly shop-fronts, the horses slipping in the brown mud, the crowd
on the pavement pushing him this side and that. The poor little chap was
standing in the middle of it with dazed eyes, like a hare’s, when the
‘bus pulled up. His eyelids were pink and swollen; but he wasn’t crying,
though he wanted to. Instead, he gave a gulp as he came on board with
stick and bundle, and tried to look brave as a lion.