The Message

As a very small lad, at home in Tarn Regis, I had but one close chum, George Stairs, and he went off with his father to Canada, while I was away for my first term at Elstree School. Then came Rugby, where I had several friends, but the chief of them was Leslie Wheeler. Just why we should have been close friends I cannot say, but I fancy it was mainly because Leslie was such a handsome fellow, and always seemed to cut a good figure in everything he did; while I, on the other hand, excelled in nothing, and was not brilliant even in the expression of my discontent, which was tolerably comprehensive. Withal, in other matters beside discontent, I was a good deal of an extremist, and by no means lacking in enthusiasm.

My father, too, was an enthusiast in his quiet way. His was the enthusiasm of the student, and his work as historian and archaeologist absorbed, I must suppose, a great deal more of his interest and energy than was ever given to his cure of souls. He was rector of Tarn Regis, in Dorset, before I was born, and at the time of his death, to be present at which I was called away in the middle of the last term of my third year at Cambridge. I was to have spent four years at the University; but, as the event proved, I never returned there after my hurried departure, three days prior to my father's death.

The personal tie between my father and those among whom he lived and worked was not a very close or intimate bond. His contribution to the Cambridge History was greatly appreciated by scholars, and his archaeological research won him the respect and esteem of his peers in that branch of study. But I cannot pretend that his loss was keenly felt by his parishioners, with most of whom his relations had been strictly professional rather than personal. A good man and true, without a trace of anything sordid or self-seeking in his nature, my father was yet singularly indifferent to everything connected with the daily lives and welfare of his fellow creatures.

In this he was typical of a considerable section of the country clergy of the time. I knew colleagues of his who were more pronounced examples of the type. One in particular I call to mind (whose living was in the gift of a Cambridge college, like my father's), who, though a good fellow and a clean-lived gentleman, was no more a Christian than he was a Buddhist--less, upon the whole. Among scholarly folk he made not the slightest pretence of regarding the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith in the light of anything more serious than interesting historical myths, notable sections in the mosaic of folk-lore, which it was his pride and delight to study and understand.

Such men as A---- R---- and my father (and there were many like them, and more who shared their aloofness while lacking half their virtues) lived hard-working, studious lives, in which the common kinds of self-indulgence played but a very small part. Honourable, kindly at heart, gentle, rarely consciously selfish, these worthy men never gave a thought to the current affairs of their country, to their own part as citizens, or to the daily lives of their fellow countrymen. Indeed, they exhibited a kind of gentle intolerance and contempt in all topical concerns; and though they preached religion and drew stipends as expounders of Christianity, they no more thought of "prying" or "interfering," as they would have said, into the actual lives and hearts and minds of those about them, than of thrusting their hands into their parishioners' pockets.

Stated in this bald way the thing may sound incredible, but those whose recollections carry them back to the opening years of the century will bear me out in saying that this was far from being either the most distressing or the most remarkable among the outworkings of what was then extolled as a broad spirit of tolerance. Our "tolerance," our vaunted "cosmopolitanism," were far more dangerous factors of our national life, had we but known it, than either the insularity of our sturdy forbears or the strength of our enemies had ever been.

Even my dear mother did not, I think, feel the shock of her bereavement so much as might have been supposed. One may say, without disrespect, that the loss of my father gave point and justification to my mother's attitude toward life. Kind, gentle soul that she was, my mother was afflicted with what might be called the worrying temperament; a disposition characteristic of that troublous time. My memory seems to fasten upon the matter of domestic labour as representing the crux and centre of my dear mother's grievances and topics of lament prior to my father's death. The subject may seem to border upon the ridiculous, as an influence upon one's general point of view; but at that time it was really more tragic than farcical, and I know that what was called "the servant question"--as such it was gravely treated in books and papers, and even by leader-writers and lecturers--formed the basis of a great deal of my mother's conversation, just as I am sure that it coloured her outlook upon life, and strengthened her tendency to worry over everything, from the wear-and-tear of house-linen to the morality of the people. All this was incomprehensible and absurd to my father, though, had he but thought of it, it was really more human than his own attitude; for certainly my mother was interested and concerned in the daily lives of her fellow creatures, though not in a cheering or illuminating manner perhaps.

But, as I say, the deprecatory, worrying attitude had become second nature with my mother long years before her widowhood, and had lined and seamed her poor forehead and silvered her hair before my Rugby days were over. Bereavement merely gave point to a mood already well established.

That I should not return to Cambridge was decided as a matter of course within the week of my father's funeral, when we learned that the little he had left behind him would not even pay for the dilapidations of the rectory. There was practically nothing, when my father's affairs were put in order, beyond my mother's little property, a recent legacy, the investment of which in Canadian railway stocks brought in about a hundred and fifty a year.

Thus I found myself confronted with a sufficiently serious situation for a young man whose training so far had no more fitted him for taking part in any particular division of the battle of life, where the prize sought is an income, than for the administration of the planet Mars. Rugby was better than some of the great public schools in this respect, for a lad with definite purposes and ambitions, but its curriculum had far less bearing upon the working life of the age than it had upon its games and pastimes and the affairs of nations and peoples long since passed away. Yet Rugby belonged to a group of schools that were admittedly the best, and certainly the most outrageously costly, of the educational establishments of the period.

I think my sister Lucy was more shocked than any one else by the death of our father. I say shocked, because I am not certain whether or not the word grieved would apply accurately. For one thing, Lucy had never before seen any dead person. Neither had I, for that matter; but Lucy was more affected by the actual presence in the house of Death, than I was. Twice a day for years she had kissed our father's forehead. Now and again she had sat upon the arm of his chair and stroked his thin hair. These demonstrations were connected, I believe, with the quest of favours--permission, money, and so forth; but doubtless affection played a part in them.

As for Lucy's home life, a little conversation I recall on the occasion of her driving me to the station when I was leaving for what proved my last term at Cambridge, seems to me to throw some light. I had but recently learned of Lucy's engagement to marry Doctor Woodthrop, of Davenham Minster, our nearest market-town. I had found Woodthrop a decent fellow enough, but thirty-four as against Lucy's twenty-one, inclining ominously to corpulence, and as flatly prosaic and unadventurous a spirit as a small country town could produce. Now, as Lucy seemed to me to have hankerings in the direction of social pleasures and the like, with a penchant for brilliancy and daring, I was a little puzzled about her engagement, for Woodthrop was one who kept a few conversational pleasantries on hand, as a man keeps old pipes on a rack, for periodical use at suitable times.

"So you are actually going to be married, Loo?" I said.

"Oh, well, engaged, Dick," she replied, with a little blush.

"With a view, I presume. Then I suppose it follows that you are in love--h'm?"

"Why, Dick, what a cross-examiner you are!" The blush increased.

"Well, my dear girl, surely it's a natural assumption, is it not?"

"Oh, I suppose so. But----"

"Yes?"

"Well, I don't think in real life it's the same thing that you read about in novels, do you, Dick?"

"What? Being in love?"

"Yes."

"Well, perhaps not; but I imagine it ought to be something pretty pronounced, you know, even in such a pale reflection of the novels as real life. I gather that it ought to be; seriously, Loo, I think it ought to be. I suppose you do love Woodthrop, don't you?"

My sister looked a little distressed, and I half-regretted having put so direct a question. I was sufficiently the product of my day to be terribly afraid of any kind of interference with my fellow creatures. Our apotheosis of individual liberty had made any such action anathema, "bad form," a sin more resented in the sinner than cowardice or dishonesty, or than any kind of wickedness which was strictly personal and, as you might say, self-contained. Our one object of universal reverence and respect was the personal equation.

"There, Loo," I said, "I didn't mean to tease you." Thus, in accordance with my traditions, I brushed aside and apologized for my natural interest in her well-being in the same way that my poor father and his like brushed away all matters of topical import, and the average man of the period brushed aside all concern with his fellow men, all responsibility for the common weal.

"No," she said, "I know you didn't. And, indeed, Dick, I suppose I don't love Herbert as well as I ought; but--but, Dick, you don't know what it is to be a girl. You can go off to Cambridge, and presently you will go out into the world and live your own life in your own way. But it's different for me, Dick. A girl is not supposed to want to live her own life; she is just part of the home, and the home----. Well, Dick, you know father's life, and mother--poor mother----"

"Yes," I said, "that's so."

"Well, Dick, I'm afraid it seems pretty selfish, but I do want to live my own way, and I do get terribly tired of--of----"

"Of the 'servant question,' for instance."

"Exactly."

"And you think you can live your own life with Woodthrop?"

"Why, I think he is very kind and good, Dick, and he says there's no reason why I shouldn't hunt, if I can manage with one mount, and we can have friends of mine to stay, and--and so on."