Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers Part 9

"I've nothing particular to say."

"You never have anything to say when you've been reading. Now if I read a bit of the newspaper, I've always something to talk about."

She was silent, and her husband continued his tune.

"Miriam, my dear, you aren't well. Are you in pain?"

Mr. Farrow never understood any suffering unless it was an ache of some bind.

"Let me get you just a drop of brandy with some ginger in it."

"No, thank you."

"Yes, you will have just a drop," and he jumped up at once and went to the cupboard.

"I tell you I will not."

The "not" came out with such emphasis that he desisted and sat down.

The monkey lay on the table, the accordion lay there too; Mr. Farrow stopped his whistling and sat back in his chair with his finger to his mouth. At last, he took up the book, turned it over, and put it down again. He loved his wife after his fashion, and could not bear to see anybody distressed. He placed his chair beside hers, and lifting her arm, put it round his neck, she nothing resisting.

"Tell me now, there's a dear, what's the matter," and he kissed her.

"Nothing," she said, somewhat softened by his caresses.

"That's right, my twopenny," a name he used confidentially to her. "A little faint; the room is rather close," and he opened the window a trifle at the top, returning to his seat, and embracing her again.

Yet, though she yielded, it was not Mr. Farrow who held her in his arms; she purposely strove to think an imaginary Romeo's head was on her neck--his face was something like the face of Montgomery--and she kept up the illusion all that night. When she came down to breakfast and sat opposite her husband, it struck her suddenly that she had cheated him and was a sinner.

In the afternoon she went out for a stroll through the streets, and up to the monument in the park. Cowfold was busy, for it was market-day.

Sheep-pens were in the square full of sheep, and men were purchasing them and picking them out as they were sold; dogs were barking; the wandering dealer who pitched his earthenware van at the corner was ringing his plates together to prove them indestructible; old Madge Campion, who sold gooseberry-tarts and hot mutton-pies on her board under an awning supported by clothes-props, was surrounded by a shoal of children, as happy as the sunshine; the man with the panorama was exhibiting, at one halfpenny a head, the murder of Lord William Russell to a string of boys and girls who mounted the stool in turn to look through the gla.s.ses; and the cheapjack was expatiating on the merits of cutlery, pictures, fire-irons, and proving that his bra.s.s candlestick, honestly-worth-ten-shillings-but-obtainable-at-one-and-four-pence- because-he-really-could-not-cart-it-about-any-longer answered the double purpose of a candlestick and burglar-alarm by reason of the tremendous click of the spring, which anybody might--if they liked--mistake for a pistol.

Through all the crowd Miriam walked unsympathetic. She cursed the const.i.tution with which she was born. She wished she had been endowed with that same blessed thoughtlessness, and that she could be taken out of herself with an interest in pigs, pie-dishes, and Cowfold affairs generally. She went on up to her favourite resting-place; everything was so still, and her eye wandered over the illimitable distance but without pleasure. She recollected that she had an engagement; that two cousins of her husband were coming to tea, and she slowly returned. At half-past five they appeared. They chattered away merrily with Mr.

Farrow, who was as lively as they were, until by degrees Miriam's silence began to operate, and they grew dull. Tea being over, she managed to escape, and as she went upstairs she heard the laughter recommence, for it was she who had suppressed it. Lying down in her room overhead, the noise continued, and it came into her mind that wherever she went she cast a cold shadow. "They must wish me dead,"

she thought.

She had been married so short a time; to what a dreary length the future stretched before her, and she did not love the man she had chosen, as she understood love. How was life to be lived? She did not reproach herself. If she could have done that, if she could have accused herself of deliberate self-betrayal, it would have been better; but she seemed to have been blindfolded, and led by some unknown force into the position in which she found herself.

For some days she went on with her books, but the more she read the more miserable she became, because there was n.o.body with whom she could interchange what she thought about them. She was alarmed at last to find that something very much like hatred to her husband was beginning to develop itself. She was alarmed because she was too much of an Englishwoman to cherish the thought of any desperate remedy, such as separation; and yet the prospect of increasing aversion, which appeared to grow she knew not how, terrified her. One Monday afternoon she had gone out to her usual haunt in the park, and near the monument she saw somebody whom she presently recognised to be Mr. Armstrong, the vicar of Marston-c.o.c.king, a village about four miles from Cowfold. She knew him because he had dealt with her husband, and she had met him in the shop. Marston-c.o.c.king was really nothing better than a hamlet, with a little grey squat church with a little square tower. Adjoining the churchyard was Mr. Armstrong's house. It was not by any means a model parsonage. It was a very plain affair of red brick with a door in the middle, a window with outside shutters on either side, and one story above. There was a small garden in front, protected from the road by white palings and a row of laurels. At the back was a bigger garden, and behind that an orchard. It had one recommendation, worth to its tenant all the beauty of a moss-covered manse in Devonshire, and that was its openness. It was on a little sandy hill. For some unaccountable reason there was a patch of sand in that part of the country, delicious, bright, cheerful yellow and brown sand, lifting itself into little cliffs here and there, pierced with the holes of the sand-martin. It exhaled no fogs, and was never dull even on a November day, when the clay-lands five miles away breathed a vapour which lay blue and heavy on the furrows, and the miry paths, retaining in their sullenness for weeks the impress of every footmark, almost pulled the boots off the feet as you walked along them. At Marston, on the contrary, the rain disappeared in an hour; and the landscape always seemed in the depths of winter to retain something of summer sunshine.

The vicarage was open, open to every wind, and from the top rooms the stars could be seen to rise and set, no trees intercepting the view.

Mr. Armstrong was a man of sixty, a widower with no children. His income from his living was about two hundred pounds annually, and the number of his parishioners all told, men, women, and children, was, as nearly as may be, two hundred. He had been at Marston-c.o.c.king for thirty-five years. He came just after his wife died--how he hardly knew. The living was offered him; he thought the change would do him good, although he did not intend to remain; but there he had stayed, and there was no chance of his removal. He was completely out of the world, troubled himself with no church controversies, and preached little short sermons telling his congregation not to tell lies nor be unkind to one another. Every now and then he introduced into his discourses his one favourite subject, astronomy, and by degrees the labourers in Marston-c.o.c.king knew more about the sky and its daily and nightly changes than many a highly educated person in the city. Mr.

Armstrong, otherwise a very plain, simple creature, always grew eloquent on the common ignorance of the heavens. "Here," he would say, "has G.o.d thrust upon us these marvellous sights. These are not the secrets hidden in the mine--they are forced upon us; and yet we walk with our heads to the earth; we do not know the morning star when we see it, nor can we even recognise the Pleiads and Arcturus which Job knew." Mr. Armstrong had made all his instruments with his own hands, and had even used the top of the church-tower as an observatory. Mrs.

Bullen, the wife of the one farmer in the parish, a lady who wrote the finest of Italian pointed hands, who had been in a Brighton boarding-school for ten years, and had been through "Keith on the Use of the Globes," was much scandalised at this "appropriation of the sacred edifice to secular purposes," as she called it, but she met with no encouragement. The poor people somehow connected heaven with the stars, and Mr. Armstrong never undeceived them, so that they saw nothing improper in the big telescope under the weatherc.o.c.k.

"Really, James," said Mrs. Bullen one morning to Mr. Armstrong's gardener and general man-of-all-work as he was carrying a chair from the house into the tower, "do you think this is quite right? Do you think our Saviour would have sanctioned the erection of a profane instrument over the house of prayer?"

James was very thick-headed, and hardly knew the meaning of these long words, bat he did not like Mrs. Bullen, and he resented her talking to him, a servant, in that strain about his master.

"Ah! Mrs. Bullen, you needn't bother yourself. He's all right with the Saviour,--more so nor many other people, maybe."

"Well, but, James, this is a church consecrated to the service of G.o.d."

"Ah! how do you know? Very likely o' nights--for he's up there when you're abed and asleep--he's a looking into heaven through that there gla.s.s, and, sees G.o.d and the blessed angels."

"Really, James, can you be so ignorant as not to know that G.o.d is a Spirit? I am astonished at you." And Mrs. Bullen pa.s.sed on without a single doubt in her mind that there was a single weak spot in her creed, or that anybody could question its intelligibility and coherence who would not also question the multiplication-table. She told her husband when she got home that it was really dreadful to think that the poor had such low views of the Divine Being. How degraded! No wonder they were so immoral. Bullen, however, did not trouble himself much about these matters. He a.s.sented to what his wife said, but then he called "spirit" "sperrit," to her annoyance, and she could not get him to comprehend what she meant by "entirely immaterial," although it was so plain.

Mr. Armstrong, as we have said, was in front of Miriam. He had brought a small telescope to that point to be tested, for exactly eight miles away was a church-tower with a clock, and he wished to see if he could tell the time by it. Miriam was about to avoid him, but he recognised her and beckoned to her.

"Ah! Mrs. Farrow, is it you? Would yon like to look through my gla.s.s?"

He adjusted it for her, and she saw the hour quite plainly.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "that is wonderful!"

"Yes, it is pretty well. We will now put him in his box. For the box I have to thank Mr. Farrow. He is one of the neatest hands at that kind of work I know, although it is not exactly his trade. I never was much of a joiner."

Miriam was a little surprised. She knew that her husband was clever with his tools, but she had never set any value on his labours. Now, however, she was really struck with the well-polished mahogany and the piece of bra.s.s neatly let into the lid, and when she heard Mr.

Armstrong's praises she began to think a little differently.

"Ah!" he continued, "it is so difficult now to get anybody to take any interest in such a job as that. I have got another box at home made by a professed cabinetmaker, and it is really disgraceful. It will never be right, although I have had it altered two or three times. When it was shut it caught the object-gla.s.s inside. I remedied that defect, but only to create a worse, for then the instrument shook about. So it is, when once a thing is badly done, you had better get rid of it; it is of no use to bother with it. You may depend upon it, it is not bad just here or there, but is bad all through, and the attempt to mend it serves no other purpose than to bring to light hidden weakness. On the other hand, if you are fortunate enough to have work done like Mr.

Farrow's, it is perfect all through. You can never surprise it, so to speak. Just look at it. Look at that green baize rest. There is not the thirty-second part of an inch to spare on either side, and the lid comes down so evenly that you can hardly see where the edge is. Shake the box, and you will not feel a single movement. You have never seen my big telescope at Marston?"

"No."

"Well, if you like, you can come over with your husband any bright night, and I shall be happy to show it to you."

Miriam thanked him, and they parted.

A few days afterwards Mrs. and Mr. Farrow presented themselves at the vicarage. It was a lovely evening, and so clear that the outline of the constellations was obscured by the mult.i.tude of small stars, which usually are not seen, or seen but imperfectly. In the south was Jupiter, mild, magnificent, like a G.o.d amongst the crowd of lesser divinities.

Mr. Armstrong, with all the ardour of an enthusiast for his science, began a little preliminary lecture.

"I am not going to let you peep simply in order to astonish you. I abominate what are called popular lectures for that very reason. If you can be made to understand the apparent revolution of the heavens, that is better than all speculation. To understand is the great thing, not to gape. Now I a.s.sume you know that the earth goes round on its axis, and that consequently the stars seem to revolve round the earth.

But the great difficulty is to realise _how_ they go round, because the axis is not upright, nor yet horizontal, but inclined, and points to that star up there, the pole-star. Consequently the stars describe circles which are not at right angles with the horizon, nor yet parallel to it. That is my first lesson."

Mr. Farrow comprehended without the slightest difficulty, but Miriam could not. She had noticed that some of the stars appear in the east and disappear in the west, but beyond that she had not gone. Mr.

Armstrong continued--

"The next thing you have to bear in mind is that the planets move about amongst the stars. Just think! They go round the sun, and so do we.

The times of their revolution are not coincident with ours, and their path is sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards. Suppose we were in the centre of the planetary system, all these irregularities would disappear; but we are outside, and therefore it looks so complicated."

Again Mr. Farrow comprehended, but to Miriam it was all dark.

"Now," continued Mr. Armstrong, "these are the two great truths which I wish you not simply to acknowledge, but to _feel_. If you can once from your own observation _realise_ the way the stars revolve--why some near the pole never set--why some never rise, and why Venus is seen both before the sun and after it--you will have done yourselves more real good than if you were to dream for years of immeasurable distances, and what is beyond and beyond and beyond, and all that nonsense. The great beauty of astronomy is not what is incomprehensible in it, but its comprehensibility--its geometrical exact.i.tude. Now you may look."

Miriam looked first. Jupiter was in the field. She could not suppress a momentary exclamation of astonished ecstasy at the spectacle. While she watched, Mr. Armstrong told her something about the mighty orb. He pointed out the satellites, contrasted the size of Jupiter with that of the earth, and explained to her the distances at which parts of the planet are from each other as compared with those of New Zealand and America from London. But what affected her most was to see Jupiter's solemn, still movement, and she gazed and gazed, utterly absorbed, until at last he had disappeared. The stars had pa.s.sed thus before her eyes ever since she had been born, but what was so familiar had never before been emphasised or put in a frame, and consequently had never produced its due effect.

Afterwards Mr. Farrow had his turn, and Mr. Armstrong then observed that they had had enough; that it was getting late, but that he hoped they would come again. They started homewards, but their teacher remained solitary till far beyond midnight at his lonely post. The hamlet lay asleep beneath him in profoundest peace. His study had a strange fascination for him. He never wrote anything about it; he never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at Marston-c.o.c.king, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary. It was for some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind needed. It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with his lot.

On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.