II THE CURATE MARRIES

          She’s extremely pretty and loves thee entirely. I have heard her breathe such raptures about thee.         
THE OLD BACHELOR.

POTSHAM then was very much what it is now. It is doubtful if fifty houses were built in it in as many years. It had then a repairing dock which provided work for the poor. It has now a jam factory. Then its postmistress, with the aid of a kettle, opened all letters that looked interesting. Only the other day a new resident discovered that his private affairs were common property, and the postmistress was deposed. Then, as now, the church, standing high above the river, was the centre of the somnolent life of the place, and Francis Folyat lived upon an eminence. He liked it.

The little society of the place warmed to the curate when it was found that he was welcomed in the houses of one or two of the county families. When it was discovered that Viscount Bampfield was his first cousin once removed, and that Baron Folyat was half a degree nearer in kinship, he became a romantic figure. When a small girl read in her history book that Henry Folyat was associated with Guy Fawkes, she ran with her thumb between the leaves and showed the passage to her governess, who showed it to her mother, who gave a dinner-party to announce the discovery. Thenceforth the curate was bathed in a golden light.

He became the object of the most flattering attentions. Every woman in the town showed herself a mother to him, and Miss Martha Brett won from him the confession that his full name was Francis ffolyat Christopher ffolyat-Folyat. She hugged this information to her bosom, and [Pg 10]gloated over the thought that it was hers and hers alone. She devoured romances, though, being not yet seventeen, she was supposed to confine her attentions to “The Fairchild Family” and Miss Maria Edgeworth. In all innocence Francis lent her the poems of a young man named Shelley who was still regarded as a blasphemous and immoral writer. She could not read them, but did not tell him so, though she distressed him by inviting him to read Mrs. Inchbald aloud to her in the gazebo at the end of the garden, above the wall that was washed by the river when the tide was up and slimed with mud when it was out.

The curate’s mind was at that time divided into two compartments, one for literature and the other for religion. He saw no necessity for reconciling the two things and made no attempt to do so. He regarded religion as his work, and literature as an escape from it. Life was extremely pleasant: lazy day succeeded lazy day. The obedient flock was rounded into the church on Sunday and quite often on weekdays, for there was no other place in which two or three could gather together. The only tiny clouds in a fair blue sky were drink and dissent, and in the lower classes an occasional outburst of immorality. Dissent was ignored; drink was attacked by prayer; and immorality was defeated by a hurried marriage where possible, and when that was out of the question it was scarified by threats—sure promises even—of eternal punishment. It was all a matter of routine, and so extremely pleasant that Francis soon ceased to regret that he had stifled ambition with a black coat. His vicar was a man who had taken a small active part in the Tractarian movement, without in the least understanding its spiritual significance. He had been attracted by the notion that the Church existed in spite of Henry VIII, and not because of him, and when his leaders told him to adopt the ideas of the Real Presence in the Sacrament and the sacrificial priesthood of the clergy, he did so without making any attempt to bring them into agreement with the facts of his life or the practice of his profession. He instituted ritual in his services, thus making [Pg 11]them more entertaining to his flock, and, as he had never looked for any rejuvenation of the spiritual life of his parish, he was not disappointed by the result. He thought he was a good man: everybody said he was a good man, and perhaps he was.

Francis swallowed both his ideas and his goodness without difficulty, examined the ritual of the services with interest and some enthusiasm, corrected it in one or two points, and as he took nearly all the work of the parish off the vicar’s shoulders, there could not possibly be any friction between them. The vicar congratulated himself on having found a jewel of curates, and his wife began to dream dreams of vast preferment obtained through the Folyat influence—a rural deanery, a stall, a bishopric, and—why not?—Canterbury or York.

Francis, on the other hand, gave no thought to the future and drifted drowsily, most keenly enjoying himself in the summer days when he could take a boat, a book, an old long-shoreman and fishing tackle, and go down to the sand-banks at the mouth of the estuary and bathe and fish and lie in the sun with his clay pipe between his teeth, and his golden beard glistening and his blue eyes shining as he thought that the world was very good and the sea almost the best of good things in it. It was not his way to compare his lot with others, and it had never occurred to him, except in his official capacity, to criticise life. In that capacity he criticised not so much life as a traditional concept of it.

He was rudely awakened from this drowsy golden age by an event which kept Potsham talking for a generation and a half.

One night when he had been dining at Crabtrees, the house of Miss Martha Brett’s aunt, where there had been music and cribbage and a walk down the garden to look at the moonlight on the sea, he returned to his rooms to find them occupied by a man with a white face and quivering lips and legs that would not be still. He was a poor man and a sort of seafaring man, and he looked up and in a rustling voice he said:

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“Parson, what sort of man would that man be. . . ?”

Then he stopped and rattled in his throat, and Francis felt a curious nausea as he looked at the man and saw how frightened he was.

“What sort of man?” asked Francis, feeling that the question was almost as meaningless as the man’s words.

“She’s got a cut in her throat and a lot of blood. . . . I say.”

“I say,” echoed Francis.

“We’d better go,” said the man.

“Yes,” said Francis. “Does anybody know?”

“No,” replied the man, “I been looking at her three hours.”

With that he seemed to gain control of himself, and his legs did not shake any more and his lips set in a thin straight line. He stood up and went to the door and Francis followed him. Very cunningly the man looked at him and said: “You do know how a man could do it?”

“No,” said Francis, “unless——”

However, the man seemed to be satisfied and led the way, and they walked down the little crooked street called the Strand and came to a little tumble-down house by the dock, and there they found the woman even as the man had told. To Francis the adventure seemed to be complete and fantastic, and he felt that he was outside it, that the world had stopped and that it was very cold. Then he felt that it was horrible and intolerable, simply because nothing could happen unless he made it happen, and action had never been asked of him before.

There was a tallow candle in a bottle, but it gave very little light. The moon shone through the window, and its light was very pitiless and grim.

The man folded his arms and said with a sort of insistence: “You do know how a man could do it!”

The cold dead harshness of his voice brought Francis out of his fantasy, and at last he found the word that had been buzzing in his brain ever since he saw the man sitting in his chair: Murder.

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“No,” he said, and he was astonished at the hardness of his own voice.

He turned heavily, but the man was quicker than he. He saw him dart through the door, run a little way up the street, go into a house, and in an instant there sprang up a crowd of people whispering, murmuring, buzzing, huddling, and crushing round the door of the little dark house. They were a little awed when they saw the curate, but the crowd hummed as new people came running up and the tale was told again. Suddenly Francis felt a hand on his arm, and there was the man clinging to him while the beadle and the policeman were tugging at him to take him away. The man would not let go, but he was very strong, and for some way Francis had to move with him through the crowd. Then at last he wrenched free and watched the three figures cleave into the crowd, part it, and then be swallowed up.

He found himself standing at a place where, between two houses, he could see the water swelling with the tide and a black boat rocking, and over all the light of the moon.

The machinery of the law passed over the murderer and he was hanged, but Francis never told a soul how he had been drawn into the eddy of the crime. His experience produced in him a feeling of profound depression, from which he recovered slowly and painfully to find that human beings had emerged from the landscape as they had never done before. They demanded, a different sort of attention from that which he had always given them, and at first he disliked them heartily. He saw them in their habits, sadly, as they were—eating, drinking, sleeping, gossiping, with very little to vary the monotony save foolish love affairs and mean jealousies and petty quarrels. Nothing that they did, not even their sins, seemed to be worth while. What bothered him most was that he found himself sympathising with the criminal and curiously desirous of defending him against the society which had answered ferocity with ferocity.

That did not last long. He was soon brought up against his ignorance of the world outside and his entire [Pg 14]lack of comparative standards, and, as young men will, he thought that at all costs he must escape—that is, move from the circumference of a dizzily spinning world to the centre of it.

First of all he came to the conclusion that he had religious doubts and consulted his vicar, who bowled him over with professional arguments. Against them he could only set his vivid sensation on that strange night and his keen recollection of the tallow candle in the bottle and the moon shining through the window; and of these he dared not speak. He agreed perfectly that he had set his hand to the noblest service in the world and had no right to look back. But looking forward availed him nothing; the present was bewildering and the past had suddenly become empty. The bung had been removed from the tight barrel of his existence and all the good liquor had leaked away.

However, he did his work neither better nor worse than he had done it before. He christened children and churched women and married couples and read solemn and beautiful words over the dead, and for the first time began to ponder the meaning of these ceremonies. The Church, he said, sanctified birth and death and what lay between them, and he tried to persuade himself that it raised them from brutality, spiritualised them, and made them holy; but then he could not help feeling that there was some discrepancy. The facts remained the same, therefore if they were sacred at all they must be sacred in themselves. All that could be done by mind and Holy Writ, the product of inspired minds, was nobly to interpret the facts, to see to it that men lived nobly—lived nobly and nobly died. He had seen several persons die, had given them the comfort of religion, and now, when he remembered, he was struck principally by the dignity with which death was accepted. It seemed to him that men had religion in themselves, that it was not, could not be grafted on them from without.

“Life,” he said to himself, “is a religious thing, or it is something less than life.”

He felt that he was moving from the circumference to [Pg 15]the centre, and then he realised that he was reaching only the centre of his own thoughts, not the heart of the world. He had advanced in theory but in practice was just as far out of his bearings as ever. He had fed himself chiefly with the writings of ironists and he was hungry for belief—in the nobility of life and death and the unity of all things. The lives of birds he knew and the lives of beasts, but of the lives of men he knew nothing at all. Never had he been to a great city, but he conceived that there also the lives of men must be very much what they were in the somnolent little town on the Devon estuary—they were born, they suffered, and they died. That was all. Surely that was all.

He would not have that. The ironists left it at that. He became positive that the manner of it mattered—to Nature, perhaps, not at all, but to men, and to God through men, vitally. To that end the Holy Bible had been written and the Church founded, and to that end Keble and Pusey had sought to rouse the Church from its indolence and indifference. His vicar was right: he could not turn back, but he must know wherein his work as a priest consisted. If it served any purpose at all, it must be for the sanctification of life by endowing it with a noble interpretation.

Francis had no large conception of the universe. At this young period of his life his notions were still medi?val. He believed the earth to be stationary, Hell to be under his feet, and the Heavenly region to be beyond the blue vault of the sky, and that human life led infallibly to one or the other. A noble life, therefore, was that which led to Heaven, and to this idea, and to the cosmogony it implied, he shaped his ethics and his ideals, never suspecting that he was sacrificing the greater to the less.

When men sit down and think out schemes of life they nearly always make the mistake of leaving women out of them. This is easily understood in the case of young men for whom women hardly exist except as an emotion, a fire that may at any moment flame into their existence and lay it waste like the little foxes in the Bible. Our curate made that mistake. Naturally he had been in love—never [Pg 16]out of it; but always he had worshipped from afar, and had thought the objects of his adoration as insensible to it as the stars in the sky to his wonder and delight. He was in love now, but could attach his emotion to no particular young woman. There were at least four, and he never credited them with any design when he met them out walking, or they came to him on parish business or demanded his escort or displayed their gardens to him. He enjoyed his emotions while he was ashamed of them. They were not “noble.”

When next he sat—at her suggestion—with Miss Martha Brett in the gazebo, he found himself thinking that she was very charming and pretty with her brown ringlets on either side of her face and her plump little shoulders peeping out of her gown, a modification of the style made popular by the young Queen. She was so demure, so quiet, and her manner of listening to him gave him such a sense of authority. He felt it could never leave him, that he would never again have those appalling moments in church when a gulf opened wide in front of him and he felt that any one of his listeners had more right than he to be talking and calling this black and that white.

She sat by a little table and he sat on the other side of it with a book in his hands, and she let her hand fall on the table so that it lay flat, very white and soft and pink at the finger-tips, and in her wrist was the most delicious little bone. He could see nothing else. He gazed and gazed at it, then with a wrench turned to his book, but his eyes were swimming so that the words swallowed each other up.

Roses nodded in at the window, and the smell of the salt water came up and mingled with the garden scents.

“It is most moving,” said Miss Martha.

“Most,” stuttered the Curate, and he looked up and saw warmth and mischief in her eyes, and almost imperceptibly she edged her hand a little nearer to him.

Her aunt came in on that, and Francis heaved an immense sigh of relief and went spluttering on with his [Pg 17]reading as though he had been caught out in some shameful act.

When he left the house later in the evening he admitted to himself that he was in love, and that Miss Martha was the most beautiful, the most peerless, the most chaste, the most innocent of women, and he called his emotion “gross desire” and tried to strangle it, and suffered horribly. The more he wrestled with it, the more powerful it grew.

He was in love, and love swamped all his thoughts. He took long solitary walks, and he hated all the couples whom he married and envied them. They had passed through torment—Oh! who was the fool who said that love was sweet? The old fleeting devotions had been delicious—if shameful; but this, this was fire in the veins, scalding thoughts, an obsession, a fixed idea.

More to be rid of it than with any hope of success, he called upon Miss Martha’s aunt, and, coming straight to the point, blurted out that he hoped she could regard him favourably as a suitor and would grant him permission to ask for her niece’s hand in marriage—exactly as Miss Martha’s aunt had planned that he should when he first came to Potsham and she had satisfied herself as to his antecedents. He explained that he was not rich but had every hope of being given a family living as soon as one should fall vacant. To his amazement he was informed that Miss Martha was something of an heiress, and would own, when she came of age, thirteen houses in Potsham, subject to leases, and one mortgage, a farm on Dartmoor, and fifty acres in Cornwall. Her niece, the aunt added, had often expressed her great admiration for Mr. Folyat, and, with her eyes gleaming exultation and beatitude, she confessed that she could desire no better thing than to see such coincidence between her own wishes and her niece’s affections.

Francis took his leave praying devoutly that he might not meet his Martha, but no sooner had he set foot outside the parlour door than there she stood before him, and he could say nothing and she could say nothing, until suddenly he caught her up in his arms and hugged her [Pg 18]and kissed her, set her down on her feet gasping, begged her pardon, and blundered out of the house blushing furiously.

Cousin Bampfield warmly congratulated his kinsman on his betrothal, and, two adjacent livings in Cornwall presently falling vacant, gave him both of them.

There was a splendid wedding and the young couple spent their honeymoon in London, for neither had ever before visited the capital. They saw the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral, but Martha was impressed by nothing so much as her husband’s grandfather’s town house in Curzon Street. She thought it grand, and was never tired of hearing her husband tell of his gentle family, the Folyats.