The Captives Part 14

"You'll think it odd, Martin, when you know how often I have to preach and speak in public, that I should find it hard to talk--but I never, with any man alone, could find words easily. I know so little. It is G.o.d's punishment for some selfish nervousness and shyness in me, that even now when I am an old man I cannot speak as one man to another.

There was once, I remember, a young man who had heard me preach and was moved by my words and begged to see me in private. He came one evening; he was tempted to commit a terrible sin. He depended upon me to save him and I could say nothing. I struggled, I prayed, but it was incredible to me that any man could be tempted to such a thing. I spoke only conventional words that meant nothing. He went away from me, and his lost soul is now upon me and will always be ... but, Martin, what I would say beyond everything is--do not let us separate. Be free as you must be free, as you should be free--but stay with me--remain with me.

I am an old man; I have longed for you as I think no other father can ever have longed for his son. They tell me that I cannot live many more years. G.o.d chooses His time. Be with me, Martin, for a little while even though I may seem old to you and foolish. Perhaps things will come back to you that you have long forgotten. You were once pledged and it was a vow that is not easily removed--but it is enough for the present if you will be with me a little, give me some of your time--give the old days a chance to come back." He laid his hand upon his son's.

The sudden touch of the dry, hot, trembling skin filled Martin's heart with the strangest confusion of affection, embarra.s.sment and some familiar pathos. In just that way ten years before he had felt his father's hand and had thought: "How old he's getting! ... How I shall miss him! ... I hope nothing happens to him!" In the very balance of his father's sentences and the deliberate choice of words there had been something old-fashioned and remote from all the life and scramble of Martin's recent years. Now he took his father's hand in his own strong grasp and said gruffly:

"That's all right, father ... I'm not going while you want me ... You and I ... always ... it's just the same now."

But even as he spoke he felt as though he were giving some pledge that was to involve him in far more than he could see before him. Then, with a happy sense that the sentimental part of the conversation was over, he began to talk about all kinds of things. He let himself go and even, after a while, began to feel the whole thing really jolly and pleasant.

His father wanted waking up. He had been here so long, with all these awful frumps, brooding over one idea, never getting away from this Religion.

Martin began to imagine himself very cleverly leading his father into a normal natural life, taking him to see things, making him laugh; it would do his health a world of good.

Then, quite suddenly, the old man said:

"And what do you remember, Martin, of the old days here, the days when you were quite small, when we lived in Mason Street?"

What did Martin remember? He remembered a good deal. He was surprised when he began to think ... "Did he remember ..." his father suggested a scene, a day--yes, he remembered that. His father continued, as though it had been for his own pleasure.

The scenes, the hours returned with a vividness and actuality that thronged the room.

He could see Mason Street with its grocer's shop at the corner, its Baths and Public Library, the sudden little black dips into the areas as the houses followed one another, the lamp-post opposite their window that had always excited him because it leaned inwards a little as though it would presently tumble. He remembered the fat short cook with the pink cotton dress who wheezed and blew so when she had to climb the stairs. He remembered the rooms that would seem bare enough to him now, he supposed, but were then filled with exciting possibilities--a little round brown table, his mother's work-box with mother-of-pearl sh.e.l.ls upon the cover, a stuffed bird with bright blue feathers under a gla.s.s case, a screen with coloured pictures of battles and horses and elephants casted upon it. He remembered the exact sound that the tinkling bell made when it summoned them to meals, he remembered the especial smell of beef and carpet that was the dining-room, he remembered a little door of coloured gla.s.s on the first landing, a cupboard that had in it sugar and apples, a room full of old books piled high all about the floor upon the dry and dusty boards ... a thousand other things came crowding around him.

Then, as his father's voice continued, out from the background there came his own figure, a small, pale, excited boy in short trousers.

He was immensely excited--that was the princ.i.p.al thing. It was evening, the house seemed to swim in candlelight and smoke through which things could be seen only dimly.

Something wonderful was about to happen to him. He was in a state of glory, very close to G.o.d, so close that he could almost see Him sitting with His long white beard in the middle of a cloud, watching Martin with interest and affection. He was pleased with Martin and Martin was pleased with himself. At the same time as his pleasure he was aware that the stuff of his new black trousers tickled his knees and that he was hungry.

He saw his small sister Amy for a moment and expressed quite effectively by a smile and nod of the head his immeasurable superiority to her ...

They, he and his father, drove in a cab to the Chapel. Of what followed then he was now less aware. He remembered that he was in a small room with two men, that they all took off their clothes (he remembered that one man, very stout and red, looked funny without his clothes), that they put on long white night-shirts, that his was too long for him and that he tripped over it, that they all three walked down the centre of the Chapel, which was filled with eyes, mouths and boots, and that he was very conscious of his toe-nails, which had never been exposed in public before, that they came to a round stone place filled with water and into this after the two men he was dipped, that he didn't scream from the coldness, of the water although he wanted to, that he was wrapped in a blanket and finally carried home in an ecstasy of triumph.

What happiness followed! The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of G.o.d and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part.

G.o.d had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ever safe and happy.

It was not only that he was a.s.sured that when the moment arrived he would have, in Heaven, a "good time"--it was that he was greatly exalted, so that he gave his twopence a week pocket-money to his school-fellows, never pulled Amy's hair, never teased his mother's canary. He had been aware, young though he was, of another life. He prayed and prayed, he went to an endless succession of services and meetings. There was Mr. Bates, one of the leading brethren then, who loved him and spoilt him ... above all, through and beyond it all, there was his father, who adored him and whom he adored.

That adoration--of G.o.d, of his father, of life itself! Was it possible that a small boy, normal and ordinary enough in other ways, could feel so intensely such pa.s.sions?

The dark room was crowding him with figures and scenes. A whole world that he had thought dead and withered was beating--urgently, insistently, upon his consciousness.

In another instant he did not know what surrender, what acknowledgement he might have made. It seemed to him that nothing in life was worth while save to receive again, in some fashion, that vitality that he had once known.

The door was flung open; a stream of light struck the dark; the shadows, memories, fled, helter-skelter, like crackling smoke into the air.

Amy stood in the doorway, blinking at him, scowling. He knew, for some undefined reason, that he could not meet his father's eyes. He jumped up and walked to the window.

CHAPTER II

EXPECTATION

Maggie developed marvellously during her first weeks in London. It could not truthfully be said that her aunts gave her great opportunity for development; so far as they were concerned she might as well have been back in the green seclusion of St. Dreots.

It is true that she accompanied her Aunt Elizabeth upon several shopping expeditions, and on one hazardous afternoon they penetrated the tangled undergrowth of Harrods' Stores; on all these occasions Maggie was too deeply occupied with the personal safety and happiness of her aunt to have leisure for many observations.

Aunt Elizabeth always started upon her shopping expeditions with the conviction that something terrible was about to happen, and the expectation of this overwhelming catastrophe paralysed her nerves.

Maggie wondered how it could have been with her when she had ventured forth alone. She would stand in the middle of the street hesitating as to the right omnibus for her to take, she was often uncertain of the direction in which she should go. She would wave her umbrella at an omnibus, and then when it began to slacken in answer to her appeal, would discover that it was not the one that she needed, and would wave her umbrella furiously once more. Then when at last she had mounted the vehicle she would flood the conductor with a stream of little questions, darting her eyes angrily at all her neighbours as though they were gathered there together to murder her at the earliest opportunity. She would be desperately confused when asked to pay for her ticket, would be unable to find her purse, and then when she discovered it would scatter its contents upon the ground. In such an agony would she be at the threatened pa.s.sing of her destination that she would spring up at every pause of the omnibus, striking her nearest neighbour's eye or nose with her umbrella, apologising nervously, and then, because she thought she had been too forward with a stranger, staring fiercely about her and daring any one to speak to her. Upon the day that she visited Harrods' she spent the greater part of her time in the lift because she always wished to be somewhere where she was not, and because it always went up when she wished it to go down and down when she wished it to go up. Maggie, upon this eventful occasion, did her best, but she also was bewildered, and wondered how any of the attendants found their way home at night. Before the end of the afternoon Aunt Elizabeth was not far from tears. "It isn't cutlery we want. I told the man that it was saucepans. They pay us no attention at all. You aren't any help to me, Maggie." They arrived in a room filled with performing gramophones. This was the final blow. Aunt Elizabeth, trembling all over, refused either to advance or retreat. "Will you please," said Maggie very firmly to a beautifully clothed young man with hair like a looking-gla.s.s, "show us the way to the street?" He very kindly showed them, and it was not until they were in the homeward omnibus that Aunt Elizabeth discovered that she had bought nothing at all.

Nevertheless, although Maggie collected but little interesting detail from these occasions, she did gather a fine general impression of whirling movement and adventure. One day she would plunge into it--meanwhile it was better that she should move slowly and a.s.semble gradual impressions. The solid caution that was mingled in her nature with pa.s.sionate feeling and enthusiasm taught her admirable wisdom.

Aunt Anne, it seemed, never moved beyond the small radius of her home and the Chapel. She attended continually Bible-meetings, prayer-meetings, Chapel services. She had one or two intimate friends, a simple and devout old maid called Miss Pyncheon, Mr. Magnus, whom Maggie had seen on the day of her arrival, Mr. Thurston, to whom Maggie had taken an instant dislike, and Amy Warlock. She visited these people and they visited her; for the rest she seemed to take no exercise, and her declared love for the country did not lead her into the Parks. She was more silent, if possible, than she had been at St. Dreots, and read to herself a great deal in the dark and melancholy drawing-room.

Although she talked very little to Maggie, the girl fancied that her eye was always upon her. There was a strange att.i.tude of watchfulness in her silent withdrawal from her scene as though she had retired simply because she could see the better from a distance.

She liked Maggie to read the Bible to her, and for an hour of every evening Maggie did this. For some reason the girl greatly disliked this hour and dreaded its approach. It was perhaps because it seemed to bring before her the figure of her father, the words as they fell from her lips seemed to be repeated by him as he stood behind her. Nothing was more unexpected by her than the way that those last days at St.

Dreots crowded about her. They should surely have been killed by the colours and interests of this new life. It appeared that they were only accentuated by them. Especially did she see that night when she had watched beside her father's dead body ... she saw the stirring of the beard, the shape of the feet beneath the sheet, the flicker of the candle. Apart from this one hour of the day, however, she was happy, excited, expectant. What it was that she expected she did not exactly know, but there were so many things that life might now do for her. One thing that very evidently it did not intend to do for her was to make her tidy, careful, and a good manager. Old Martha, the Cardinal servant, was her sworn enemy, and, indeed, with reason. It seemed that Maggie could not remember the things that she was told: lighted lamps were left long after they should have been extinguished, one night the bathroom was drowned in water by a running tap, her clothes were not mended, she was never punctual at meal-times. And yet no one could call her a dreamy child. She could, about things that interested her, be remarkably sharp and penetrating. She had a swift and often successful intuition about characters; facts and details about places or people she never forgot. She had a hard, severe, entirely masculine sense of independence, an ironic contempt for sentimentality, a warm, ardent loyalty and simplicity in friendship. Her carelessness in all the details of life sprang from her long muddled years at St. Dreots, the lack of a mother's guidance and education, the careless selfishness of her father's disregard of her. She struggled, poor child, pa.s.sionately to improve herself. She sat for hours in her room working at her clothes, trying to mend her stockings, the holes in her blouses, the rip of the braid at the bottom of her skirt. She waited listening for the cuckoo to call that she might be in exact time for luncheon or dinner, and then, as she listened, some thought would occur to her, and, although she did not dream, her definite tracking of her idea would lead her to forget all time. Soon there would be Martha's knock on the door and her surly ill-tempered voice:

"Quarter of an hour they've been sitting at luncheon, Miss."

And her clothes! The aunts had said that she must buy what was necessary, and she had gone with Aunt Elizabeth to choose all the right things. They had, between them, bought all the wrong ones. Maggie had no idea of whether or no something suited her; a dress, a hat that would look charming upon any one else looked terrible upon her; she did not know what was the matter, but nothing became her!

Her new friend, Caroline Smith, laughing and chattering, tried to help her. Caroline had very definite ideas about dress, and indeed spent the majority of her waking hours in contemplation of that subject. But she had never, she declared, been, in all her life, so puzzled. She was perfectly frank.

"But it looks AWFUL, Maggie dear, and yesterday in the shop it didn't seem so bad, although that old pig wouldn't let us have it the way we wanted. It's just as it is with poor mother, who gets fatter and fatter, diet herself as she may, so that she can wear nothing at all now that looks right, and is only really comfortable in her night-dress. Of course you're not FAT, Maggie darling, but it's your figure--everything's either too long or too short for you. You don't mind my speaking so frankly, do you? I always say one's either a friend or not, and if one's a friend why then be as rude as you please. What's friendship for?"

They were, in fact, the greatest possible friends. Maggie had never possessed a girl-friend before. She had, in the first days of the acquaintance, been shy and very silent--she had been afraid of going too far. But soon she had seen that she could not go too far and could not say too much. She had discovered then a mult.i.tude of new happinesses.

There was nothing, she found, too small, too unimportant to claim Caroline's interest. Caroline wished to know everything, and soon Maggie disclosed to her many things that she had told to no other human being in her life before. It could not honestly be said that Caroline had many wise comments to make on Maggie's experiences. Her att.i.tude was one of surprised excitement. She was amazed by the most ordinary incidents and conversations. She found Maggie's life quite incredible.

"You must stop me, Maggie, if I hurt your feelings. But really! ...

Why, if poor father had treated me like that I'd have gone straight out of the house and never come back. I would indeed ... Well, here you are now, dear, and we must just see each other as often as ever we can!"

They made a strange contrast, Maggie so plain in her black dress with her hair that always looked as though it had been cut short like a boy's, her strong rough movements, and Caroline, so neat and shining and entirely feminine that her only business in the world seemed to be to fascinate, beguile and bewilder the opposite s.e.x. Whatever the aunts may have thought of this new friendship, they said nothing. Caroline had her way with them as with every one else. Maggie wondered often as to Aunt Anne's, real thoughts. But Aunt Anne only smiled her dim cold smile, gave her cold hand into the girl's warm one and said, "Good afternoon, Caroline. I hope your father and mother are well." "They're dears, you know," Caroline said to Maggie; "I do admire your Aunt Anne; she keeps to herself so. I wish I could keep to myself, but I never was able to. Poor mother used to say when I was quite little, 'You'll only make yourself cheap, Carrie, if you go on like that. Don't make yourself cheap, dear.' But what I say is, one's only young once and the people who don't want one needn't have one."

Nevertheless there were, even in these very early days, directions into which Maggie did not follow her new friend. Young as she was in many things, in some ways she was very old indeed. She had been trained in another school from Caroline; she felt from the very first that upon certain questions her lovely friend was inexperienced, foolish and dangerously reckless. On the question of "men," for instance, Maggie, with clear knowledge of her father and her uncle, refused to follow Caroline's light and easy excursions. Caroline was disappointed; she had a great deal to say on the subject and could speak, she a.s.sured Maggie, from a vast variety of experience: "Men are all the same. What I say is, show them you don't care 'that' about them and they'll come after you. Not that I care whether they do or no. Only it's fun the way they go on. You just try, Maggie."

But Maggie had her own thoughts. They were not imparted to her friend.

Nothing indeed appeared to her more odd than that Caroline should be so wise in some things and so foolish in others. She did not know that it was her own strange upbringing that gave her independent estimates and judgments.

The second influence that, during these first weeks, developed her soul and body was, strangely enough, her aunt's elderly friend, Mr. Magnus.

If Caroline introduced her to affairs of the world, Mr. Magnus introduced her to affairs of the brain and spirit.

She had never before known any one who might be called "clever." Her father was not, Uncle Mathew was not; no one in St. Dreots had been clever. Mr. Magnus, of course, was "clever" because he wrote books, two a year.

But to be an author, was not a claim to Maggie's admiration. As has been said before, she did not care for reading, and considered that the writing of books was a second-rate affair. The things that Mr. Magnus might have done with his life if he had not spent it in writing books!

She regarded him with the kind indulgence of an elder who watches a child brick-building. He very quickly discovered her att.i.tude and it amused him. They became the most excellent friends over it. She on her side very quickly discovered the true reason of his coming so often to their house; he loved Aunt Anne. At its first appearance this discovery was so strange and odd that Maggie refused to indulge it. Love seemed so far from Aunt Anne. She greeted Mr. Magnus from the chill distance whence she greeted the rest of the world--she gave him no more than she gave any one else--But Mr. Magnus did not seem to desire more. He waited patiently, a slightly ironical and self-contemptuous worshipper at a shrine that very seldom opened its doors, and never admitted him to its altar. It was this irony that Maggie liked in him; she regarded herself in the same way. Their friendship was founded on a mutual detachment. It prospered exceedingly.