Robert Elsmere Part 99

BOOK VII

GAIN AND LOSS

CHAPTER XLVI

A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine and the child he had driven away more than once, but the claims upon himself were becoming so absorbing he did not know how to go even for a few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated, and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children, and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbour, whom he had succeeded in interesting in the case.

Another was a young 'secret springer,' to use the mysterious terms of the trade--Robson by name--whom Elsmere had originally known as a clever workman belonging to the watchmaking colony, and a diligent attendant from the beginning on the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave his lodgings, and his sickly pessimist personality had established a special hold on Robert. He was dying of tumour in the throat, and had become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was a spark of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled him to bear his ills with a mixture of savage humour and clear-eyed despair. In general outlook he was much akin to the author of the _City of Dreadful Night_, whose poems he read; the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him with a kind of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for hours, startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained any hold upon him no one could guess. But from the moment when Elsmere, struck in the lecture-room by the pallid ugly face and swathed neck, began regularly to go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that virtue had gone out of him, and that in some subtle way yet another life had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of strength and comfort.

His lecturing and teaching work also was becoming more and more the instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore more and more difficult to leave. The thoughts of G.o.d, the image of Jesus, which were active and fruitful in his own mind, had been gradually pa.s.sing from the one into the many, and Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion, once nurtured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men and women his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a trembling joy, a humble prostration of the soul before the Eternal Truth, no words can fitly describe. With an ever-increasing detachment of mind from the objects of self and sense, he felt himself a tool in the Great Workman's hand.

'Accomplish Thy purposes in me,' was the cry of his whole heart and life; 'use me to the utmost; spend every faculty I have, O "Thou who mouldest men"!'

But in the end his work itself drove him away. A certain memorable Sat.u.r.day evening brought it about. It had been his custom of late to spend an occasional evening hour after his night-school work in the North R---- Club, of which he was now by invitation a member. Here, in one of the inner rooms, he would stand against the mantelpiece chatting, smoking often with the men. Everything came up in turn to be discussed; and Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence so well as these moments of free discursive intercourse. The mere orator, the mere talker, indeed, would never have gained any permanent hold; but the life behind gave weight to every acute or eloquent word, and importance even to those mere sallies of a boyish enthusiasm which were still common enough in him.

He had already visited the club once during the week preceding this Sat.u.r.day. On both occasions there was much talk of the growing popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street work, of the numbers attending the lectures, the story-telling, the Sunday school, and of the way in which the attractions of it had spread into other quarters of the parish, exciting there, especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid's, an anxious and critical attention. The conversation on Sat.u.r.day night, however, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and curious note of _responsibility_. The men present were evidently beginning to regard the work as _their_ work also, and its success as their interest.

It was perfectly natural, for not only had most of them been his supporters and hearers from the beginning, but some of them were now actually teaching in the night-school or helping in the various branches of the large and overflowing boys' club. He listened to them for a while in his favourite att.i.tude, leaning against the mantelpiece, throwing in a word or two now and then as to how this or that part of the work might be amended or expanded. Then suddenly a kind of inspiration seemed to pa.s.s from them to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new departure.

'Suppose I drop my dictatorship,' he said, 'suppose we set up parliamentary government, are you ready to take your share? Are you ready to combine, to commit yourselves? Are you ready for an effort to turn this work into something lasting and organic?'

The men gathered round him smoked on in silence for a minute. Old Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing away in a corner peculiarly his own, and dedicated to the glorification--in broad Berwickshire--of the experimental philosophers, laid down his pipe and put on his spectacles, that he might grasp the situation better. Then Lestrange, in a dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself further.

Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye kindling.

But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking rapid gestures characteristic of him.

'But no mere social and educational body, mind you!' and his bright commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good thing surely, "yet is there better than it." The real difficulty of every social effort--you know it and I know it--lies, not in the planning of the work, but in the kindling of will and pa.s.sion enough to carry it _through_. And that can only be done by religion--by faith.'

He went back to his old leaning att.i.tude, his hands behind him. The men gazed at him--at the slim figure, the transparent changing face--with a kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly, taking off his gla.s.ses again and clearing his throat--

'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther Elsmere?'

'If you like,' said Robert impetuously. 'I have no fear of the great words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles if it must, and never mind words. Be content to be a new "sect,"

"conventicle," or what not, so long as you feel that you are _something_ with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.'

Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat with his elbows on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert's next words.

'However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these suggestions of mine. "a.s.sociation," "society," "brotherhood," what you will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it life rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested on _trust_ and _memory_!--_trust_ in the G.o.d of experience and history; _memory_ of that G.o.d's work in man, by which alone we know Him and can approach Him.

Well, of that work--I have tried to prove it to you a thousand times--Jesus of Nazareth has become to _us_, by the evolution of circ.u.mstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and epitomes. We have made our protest--we are daily making it--in the face of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present time are excluding him more and more from human love. But now, suppose we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of faith, the gathering and organising of a new Company of Jesus!'

Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the smoke, the lines and groups of working-men in every sort of working dress, the occasional rumbling of huge waggons past the window, the click of gla.s.ses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir of spiritual pa.s.sion which any competent observer might have felt sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was pa.s.sing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of the world.

After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up.

He was commonly known among his fellow-potters as 'the hartist,' because of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his aesthetic susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him their target, but the teasing of him that went on was more or less tempered by the knowledge that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart had been killed before his eyes a year before in a railway accident.

'I dun know,' he said in a high treble voice, 'I dun know whether I speak for anybody but myself--very likely not; but what I _do_ know,'

and he raised his right hand and shook it with a gesture of curious felicity, 'is this--what Mr. Elsmere starts I'll join; where he goes I'll go; what's good enough for him's good enough for me. He's put a new heart and a new stomach into me, and what I've got he shall have, whenever it pleases 'im to call for it! So if he wants to run a new thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with it--I don't know as I'm very clear what he's driving at, nor what good I can do 'im--but when Tom Wheeler's asked for he'll be there!'

A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of a.s.sent ran through the little a.s.sembly. Robert bent forward, his eye glistening, a moved acknowledgment in his look and gesture. But in reality a pang ran through the fiery soul. It was 'the personal estimate,' after all, that was shaping their future and his and the idealist was up in arms for his idea, sublimely jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its power and place.

A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the possible outlines of a possible organisation, and as to the observances which might be devised to mark its religious character. As it flowed on the atmosphere grew more and more electric. A new pa.s.sion, though still timid and awestruck, seemed to shine from the looks of the men standing or sitting round the central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy about him; and when Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon him an almost awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future.

He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he sank into a chair and fainted. He was probably not unconscious very long, but after he had struggled back to his senses, and was lying stretched on the sofa among the books with which it was littered, the solitary candle in the big room throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of death.

How was it he had come to feel so ill? Suddenly, as he looked back over the preceding weeks, the physical weakness and disturbance which had marked them, and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed as possible, took shape, spectre-like, in his mind.

And at the same moment a pa.s.sionate rebellion against weakness and disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, his head in his hands.

'Rest--strength,' he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, 'for the work's sake!'

He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine till the morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to take him and the babe off without delay to the Norman coast, vowing that he would lounge and idle for six whole weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks, she gradually got from him the story of the night before. As he told it, his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, pa.s.sed even to her.

The contrast, however, between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one sensitive dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed by a strange and desolate sense of her comparatively small share in this ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as though he were no longer hers--as though a craving hungry world, whose needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her, claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind and delicate frame.

As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take them in whether for protest or sympathy. She could think only of where to go, what doctor to consult, how she could persuade him to stay away long enough.

There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere announced that he must go off for a while. He so announced it that everybody who heard him understood that his temporary withdrawal was to be the mere preparation for a great effort--the vigil before the tourney; and the eager friendliness with which he was met sent him off in good heart.

Three or four days later he, Catherine and Mary were at Pet.i.tes Dalles, a little place on the Norman coast, near Fecamp, with which he had first made acquaintance years before, when he was at Oxford.

Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered 'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock, Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into a quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and pluck of the two-year-old English _bebe_. By eleven the heat out of doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back--father and mother and trailing child--past the hotels on the _plage_, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had established themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French _bonne_ to look after them; would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the _dejeuner_ waiting for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual warfare. Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless _salon_, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another _comedie humaine_ unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist mind.

Pet.i.tes Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College de France, as good as any at etretat, a tired journalist or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among them, _more suo_, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new acquaintances.

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all round them--the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half tangled gra.s.s and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the patches of heather glowing, the tall gra.s.ses swaying in the breeze, there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.

One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night-jar, and immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.

Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears dropped on to her cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her always smote him to the heart.

'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for myself, but----'

For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?--of youth, of hope, of memory?

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-coloured waves, while he held her hand close and tenderly. No--she was not unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone for ever out of that early joy. Her life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things.

It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the epoch-making fact of our day. 'Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher, 'is sin, and implies it': and while he speaks, the saint in the unbeliever gently smiles down his argument, and suddenly, in the rebel of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.