The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford Part 8

Some weeks afterwards I happened to be in the neighbourhood of the b.u.t.terfly-catcher's house, and I called. He was at home, and welcomed me cordially. The first thing he did was to show me his little museum.

It was really a wonderful exhibition, and as I saw the creatures in lines, and noted the amazing variations of the single type, I was filled with astonishment. Seeing the b.u.t.terflies systematically arranged was a totally different thing from seeing a b.u.t.terfly here and there, and gave rise to altogether new thoughts. My friend knew his subject from end to end, and I envied him his mastery of it. I had often craved the mastery of some one particular province, be it ever so minute. I half or a quarter knew a mult.i.tude of things, but no one thing thoroughly, and was never sure, just when I most wanted to be sure. We got into conversation, and I was urged to stay to dinner. I consented, and found that my friend's household consisted of himself alone. After dinner, as we became a little more communicative, I asked him when and how he took to this pursuit.

"It will be twenty-six years ago next Christmas," said he, "since I suffered a great calamity. You will forgive my saying anything about it, as I have no a.s.surance that the wound which looks healed may not break out again. Suffice to say, that for some ten years or more my thoughts were almost entirely occupied with death and our future state.

There is a strange fascination about these topics to many people, because they are topics which permit a great deal of dreaming, but very little thinking: in fact, true thinking, in the proper sense of the word, is impossible in dealing with them. There is no rigorous advance from one position to another, which is really all that makes thinking worth the name. Every man can imagine or say cloudy things about death and the future, and feel himself here, at least, on a level with the ablest brain which he knows.

"I went on gazing gloomily into dark emptiness, till all life became nothing for me. I did not care to live, because there was no a.s.surance of existence beyond. By the strangest of processes, I neglected the world, because I had so short a time to be in it. It is with absolute horror now that I look back upon those days, when I lay as if alive in a coffin of lead. All pa.s.sions and pursuits were nullified by the ever-abiding sense of mortality. For years this mood endured, and I was near being brought down to the very dust.

"At last, by the greatest piece of good fortune, I was obliged to go abroad. The change, and the obligation to occupy myself about many affairs, was an incalculable blessing to me. While travelling I was struck with the remarkable and tropical beauty of the insects, and especially of the b.u.t.terflies. I captured a few, and brought them home. On showing them to a friend, learned in such matters, I discovered that they were rare, and I had a little cabinet made for them. I looked into the books, found what it was which I had got, and what I had not got.

"Next year it was my duty to go abroad again, and I went with some feeling akin to pleasure, for I wished to add to my store. I increased it considerably, and by the time I returned I had as fine a show as any private person might wish to possess. A good deal of my satisfaction, perhaps, was unaccountable, and no rational explanation can be given of it. But men should not be too curious in a.n.a.lysing and condemning any means which Nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, b.u.t.terflies, or fossils. And yet my newly-acquired pa.s.sion was not altogether inexplicable. I was the owner of something which other persons did not own, and in a little while, in my own limited domain, I was supreme. No man either can study any particular science thoroughly without transcending it; and it is an utter mistake to suppose that, because a student sticks to any one branch, he necessarily becomes contracted.

"However, I am not going to philosophise; I do not like it. All I can say is, that I shun all those metaphysical speculations of former years as I would a path which leads to madness. Other people may be able to occupy themselves with them and be happy; I cannot. I find quite enough in my b.u.t.terflies to exercise my wonder, and yet, on the other hand, my study is not a mere vacant, profitless stare. When you saw me that morning, I was trying to obtain an example which I have long wanted to fill up a gap. I have looked for it for years, but have missed it. But I know it has been seen lately where we met, and I shall triumph at last."

A good deal of all this was to me incomprehensible. It seemed mere solemn trifling compared with the investigation of those great questions with which I had been occupied, but I could not resist the contagion of my friend's enthusiasm when he took me to his little library and identified his treasures with pride, pointing out at the same time those in which he was deficient. He was specially exultant over one minute creature which he had caught himself, which he had not as yet seen figured, and he proposed going to the British Museum almost on purpose to see if he could find it there.

When I got home I made inquiries into the history of my entomologist.

I found that years ago he had married a delicate girl, of whom he was devotedly fond. She died in childbirth, leaving him completely broken.

Her offspring, a boy, survived, but he was a cripple, and grew up deformed. As he neared manhood he developed a satyr-like l.u.s.tfulness, which was almost uncontrollable, and made it difficult to keep him at home without constraint. He seemed to have no natural affection for his father, nor for anybody else, but was cunning with the base, beastly cunning of the ape. The father's horror was infinite. This thing was his only child, and the child of the woman whom he worshipped. He was excluded from all intercourse with friends; for, as the boy could not be said to be mad, he could not be shut up. After years of inconceivable misery, however, l.u.s.t did deepen into absolute lunacy, and the crooked, misshapen monster was carried off to an asylum, where he died, and the father well-nigh went there too.

Before I had been six months amongst the Unitarians, I found life even more intolerable with them than it had been with the Independents. The difference of a little less belief was nothing. The question of Unitarianism was altogether dead to me; and although there was a phase of the doctrine of G.o.d's unity which would now and then give me an opportunity for a few words which I felt, it was not a phase for which my hearers in the least cared or which they understood.

Here, as amongst the Independents, there was the same lack of personal affection, or even of a capability of it--excepting always Mrs. Lane-- and, in fact, it was more distressing amongst the Unitarians than amongst the orthodox. The desire for something like sympathy and love absolutely devoured me. I dwelt on all the instances in poetry and history in which one human being had been bound to another human being, and I reflected that my existence was of no earthly importance to anybody. I could not altogether lay the blame on myself. G.o.d knows that I would have stood against a wall and have been shot for any man or woman whom I loved, as cheerfully as I would have gone to bed, but n.o.body seemed to wish for such a love, or to know what to do with it.

Oh, the humiliations under which this weakness has bent me! Often and often I have thought that I have discovered somebody who could really comprehend the value of a pa.s.sion which could tell everything and venture everything. I have overstepped all bounds of etiquette in obtruding myself on him, and have opened my heart even to shame. I have then found that it was all on my side. For every dozen times I went to his house, he came to mine once, and only when pressed: I have languished in sickness for a month without his finding it out; and if I were to drop into the grave, he would perhaps never give me another thought. If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I should have transferred this burning longing to the unseen G.o.d and have become a devotee. But I was a hundred years too late, and I felt that it was mere cheating of myself and a mockery to think about love for the only G.o.d whom I knew--the forces which maintained the universe.

I am now getting old, and have altered in many things. The hunger and thirst of those years have abated, or rather, the fire has had ashes heaped on it, so that it is well-nigh extinguished. I have been repulsed into self-reliance and reserve, having learned wisdom by experience; but still I know that the desire has not died, as so many other desires have died, by the natural evolution of age. It has been forcibly suppressed, and that is all. If anybody who reads these words of mine should be offered by any young dreamer such a devotion as I once had to offer, and had to take back again refused so often, let him in the name of all that is sacred accept it. It is simply the most precious thing in existence. Had I found anybody who would have thought so, my life would have been redeemed into something which I have often imagined, but now shall never know.

I determined to leave, but what to do I could not tell. I was fit for nothing, and yet I could not make up my mind to accept a life which was simply living. It must be a life, through which some benefit was conferred upon my fellow-creatures. This was mainly delusion. I had not then learned to correct this natural instinct to be of some service to mankind by the thought of the boundlessness of infinity and of Nature's profuseness. I had not come to reflect that, taking into account her eternities, and absolute exhaustlessness, it was folly in me to fret and fume, and I therefore clung to the hope that I might employ myself in some way which, however feebly, would help mankind a little to the realisation of an ideal. But I was not the man for such a mission. I lacked altogether that concentration which binds up the scattered powers into one resistless energy, and I lacked faith. All I could do was to play the vagrant in literature, picking up here and there an idea which attracted me, and presenting it to my flock on the Sunday; the net result being next to nothing.

However, existence like that which I had been leading was intolerable, and change it I must. I accordingly resigned, and with ten pounds in my pocket, which was all that remained after paying my bills, I came to London, thinking that until I could settle what to do, I would try and teach in a school. I called on an agent somewhere near the Strand, and after a little negotiation, was engaged by a gentleman who kept a private establishment at Stoke Newington.

Thither I accordingly went one Monday afternoon in January, about two days before the term commenced. When I got there, I was shown into a long schoolroom, which had been built out from the main building. It was dark, save for one candle, and was warmed by a stove. The walls were partly covered with maps, and at one end of the room hung a diagram representing a globe, on which an immense amount of wasted ingenuity had been spent to produce the illusion of solidity. The master, I was told, was out, and in this room with one candle I remained till nine o'clock. At that time a servant brought me some bread and cheese on a small tray, with half-a-pint of beer. I asked for water, which was given me, and she then retired. The tray was set down on the master's raised desk, and sitting there I ate my supper in silence, looking down upon the dimly-lighted forms, and forward into the almost absolute gloom.

At ten o'clock a man, who seemed as if he were the knife and boot- cleaner, came and said he would show me where I was to sleep. We pa.s.sed through the schoolroom into a kind of court, where there was a ladder standing against a trap-door. He told me that my bedroom was up there, and that when I got up I could leave the ladder down, or pull it up after me, just as I pleased.

I ascended and found a little chamber, duly furnished with a chest of drawers, bed, and washhand-stand. It was tolerably clean and decent; but who shall describe what I felt! I went to the window and looked out. There were scattered lights here and there, marking roads, but as they crossed one another, and now and then stopped where building had ceased, the effect they produced was that of bewilderment with no clue to it. Further off was the great light of London, like some unnatural dawn, or the illumination from a fire which could not itself be seen.

I was overcome with the most dreadful sense of loneliness. I suppose it is the very essence of pa.s.sion, using the word in its literal sense, that no account can be given of it by the reason.

Reflecting on what I suffered, then, I cannot find any solid ground for it, and yet there are not half-a-dozen days or nights of my life which remain with me like that one. I was beside myself with a kind of terror, which I cannot further explain. It is possible for another person to understand grief for the death of a friend, bodily suffering, or any emotion which has a distinct cause, but how shall he understand the worst of all calamities, the nameless dread, the efflux of all vitality, the ghostly, haunting horror which is so nearly akin to madness?

It is many years ago since that evening, but while I write I am at the window still, and the yellow flare of the city is still in my eyes. I remember the thought of all the happy homes which lay around me, in which dwelt men who had found a position, an occupation, and, above all things, affection. I know the causelessness of a good deal of all those panic fears and all that suffering, but I tremble to think how thin is the floor on which we stand which separates us from the bottomless abyss.

The next morning I went down into the schoolroom, and after I had been there for some little time, the proprietor of the school made his appearance. He was not a bad man, nor even unkind in his way, but he was utterly uninteresting, and as commonplace as might be expected after having for many years done nothing but fight a very uphill battle in boarding the sons of tradesfolk, and teaching them, at very moderate rates, the elements of Latin, and the various branches of learning which const.i.tute what is called a commercial education. He said that he expected some of the boys back that day; that when they came, he should wish me to take my meals with them, but that meanwhile he would be glad if I would breakfast with him and his wife. This accordingly I did. What his wife was like I have almost entirely forgotten, and I only saw her once again. After breakfast he said I could go for a walk, and for a walk I went; wandering about the dreary, intermingled chaos of fields with damaged hedges, and new roads divided into building plots.

Meanwhile one or two of the boys had made their appearance, and I therefore had my dinner with them. After dinner, as there was nothing particular to do, I was again dismissed with them for a walk just as the light of the winter afternoon was fading. My companions were dejected, and so was I! The wind was south-easterly, cold, and raw, and the smoke came up from the region about the river and shrouded all the building plots in fog. I was now something more than depressed.

It was absolutely impossible to endure such a state of things any longer, and I determined that, come what might, I would not stop. I considered whether I should leave without saying a word--that is to say, whether I should escape, but I feared pursuit and some unknown legal proceedings.

When I got home, therefore, I sought the princ.i.p.al, and informed him that I felt so unwell that I was afraid I must throw up my engagement at once. He naturally observed that this was a serious business for him; that my decision was very hasty--what was the matter with me? I might get better; but he concluded, after my reiterated a.s.severations that I must go, with a permission to resign, only on one condition, that I should obtain an equally efficient subst.i.tute at the same salary. I was more agitated than ever. With my natural tendency to believe the worst, I had not the least expectation of finding anybody who would release me.

The next morning I departed on my errand. I knew a poor student who had been at college with me, and who had nothing to do, and to him I betook myself. I strove--as even now I firmly believe--not to make the situation seem any better than it was, and he consented to take it. I have no clear recollection of anything that happened till the following day, excepting that I remember with all the vividness of actual and present sensuous perception lugging my box down the ladder and sending for a cab. I was in a fever lest anything should arrest me, but the cab came, and I departed. When I had got fairly clear of the gates, I literally cried tears of joy--the first and the last of my life. I am constrained now, however, to admit that my trouble was but a bubble blown of air, and I doubt whether I have done any good by dwelling upon it.

CHAPTER IX--OXFORD STREET

Until I had actually left, I hardly knew where I was going, but at last I made up my mind I would go to Reuben Shapcott, another fellow- student, whom I knew to be living in lodgings in one of the streets just then beginning to creep over the unoccupied ground between Camden Town and Haverstock Hill, near the Chalk Farm turnpike gate. To his address I betook myself, and found him not at home. He, like me, had been unsuccessful as a minister, and wrote a London letter for two country papers, making up about 100 or 120 pounds a year by preaching occasionally in small Unitarian chapels in the country. I waited till his return, and told him my story. He advised me to take a bed in the house where he was staying, and to consider what could be done.

At first I thought I would consult Mardon, but I could not bring myself to go near him. How was I to behave in Mary's presence? During the last few months she had been so continually before me, that it would have been absolutely impossible for me to treat her with a.s.sumed indifference. I could not have trusted myself to attempt it. When I had been lying alone and awake at night, I had thought of all the endless miles of hill and valley that lay outside my window, separating me from the one house in which I could be at peace; and at times I scarcely prevented myself from getting up and taking the mail train and presenting myself at Mardon's door, braving all consequences. With the morning light, however, would come cooler thoughts and a dull sense of impossibility.

This, I know, was not pure love for her; it was a selfish pa.s.sion for relief. But then I have never known what is meant by a perfectly pure love. When Christian was in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and, being brought to the mouth of h.e.l.l, was forced to put up his sword, and could do no other than cry, O Lord, I beseech Thee, deliver my soul, he heard a voice going before him and saying, Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear none ill, for Thou art with me. And by and by the day broke. "Then," said Christian, "He hath turned the Shadow of Death into morning. Whereupon Christian sang -

"Oh, world of wonders! (I can say no less) That I should be preserved in that distress That I have met with here! Oh, blessed be That hand that from it hath delivered me!"

This was Christian's love for G.o.d, and for G.o.d as his helper. Was that perfectly pure? However, this is a digression. I determined to help myself in my own way, and thought I would try the publishers. One morning I walked from Camden Town to Paternoster Row. I went straightway into two or three shops and asked whether they wanted anybody. I was ready to do the ordinary work it of a publisher's a.s.sistant, and aspired no higher. I met with several refusals, some of them not over-polite, and the degradation--for so I felt it--of wandering through the streets and suing for employment cut me keenly.

I remember one man in particular, who spoke to me with the mechanical brutality with which probably he replied to a score of similar applications every week. He sat in a little gla.s.s box at the end of a long dark room lighted with gas. It was a bitterly cold room, with no contrivances for warming it, but in his box there was a fire burning for his own special benefit. He surveyed all his clerks unceasingly, and woe betide the unhappy wretch who was caught idling. He and his slaves reminded me of a thrashing-machine which is worked by horses walking round in a ring, the driver being perched on a high stool in the middle and armed with a long whip.

While I was waiting his pleasure he came out and spoke to one or two of his miserable subordinates words of directest and sharpest rebuke, without anger or the least loss of self-possession, and yet without the least attempt to mitigate their severity. I meditated much upon him.

If ever I had occasion to rebuke anybody, I always did it apologetically, unless I happened to be in a flaming pa.s.sion--and this was my habit, not from any respectable motive of consideration for the person rebuked, but partly because I am timid, and partly because I shrink from giving pain. This man said with perfect ease what I could not have said unless I had been wrought up to white heat. With all my dislike to him, I envied him: I envied his complete certainty; for although his language was harsh in the extreme, he was always sure of his ground, and the victim upon whom his lash descended could never say that he had given absolutely no reason for the chastis.e.m.e.nt, and that it was altogether a mistake. I envied also his ability to make himself disagreeable and care nothing about it; his power to walk in his own path, and his resolve to succeed, no matter what the cost might be.

As I left him, it occurred to me that I might be more successful perhaps with a publisher of whom I had heard, who published and sold books of a sceptical turn. To him I accordingly went, and although I had no introductions or recommendatory letters, I was received, if not with a cordiality, at least with an interest which surprised me. He took me into a little back shop, and after hearing patiently what I wanted, he asked me somewhat abruptly what I thought of the miracles in the Bible. This was a curious question if he wished to understand my character; but his mind so constantly revolved in one circle, and existed so completely by hostility to the prevailing orthodoxy, that belief or disbelief in it was the standard by which he judged men. It was a very absurd standard doubtless, but no more absurd than many others, and not so absurd then as it would be now, when heresy is becoming more fashionable.

I explained to him as well as I could what my position was; that I did not suppose that the miracles actually happened as they are recorded, but that, generally speaking, the miracle was a very intense statement of a divine truth; in fact, a truth which was felt with a more than common intensity seemed to take naturally a miraculous expression.

Hence, so far from neglecting the miraculous stories of the Bible as simply outside me, I rejoiced in them more, perhaps, than in the plain historical or didactic prose.

He seemed content, although hardly to comprehend, and the result was that he asked me if I would help him in his business. In order to do this, it would be more economical if I would live in his house, which was too big for him. He promised to give me 40 pounds a year, in addition to board and lodging. I joyously a.s.sented, and the bargain was struck.

The next day I came to my new quarters. I found that he was a bachelor, with a niece, apparently about four or five and twenty years old, acting as a housekeeper, who a.s.sisted him in literary work. My own room was at the top of the house, warm, quiet, and comfortable, although the view was nothing but a wide reaching a.s.semblage of chimney-pots. My hours were long--from nine in the morning till seven in the evening; but this I did not mind. I felt that if I was not happy, I was at least protected, and that I was with a man who cared for me, and for whom I cared. The first day I went there, he said that I could have a fire in my bedroom whenever I chose, so that I could always retreat to it when I wished to be by myself. As for my duties, I was to sell his books, keep his accounts, read proofs, run errands, and in short do just what he did himself.

After my first morning's work we went upstairs to dinner, and I was introduced to "my niece Theresa." I was rather surprised that I should have been admitted to a house in which there lived a young woman with no mother nor aunt, but this surprise ceased when I came to know more of Theresa and her uncle. She had yellowish hair which was naturally waved, a big arched head, greyish-blue eyes, so far as I could make out, and a mouth which, although it had curves in it, was compressed and indicative of great force of character. She was rather short, with square shoulders, and she had a singularly vigorous, firm walk. She had a way, when she was not eating or drinking, of sitting back in her chair at table and looking straight at the person with whom she was talking.

Her uncle, whom, by the way, I had forgotten to name--his name was Wollaston--happened to know some popular preacher whom I knew, and I said that I wondered so many people went to hear him, for I believed him to be a hypocrite, and hypocrisy was one of the easiest of crimes to discover. Theresa, who had hitherto been silent, and was reclining in her usual att.i.tude, instantly broke out with an emphasis and directness which quite startled me.

"The easiest to discover, do you think, Mr. Rutherford? I think it is the most difficult, at least for ordinary persons; and when they do discover it, I believe they like it, especially if it is successful.

They like the sanction it gives to their own hypocrisy. They like a man to come to them who will say to them, 'We are all hypocrites together,' and who will put his finger to his nose and comfort them.

Don't you think so yourself?"

In conversation I was always a bad hand at a.s.suming a position contrary to the one a.s.sumed by the person to whom I might be talking--nor could I persistently maintain my own position if it happened to be opposed.

I always rather tried to see as my opponent saw, and to discover how much there was in him with which I could sympathise. I therefore a.s.sented weakly to Theresa, and she seemed disappointed. Dinner was just over; she got up and rang the bell and went out of the room.

I found my work very hard, and some of it even loathsome. Particularly loathsome was that part of it which brought me into contact with the trade. I had to sell books to the booksellers' a.s.sistants, and I had to collect books myself. These duties are usually undertaken in large establishments by men specially trained, who receive a low rate of wages and who are rather a rough set. It was totally different work to anything I had ever had to do before, and I suffered as a man with soft hands would suffer who was suddenly called to be a blacksmith or a dock-labourer.

Specially, too, did I miss the country. London lay round me like a mausoleum. I got into the habit of rising very early in the morning and walking out to Kensington Gardens and back before breakfast, varying my route occasionally so as even to reach Battersea Bridge, which was always a favourite spot with me. Kensington Gardens and Battersea Bridge were poor subst.i.tutes for the downs, and for the level stretch by the river towards the sea where I first saw Mardon, but we make too much of circ.u.mstances, and the very pressure of London produced a sensibility to whatever loveliness could be apprehended there, which was absent when loveliness was always around me. The stars seen in Oxford Street late one night; a sunset one summer evening from Lambeth pier; and, above everything, Piccadilly very early one summer morning, abide with me still, when much that was more romantic has been forgotten. On the whole, I was not unhappy. The constant outward occupation prevented any eating of the heart or undue brooding over problems which were insoluble, at least for my intellect, and on that very account fascinated me the more.

I do not think that Wollaston cared much for me personally. He was a curious compound, materialistic yet impulsive, and for ever drawn to some new thing; without any love for anybody particularly, as far as I could see, and yet with much more general kindness and philanthropy than many a man possessing much stronger sympathies and antipathies.

There was no holy of holies in him, into which one or two of the elect could occasionally be admitted and feel G.o.d to be there. He was no temple, but rather a comfortable, hospitable house open to all friends, well furnished with books and pictures, and free to every guest from garret to cellar. He had "liberal" notions about the relationship between the s.e.xes. Not that he was a libertine, but he disbelieved in marriage, excepting for so long as husband and wife are a necessity to one another. If one should find the other uninteresting, or somebody else more interesting, he thought there ought to be a separation.