The History of David Grieve Part 93

Then he sat down to his work. The room in which he sat was made for work. It was walled with plain deal bookcases, which were filled from floor to ceiling, largely with foreign books, as the paper covers testified.

For the rest, anyone looking round would have noticed a s.p.a.cious writing-table in the window, a large and battered armchair beside the fire, a photograph of Lucy over the mantelpiece, oddly flanked by an engraving of Goethe and the head of the German historian Ranke, a folding cane chair which was generally used by Lucy whenever she visited the room, and the horsehair sofa, whereon Sandy was now sleeping amid a surrounding litter of books and papers which only just left room for his small person. If there were other chairs and tables, they were covered deep in literature of one kind or another, and did not count. The large window looked on the garden, and the room opened at the back into the drawing-room, and at one side into the dining-room. On the rug slept the short-haired black collie, whom David had once protected from Louie's dislike--old, blind, and decrepit, but still beloved, especially by Sandy, and still capable of barking a toothless defiance at the outer world.

It was a room to charm a student's eyes, especially on this September afternoon with its veiled and sleepy sun stealing in from the garden, and David fell into his chair, refilled his pipe, and stretched out his hand for a batch of ma.n.u.script which lay on his table, with an unconscious sigh of satisfaction.

The ma.n.u.script represented a pamphlet on certain trade questions by a young Oxford economist. For the firm of Grieve & Co., of Manchester, had made itself widely known for some five years past to the intelligence of northern England by its large and increasing trade in pamphlets of a political, social, or economical kind. They supplied mechanics' inst.i.tutes, political a.s.sociations, and workmen's clubs; nay, more, they had a system of hawkers of their own, which bade fair to extend largely. To be taken up by Grieve & Co. was already an object to young politicians, inventors, or social reformers, who might wish for one reason or another to bring their names or their ideas before the working-cla.s.s of the North.

And Grieve & Co. meant David, sitting smoking and reading in his armchair.

He gave the production now in his hands some careful reading for half an hour or more, then he suddenly threw it down.

'Stuff and nonsense!' he said to himself. 'The man has got the facts about those Oldham mills wrong somehow, I'm certain of it. Where's that letter I had last week?' and, jumping up, he took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and opened a drawer in his writing-table.

The drawer contained mostly bundles of letters, and to the right hand a number of loose ones recently received, and not yet sorted or tied. He looked through these, found what he wanted, and was about to close the drawer when his attention was caught by a thick black note-book lying towards the back of it. He took it out, reminded by it of something he had meant to do, and carried it off with the Oldham letter to his chair. Once settled there again, he turned himself to the confutation of his pamphleteer. But not for long. The black book on his knee exercised a disturbing influence; his under-mind began to occupy itself with it, and at last the Oldham letter was hastily put down, and, taking out a pocket pen, David, with a smile at his own delinquency, opened the black book, turned over many closely written pages, and settled down to write another.

The black book was his journal. He had kept it intermittently since his marriage, rather as a journal of thought than as a journal of events, and he had to add to it to-day some criticisms of a recent book by Renan which had been simmering in his mind for a week or two. Still it contained a certain number of records of events, and, taken generally, its entries formed an epitome of everything of most import--practical, moral, or intellectual--which had entered into David Grieve's life during the eight years since his marriage.

For instance:--

'_April_ 10, 1876.--Our son was born this morning between three and four o'clock, after more than three years of marriage, when both of us had begun to despair a little. Now that he is come, I am decidedly interested in him, but the paternal relation hardly begins at birth, as the mother's does. The father, who has suffered nothing, cannot shut his eyes to the physical ugliness and weakness, the clash of pain and effort, in which the future man begins; the mother, who has suffered everything, seems by a special spell of nature to feel nothing after the birth but the mystery and wonder of the _new creature_, the life born from her life--flesh of her flesh--breath of her breath. Else why is Lucy--who bears pain hardly, and had looked forward much less eagerly to the child, I think, than I had--so proud and content just to lie with the hungry creature beside her? while I am half inclined to say, What! so little for so much?--and to spend so full an energy in resenting the pains of maternity as an unmeaning blot on the scheme of things, that I have none left for a more genial emotion. Altogether, I am disappointed in myself as a father. I seem to have no imagination, and at present I would rather touch a loaded torpedo than my son.'

'_April 30_.--Lucy wishes to have the child christened at St.

Damian's, and, though it goes against me, I have made no objection.

And if she wishes it I shall go. It is not a question of one's own personal consistency or sincerity. The new individuality seems to me to have a claim in the matter, which I have no business to override because I happen to think in this way or that. My son when he grows up may be an ardent Christian. Then, if I had failed to comply with the national religious requirement, and had let him go unbaptized, because of my own beliefs or non-beliefs, he might, I think, rightly reproach me: "I was helpless, and you took advantage."

'Education is different. The duty of the parent to hand on what is best and truest in his own mind to the child is clear. Besides, the child goes on to carry what has been taught him into the open _agora_ of the world's thought, and may there test its value as he pleases. But the omission, in a sense irreparable, of a definite and customary act like baptism from a child's existence, when hereafter the omission may cause him a pang quite disproportionate to any likes or dislikes of mine in the matter, appears to me unjust.

'I talk as if Lucy were not concerned!--or Dora! In reality I shall do as Lucy wills. Only they must not misunderstand me for the future. If my son lives, his father will not hide his heart from him.

'I notice for the first time that Lucy is anxious and troubled about _her_ father. She would like now to be friends, and she took care that the news of the child's birth should be conveyed to him at once through a common acquaintance. But he has taken no notice. In some natures the seeds of affection seem to fall only on the sand and rock of the heart, where because they have "no depth of earth they wither away;" while the seeds of hatred find the rich and good ground, where they spring and grow a hundred-fold.'

'_December_ 8, 1877.--I have just been watching Sandy on the rug between the two dogs--Tim, and the most adorable black and tan _dachshund_ that Lord Driffield has just given me. Sandy had a bit of biscuit, and was teasing his friends--first thrusting it under their noses, and then, just as they were preparing to gulp, drawing it back with a squeal of joy. The child's evident mastery and sense of humour, the grave puzzled faces of the dogs, delighted me. Then a whim seized me. I knelt down on the rug, and asked him to give me some. He held out the biscuit and laid it against my lips; I saw his eye waver; there was a gleam of mischief--the biscuit was half s.n.a.t.c.hed away, and I felt absurdly chagrined. But in an instant the little face melted into the sweetest, keenest smile, and he almost choked me in his eagerness to thrust the biscuit down my throat. "Poor Daddy! Daddy _so_ hungry."

'I recall with difficulty that I once thought him ugly and unattractive, poor little worm! On the contrary, it is quite clear that, whatever he may be when he grows up--I don't altogether trust his nose and mouth--for a child he is a beauty! His great brown eyes--so dark and noticeable beneath the fair hair in the little apple-blossom face--let you into the very heart of him. It is by no means a heart of unmixed goodness. There is a curious aloofness in his look sometimes, as of some pure intelligence beholding good and evil with the same even speculative mind. But this strange mood breaks up so humanly! he has such wiles--such soft wet kisses! such a little flute of a voice when he wants to coax or propitiate you!'

'_March_ 1878.--My printing business has been growing very largely lately. I have now worked out my profit-sharing scheme with some minuteness, and yesterday the men, John, and I had a conference. In part, my plan is copied from that of the "Maison Leclaire," but I have worked a good deal of my own into it. Our English experience of this form of industrial partnership has been on the whole unfavourable; but, after a period of la.s.situde, experiments are beginning to revive. The great rock ahead lies in one's relation to the trade unions--one must remember that.

'To the practised eye the men to-day showed signs of accepting it with cordiality, but the north-country man is before all things cautious, and I dare say a stranger would have thought them cool and suspicious. We meet again next week.

'I must explain the thing to Lucy--it is her right. She may resent it vehemently, as she did my refusal, in the autumn, to take advantage of that London opening. It will, of course, restrict our income just as it was beginning to expand quickly. I have left myself adequate superintendence wages, a bonus on these wages calculated in the same way as that of the men, a fixed percentage on the capital already employed in the business and a nominal thirty per cent, of the profits. But I can see plainly that however the business extends, we--she and I--shall never "make our fortune"

out of it. For beyond the fifty per cent, of the profits to be employed in bonuses on wages, and the twenty per cent, set aside for the benefit and pension society, my thirty per cent, must provide me with what I want for various purposes connected with the well-being of the workers, and for the widening of our operations on the publishing side, in a more or less propagandist spirit.

'My bookselling business proper is, of course, at present outside the scheme, and I do not see very well how anything of the kind can be applied to it. This will be a comfort to Lucy; and just now the trade both in old and foreign books is prosperous and brings me in large returns. But I cannot disguise from myself that the other experiment is likely to absorb more and more of my energies in the future. I have from sixty to eighty men now in the printing-office--a good set, take them altogether. They have been gradually learning to understand me and my projects. The story of what Leclaire was able to do for the lives and characters of his men is wonderful!

'My poor little wife! I try to explain these things to her, but she thinks that I am merely making mad experiments with money, teaching workmen to be "uppish" and setting employers against me. When in my turn I do my best to get at what she means by "getting on," I find it comes to a bigger house, more servants, a carriage, dinner parties, and, generally, a move to London, bringing with it a totally new circle of acquaintance who need never know exactly what she or I rose from. She does not put all this into words, but I think I have given it accurately.

'And I should yield a great deal more than I do if I had any conviction that these things, when got, would make her happy. But every increase in our scale of living since we began has seemed rather to make her restless, and fill her with cravings which yet she can never satisfy. In reality she lives by her affections, as most women do. One day she wants to lose sight of everyone who knew her as Purcell's daughter, or me as Purcell's a.s.sistant; the next she is fretting to be reconciled to her father. In the same way, she thinks I am hard about money; she sees no attraction in the things which fill me with enthusiasm; but at the same time, if I were dragged into a life where I was morally starved and discontented, she would suffer too. No, I must steer through--judge for her and myself--and make life as pleasant to her in little ways as it can be made.

'Ah! the gospel of "getting on"--it fills me with a kind of rage.

There is an essential truth in it, no doubt, and if I had not been carried away by it at one time, I should have far less power over circ.u.mstances than I now have. But to square the whole of this mysterious complex life to it--to drop into the grave at last, having missed, because of it, all that sheds dignity and poetry on the human lot, all that makes it worth while or sane to hope in a destiny for man diviner and more lasting than appears--horrible!

'Yet Lucy may rightly complain of me. I get dreamy--I procrastinate. And it is unjust to expect that her ideal of social pleasure should be the same as mine. I ought to--and I will--make more effort to please her.'

'_July_ 1878.--I am in Paris again. Yesterday afternoon I wandered about looking at those wrecks of the Commune which yet remain. The new Hotel de Ville is rising, but the Tuileries still stands charred and ruined against the sky, an object lesson for Belleville. I walked up to the Arc de l'Etoile, and coming back I strolled into a little leafy open-air restaurant for a cup of coffee. Suddenly I recognised the place--the fountain--a largo quicksilver ball--a little wooden pavilion festooned with coloured lamps. It was as though eight years were wiped away.

'I could not stay there. But the shock soon subsided. There is something bewildering, de-personalising, in the difference between one stage of life and another. In certain moods I feel scarcely a thread of ident.i.ty between my present self and myself of eight years ago.

'This morning I have seen Louie, after an interval of three years.

Montjoie keeps out of my way, and, as a matter of fact, I have never set eyes on him since I pa.s.sed him close to the Auteuil station in July 1870. From Louie's account, he is now a confirmed drunkard, and can hardly ever be got to do any serious work. Yet she brought me a clay study of their little girl which he threw off in a lucid interval two or three months ago, surely as good as anybody or anything, astonishingly delicate and true. Just now, apparently, he has a bad fit on, and but for my allowance to her she tells me they would be all but dest.i.tute. It is remarkable to see how she has taken possession of this money and with what shrewdness she manages it. I suspect her of certain small Bourse speculations--she has all the financial slang on the tip of her tongue--but if so, they succeed. For she keeps herself and the child, scornfully allows him so much for his pocket in the week, and even, as I judge from the consideration she enjoys in the church she frequents, finds money for her own Catholic purposes.

'Louie a fervent Catholic and an affectionate mother! The mixture of old and new in her--the fresh habits of growth imposed on the original plant--startle me at every turn. Her Catholicism, which resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a particular church and of two or three admirable and sagacious priests, seems to me one long intrigue of a comparatively harmless kind. It provides her with enemies, allies, plots, battles, and surprises. It ministers, too, to her love of colour and magnificence--a love which implies an artistic sense, and would have been utilised young if she had belonged to an artistic family.

'But just as I am adapting myself to the new Louie the old reappears! She was talking to me yesterday of her exertions at Easter for the Easter decorations, and describing to me in superlatives the final splendour of the results, and the compliments which had been paid her by one or two of the clergy, when the name of a lady who seems to have been connected with the church longer than Louie has, and is evidently her rival in various matters of pious service and charitable organisation, came to her lips. Instantly her face flamed, and the denunciation she launched was quite in the old Clough End and Manchester vein. I was to understand that this person was a mean, designing, worthless creature, a hideous object besides, and "made up," and as to her endeavours to ingratiate herself with Father this and Father that, the worst motives were hinted at.

'Another little incident struck me more painfully still. Her devotion to the little Cecile is astonishing. She is miserable when the child has a finger-ache, and seems to spend most of her time in dressing and showing her off. Yet I suspect she is often irritable and pa.s.sionate even with Cecile; the child has a shrinking quiet way with her which is not natural. And to-day, when she was in the middle of cataloguing Montjoie's enormities, and I was trying to restrain her, remembering that Cecile was looking at a book on the other side of the room, she suddenly called to the child imperiously:

'"Cecile! come here and tell your uncle what your father is!"

'And, to my horror, the little creature walked across to us, and, as though she were saying a lesson, began to _debiter_ a set speech about her father's crimes and her mother's wrongs, containing the wildest abuse of her father, and prompted throughout by the excited and scarlet Louie. I tried to stop it; but Louie only pushed me away. The child rose to her part, became perfectly white, declaimed with a shrill fury, indescribably repulsive, and at the end sank into a chair, hardly able to stand. Then Louie covered her with kisses, made me get wine for her, and held her cradled in her arms till it was time for them to go.

'On the way downstairs, when Cecile was in front of us, I spoke my mind about this performance in the strongest way. But Louie only laughed at me. "It shall be quite plain that she is _mine_ and not his! I don't run away from him; I keep him from dying on the streets like a dog; but his child and everyone else shall know what he is."

'It is a tigress pa.s.sion. Poor little child!--a thin, brown, large-eyed creature, with rather old, affected manners, and a small clinging hand.'

'_July_ 4 _th_.--Father Lenoir, Louie's director, has just been to call upon me; Louie insisted on my going to a festival service at St. Eulalie this morning, and introduced me to him--an elderly, courteous, n.o.ble-faced priest of a fine type. He was discreet, of course, and made me feel the enormous difference that exists between an outsider and a member of the one flock. But I gathered that the people among whom she is now thrown perfectly understand Louie. By means of the subtle and powerful discipline of the Church, a discipline which has absorbed the practical wisdom of generations, they have established a hold upon her. And they work on her also through the child. But he gave me to understand that there had been crises; that the opportunities for and temptations to dissolute living which beset Montjoie's wife were endless; and it was a marvel that under such circ.u.mstances a being so wild had yet kept straight.

'I shook him warmly by the hand at parting, and thanked him from my heart. He somewhat resented my thanks, I thought. They imported, perhaps, a personal element into what he regards as a matter of pure ecclesiastical practice and duty.'

'_December_ 25 _th_, 1878.--Lucy is still asleep; the rest of the house is just stirring. I am in my study looking out on the snowy garden and the frosted trees, which are as yet fair and white, though in a few hours the breath of Manchester will have polluted them.

'Last night I went with Lucy and Dora to the midnight service at St. Damian's. It pleased them that I went; and I thought the service, with its bells, its resonant _Adeste fideles_, and its white flowers, singularly beautiful and touching. And yet, in truth, I was only happy in it because I was so far removed from it; because the legend of Bethlehem and the mythology of the Trinity are no longer matters of particular interest or debate with me; because after a period of three-fourths a.s.sent, followed by one lasting over years of critical a.n.a.lysis and controversial reading, I have pa.s.sed of late into a conception of Christianity far more positive, fruitful, and human than I have yet held. I would fain believe it the Christianity of the future. But the individual must beware lest he wrap his personal thinking in phrases too large for it.

'Yet, at least, one may say that it is a conception which has been gaining more and more hold on the minds of those who during the present century have thought most deeply, and laboured most disinterestedly in the field of Christian antiquity--who have sought with most learning and with fewest hindrances from circ.u.mstance to understand Christianity, whether as a history or as a philosophy.

'I have read much German during the past year, and of late a book reviewing the whole course of religious thought in Germany since Schleiermacher, with a mixture of exhaustive information and brilliant style most unusual in a German, has absorbed all my spare hours. Such a movement!--such a wealth of collective labour and individual genius thrown into it--producing offshoots and echoes throughout the world, transforming opinion with the slow inevitableness which belongs to all science, possessing already a great past and sure of a great future.

'In the face of it, our orthodox public, the contented ignorance of our clergy, the solemn a.s.surance of our religious press--what curious and amazing phenomena! Yet probably the two worlds have their a.n.a.logues in every religion; and what the individual has to learn in these days at once of outward debate and of unifying social aspiration, is "to dissent no longer with the heat of a narrow antipathy, but with the quiet of a large sympathy."'

CHAPTER II

A few days after Lord Driffield's warm invitation to Mr. and Mrs.

David Grieve to spend an October Sat.u.r.day-to-Monday at Benet's Park had been accepted, Lucy was sitting in the September dusk putting some frills into Sandy's Sunday coat, when the door opened and Dora walked in.

'You do look done!' said Lucy, as she held up her cheek to her cousin's salutation. 'What have you been about?'

'They kept me late at the shop, for a Sat.u.r.day,' said Dora, with a sigh of fatigue, 'and since then I've been decorating. It's the Dedication Festival to-morrow.'