Meenie Bolton had counted a great deal upon her visit to Oxford, and she
found it quite as delightful as she had anticipated. Her brother knew
such a nice set of men, especially Mr. Owen, of Christchurch. Meenie had
never been so near falling in love with anybody in her life as she was
with Paul Owen. He was so handsome and so clever, and then there was
something so romantic about this strange Church they said he belonged
to. Meenie's father was a country parson, and the way in which Paul
shrank from talking about the rector, as if his office were something
wicked or uncanny, piqued and amused her. There was an heretical tinge
about him which made him doubly interesting to the Rector's daughter.
The afternoon water party that eventful Thursday, down to Nuneham, she
looked forward to with the deepest interest. For her aunt, the
Professor's wife, who was to take charge of them, was certainly the most
delightful and most sensible of chaperons.
"Is it really true, Mr. Owen," she said, as they sat together for ten
minutes alone after their picnic luncheon, by the side of the weir under
the shadow of the Nuneham beeches--"is it really true that this Church
of yours doesn't allow people to marry?"
Paul coloured up to his eyes as he answered, "Well, Miss Bolton, I don't
know that you should identify me too absolutely with my Church. I was
very young when they selected me to go to Oxford, and my opinions have
decidedly wavered a good deal lately. But the Church certainly does
forbid marriage. I have always been brought up to look upon it as
sinful."
Meenie laughed aloud; and Paul, to whom the question was no laughing
matter, but a serious point of conscientious scruple, could hardly help
laughing with her, so infectious was that pleasant ripple. He checked
himself with an effort, and tried to look serious. "Do you know," he
said, "when I first came to Christchurch, I doubted even whether I ought
to make your brother's acquaintance because he was a clergyman's son. I
was taught to describe clergymen always as priests of Midian." He never
talked about his Church to anybody at Oxford, and it was a sort of
relief to him to speak on the subject to Meenie, in spite of her
laughing eyes and undisguised amusement. The other men would have
laughed at him too, but their laughter would have been less sympathetic.
"And do you think them priests of Midian still?" asked Meenie.
"Miss Bolton," said Paul suddenly, as one who relieves his overburdened
mind by a great effort, "I am almost moved to make a confidante of you."
"There is nothing I love better than confidences," Meenie answered; and
she might truthfully have added, "particularly from you."
"Well, I have been passing lately through a great many doubts and
difficulties. I was brought up by my Church to become its next Apostle,
and I have been educated at their expense both in London and here. You
know," Paul added with his innate love of telling out the whole truth,
"I am not a gentleman; I am the son of poor working people in London."
"Tom told me who your parents were," Meenie answered simply; "but he
told me, too, you were none the less a true gentleman born for that; and
I see myself he told me right."
Paul flushed again--he had a most unmanly trick of flushing up--and
bowed a little timid bow. "Thank you," he said quietly. "Well, while I
was in London I lived entirely among my own people, and never heard
anything talked about except our own doctrines. I thought our Apostle
the most learned, the wisest, and the greatest of men. I had not a doubt
about the absolute infallibility of our own opinions. But ever since I
came to Oxford I have slowly begun to hesitate and to falter. When I
came up first, the men laughed at me a good deal in a good-humoured way,
because I wouldn't do as they did. Then I thought myself persecuted for
the truth's sake, and was glad. But the men were really very kind and
forbearing to me; they never argued with me or bullied me; they
respected my scruples, and said nothing more about it as soon as they
found out what they really were. That was my first stumbling-block. If
they had fought me and debated with me, I might have stuck to my own
opinions by force of opposition. But they turned me in upon myself
completely by their silence, and mastered me by their kindly
forbearance. Point by point I began to give in, till now I hardly know
where I am standing."
"You wouldn't join the cricket club at first, Tom says."
"No, I wouldn't. I thought it wrong to walk in the ways of Midian. But
gradually I began to argue myself out of my scruples, and now I
positively pull six in the boat, and wear a Christchurch ribbon on my
hat. I have given up protesting against having my letters addressed to
me as Esquire (though I have really no right to the title), and I nearly
went the other day to have some cards engraved with my name as 'Mr. Paul
Owen.' I am afraid I'm backsliding terribly."
Meenie laughed again. "If that is all you have to burden your conscience
with," she said, "I don't think you need spend many sleepless nights."
"Quite so," Paul answered, smiling; "I think so myself. But that is not
all. I have begun to have serious doubts about the Apostle himself and
the whole Church altogether. I have been three years at Oxford now; and
while I was reading for Mods, I don't think I was so unsettled in my
mind. But since I have begun reading philosophy for my Greats, I have
had to go into all sorts of deep books--Mill, and Spencer, and Bain, and
all kinds of fellows who really think about things, you know, down to
the very bottom--and an awful truth begins to dawn upon me, that our
Apostle is after all only a very third-rate type of a thinker. Now that,
you know, is really terrible."
"I don't see why," Meenie answered demurely. She was beginning to get
genuinely interested.
"That is because you have never had to call in question a cherished and
almost ingrown faith. You have never realized any similar circumstances.
Here am I, brought up by these good, honest, earnest people, with their
own hard-earned money, as a pillar of their belief. I have been taught
to look upon myself as the chosen advocate of their creed, and on the
Apostle as an almost divinely inspired man. My whole life has been bound
up in it; I have worked and read night and day in order to pass high and
do honour to the Church; and now what do I begin to find the Church
really is? A petty group of poor, devoted, enthusiastic, ignorant
people, led blindly by a decently instructed but narrow-minded teacher,
who has mixed up his own headstrong self-conceit and self-importance
with his own peculiar ideas of abstract religion." Paul paused, half
surprised at himself, for, though he had doubted before, he had never
ventured till that day to formulate his doubts, even to himself, in such
plain and straightforward language.
"I see," said Meenie, gravely; "you have come into a wider world; you
have mixed with wider ideas; and the wider world has converted you,
instead of your converting the world. Well, that is only natural. Others
beside you have had to change their opinions."
"Yes, yes; but for me it is harder--oh! so much harder."
"Because you have looked forward to being an Apostle?"
"Miss Bolton, you do me injustice--not in what you say, but in the tone
you say it in. No, it is not the giving up of the Apostleship that
troubles me, though I did hope that I might help in my way to make the
world a new earth; but it is the shock and downfall of their hopes to
all those good earnest people, and especially--oh! especially, Miss
Bolton, to my own dear father and mother." His eyes filled with tears as
he spoke.
"I can understand," said Meenie, sympathetically, her eyes dimming a
little in response. "They have set their hearts all their lives long on
your accomplishing this work, and it will be to them the disappointment
of a cherished romance."
They looked at one another a few minutes in silence.
"How long have you begun to have your doubts?" Meenie asked after the
pause.
"A long time, but most of all since I saw you. It has made me--it has
made me hesitate more about the fundamental article of our faith. Even
now, I am not sure whether it is not wrong of me to be talking so with
you about such matters."
"I see," said Meenie, a little more archly; "it comes perilously
near----" and she broke off, for she felt she had gone a step too far.
"Perilously near falling in love," Paul continued boldly, turning his
big eyes full upon her. "Yes, perilously near."
Their eyes met; Meenie's fell; and they said no more. But they both felt
they understood one another. Just at that moment the Professor's wife
came up to interrupt the _tete-a-tete_; "for that young Owen," she said
to herself, "is really getting quite too confidential with dear Meenie."
That same evening Paul paced up and down his rooms in Peckwater with all
his soul strangely upheaved within him and tossed and racked by a dozen
conflicting doubts and passions. Had he gone too far? Had he yielded
like Adam to the woman who beguiled him? Had he given way like Samson to
the snares of Delilah? For the old Scripture phraseology and imagery, so
long burned into his very nature, clung to him still in spite of all his
faltering changes of opinion. Had he said more than he thought and felt
about the Apostle? Even if he was going to revise his views, was it
right, was it candid, was it loyal to the truth, that he should revise
them under the biassing influence of Meenie's eyes? If only he could
have separated the two questions--the Apostle's mission, and the
something which he felt growing up within him! But he could not--and, as
he suspected, for a most excellent reason, because the two were
intimately bound up in the very warp and woof of his existence. Nature
was asserting herself against the religious asceticism of the Apostle;
it could not be so wrong for him to feel those feelings that had
thrilled every heart in all his ancestors for innumerable generations.
He was in love with Meenie: he knew that clearly now. And this love was
after all not such a wicked and terrible feeling; on the contrary, he
felt all the better and the purer for it already. But then that might
merely be the horrible seductiveness of the thing. Was it not always
typified by the cup of Circe, by the song of the Sirens, by all that was
alluring and beautiful and hollow? He paced up and down for half an
hour, and then (he had sported his oak long ago) he lit his little
reading lamp and sat down in the big chair by the bay window. Running
his eyes over his bookshelf, he took out, half by chance, Spencer's
"Sociology." Then, from sheer weariness, he read on for a while, hardly
heeding what he read. At last he got interested, and finished a chapter.
When he had finished it, he put the book down, and felt that the
struggle was over. Strange that side by side in the same world, in the
same London, there should exist two such utterly different types of man
as Herbert Spencer and the Gideonite Apostle. The last seemed to belong
to the sixteenth century, the first to some new and hitherto uncreated
social world. In an age which produced thinkers like that, how could he
ever have mistaken the poor, bigoted, narrow, half-instructed Apostle
for a divinely inspired teacher! So far as Paul Owen was concerned, the
Gideonite Church and all that belonged to it had melted utterly into
thin air.
Three days later, after the Eights in the early evening, Paul found an
opportunity of speaking again alone with Meenie. He had taken their
party on to the Christchurch barge to see the race, and he was strolling
with them afterwards round the meadow walk by the bank of the Cherwell.
Paul managed to get a little in front with Meenie, and entered at once
upon the subject of his late embarrassments.
"I have thought it all over since, Miss Bolton," he said--he half
hesitated whether he should say "Meenie" or not, and she was half
disappointed that he didn't, for they were both very young, and very
young people fall in love so unaffectedly--"I have thought it all over,
and I have come to the conclusion that there is no help for it: I must
break openly with the Church."
"Of course," said Meenie, simply. "That I understood."
He smiled at her ingenuousness. Such a very forward young person! And
yet he liked it. "Well, the next thing is, what to do about it. You see,
I have really been obtaining my education, so to speak, under false
pretences. I can't continue taking these good people's money after I
have ceased to believe in their doctrines. I ought to have faced the
question sooner. It was wrong of me to wait until--until it was forced
upon me by other considerations."
This time it was Meenie who blushed. "But you don't mean to leave Oxford
without taking your degree?" she asked quickly.
"No, I think it will be better not. To stop here and try for a
fellowship is my best chance of repaying these poor people the money
which I have taken from them for no purpose."
"I never thought of that," said Meenie. "You are bound in honour to pay
them back, of course."
Paul liked the instantaneous honesty of that "of course." It marked the
naturally honourable character; for "of course," too, they must wait to
marry (young people jump so) till all that money was paid off.
"Fortunately," he said, "I have lived economically, and have not spent
nearly as much as they guaranteed. I got scholarships up to a hundred a
year of my own, and I only took a hundred a year of theirs. They offered
me two hundred. But there's five years at a hundred, that makes five
hundred pounds--a big debt to begin life with."
"Never mind," said Meenie. "You will get a fellowship, and in a few
years you can pay it off."
"Yes," said Paul, "I can pay it off. But I can never pay off the hopes
and aspirations I have blighted. I must become a schoolmaster, or a
barrister, or something of that sort, and never repay them for their
self-sacrifice and devotion in making me whatever I shall become. They
may get back their money, but they will have lost their cherished
Apostle for ever."
"Mr. Owen," Meenie answered solemnly, "the seal of the Apostolate lies
far deeper than that. It was born in you, and no act of yours can shake
it off."
"Meenie," he said, looking at her gently, with a changed
expression--"Meenie, we shall have to wait many years."
"Never mind, Paul," she replied, as naturally as if he had been Paul to
her all her life long, "I can wait if you can. But what will you do for
the immediate present?"
"I have my scholarship," he said; "I can get on partly upon that; and
then I can take pupils; and I have only one year more of it."
So before they parted that night it was all well understood between them
that Paul was to declare his defection from the Church at the earliest
opportunity; that he was to live as best he might till he could take his
degree; that he was then to pay off all the back debt; and that after
all these things he and Meenie might get comfortably married whenever
they were able. As to the Rector and his wife, or any other parental
authorities, they both left them out in the cold as wholly as young
people always do leave their elders out on all similar occasions.
"Maria's a born fool!" said the Rector to his wife a week after Meenie's
return; "I always knew she was a fool, but I never knew she was quite
such a fool as to permit a thing like this. So far as I can get it out
of Edie, and so far as Edie can get it out of Meenie, I understand that
she has allowed Meenie to go and get herself engaged to some Dissenter
fellow, a Shaker, or a Mormon, or a Communist, or something of the sort,
who is the son of a common labourer, and has been sent up to Oxford, Tom
tells me, by his own sect, to be made into a gentleman, so as to give
some sort or colour of respectability to their absurd doctrines. I shall
send the girl to town at once to Emily's, and she shall stop there all
next season, to see if she can't manage to get engaged to some young man
in decent society at any rate."