XIV WHITE BEARD AND GREY

          Maggior dolore e ben la Ricordanza O nell’ amaro inferno amena stanza?         
          D. G. ROSSETTI

FRANCIS had many moments of doubt as to the wisdom of encouraging and abetting Bennett Lawrie in his desire to enter the Church. To begin with he had no money; he was engaged—Francis supposed it must be called an engagement—to Gertrude, and even supposing it were possible to take the young man as curate as soon as he was ordained, that meant at most eighty pounds a year, and he was already earning more than that. Without influence the prospect of his being granted a living was, to say the least of it, remote. To be sure the rector of St. James, Irlam, had begun life as an itinerant violinist, but then he had a fruity tenor voice which made him very popular with women; also he had married a lady with a snug fortune.

“One must,” thought Francis, half apologising to himself. “One must think of these things materially. If I had thought of it materially I should never have. . .”

He broke off the thought and began to tell himself that he ought to encourage the young in high-souled endeavour. Young Lawrie was certainly remarkable, talented, very much in earnest, and, as far as one could see, very much in love. To be sure Gertrude was a good ten years older than he, but that was no bad thing for a young man of an ardent temperament. Certainly from Gertrude’s point of view it was better for her to be the wife of a clergyman than the wife of a clerk. But ought one to let these social considerations weigh in the matter? It was very difficult (thought Francis), very difficult. [Pg 144]She would be poor in any case. She might have a large family. She was a little woman, rather plain, just the type that produces enormous families. And families—could there be anything more harassing than to have a large family and to have no means of making provision for them?

On that Francis’s reflections stopped. They went round and round. It was his business to encourage the production of children (in wedlock), and year in and year out he had faithfully fulfilled his duty, without ever pausing to consider whether he had practised what he preached. Now he saw that he had done so, and was shocked to find himself rather dismayed at the result, and reluctant to face the possibility of his daughter doing the same. For years he had hardly thought about his work. Since the death of his son and the brutal outbreak that followed it, hostilities had ceased (with the exception of an occasional splutter at an Easter vestry meeting) and the work of his church, like his domestic life, had run on automatically. Time had hardly existed for him. His thoughts from disuse had grown sluggish, and it was very very slowly borne in upon him that his children were beginning to claim a separate existence, and that they had every right to do so. When he realised it he was forced painfully to face the fact that he was impotent to help them either with money, or, what is more precious, real sympathy. It was only with an effort that he was able to set aside the grotesqueness of Gertrude’s fancy and to force himself to see it with her eyes and to take it seriously. He looked back over the years and caught a glimpse of the wasted opportunities, and though he never indulged in the luxury of self-torment he cried in his heart:

“God forbid that when they are as old as I they should be even as I am.”

He was not sufficiently skilled in self-analysis to lay his finger on the weakness that had brought him to such a pass. He thought no ill of his wife. He knew enough of human nature to admit that nothing outside a man’s own soul could dishonour him or bring him to harm. Unconsciously [Pg 145]he was disloyal to the tenets of his calling in considering his own case. With all others he professed that God moved in a mysterious way and that everything happened for the best according to God’s providence. He had long since abandoned all belief in the possibility of a noble collective life here on earth, for he had seen too much not to know that when two or three are gathered together it is not to seek God, but to promote knavery and jealousy. Moments of agony he had had when he had half seen his own scepticism, but the simple devotion of some of his parishioners, craftsmen, and factory hands, and his own great liking for many of his poor had kept him from throwing up his work, and he would say:

“Though I do it ill, yet it might be done worse.”

Besides, he could not afford to renounce the stipend. Every year he had made small inroads upon his capital, fifty pounds here and a hundred there to satisfy creditors or sudden demands of charity for larger sums than he could afford to pay out of income.

Well, well—no doubt he was making a mountain out of a molehill, and things were not nearly so bad as they seemed. The house had been much jollier since Serge came back and Annette brought youth and joy into it, and if none of the family seemed to be on the way to brilliant lives, after all there were better things in the world than success, and nothing mattered so much as affection and love. And yet, how small a part love played in human life! How soon it died!

In the end Francis laughed at himself, and told himself that thinking was no use. It neither made good better nor bad worse. Things were what they were and nothing would alter them. Young Lawrie, with his brain stuffed full of illusions, wished to enter into Holy Orders. So be it. He had promised to do all he could to help him: after all it was something to find a young man with thoughts higher than the pleasure next to hand, and the first step seemed to be to see his father.

So Francis Folyat wrote to James Lawrie in his awkward spidery hand—(he could not bear writing letters)—and [Pg 146]asked for an interview in order to discuss with him the future of his son Bennett.

James Lawrie replied courteously, appointing a day, and on it Francis walked across Dale Park and over the new Cromwell Bridge and up the shabby-genteel street from the river to the stucco Gothic house.

Tibby opened the door to him and looked him up and down.

“You’ll be Mr. Folyat,” she said.

“That is my name.”

“Our Bennett’s been a new lad since he went to your house, Mr. Folyat.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“It’s not all to the good,” said Tibby, grumpily, and she turned and led him down the long passage to the dining-room.

She announced:

“The Reverend Mr. Folyat to see you.”

James Lawrie was sitting at the table engrossed in a game of dominoes. He looked up at Francis and nodded, and pointed with the stem of his pipe to a chair on the other side of the table. Francis took it, and Tibby left them. Old Lawrie rattled the dice and turned up a six and three. He grunted:

“Can’t do it. H’m. H’m. Can’t borrow again. No more credit. Will you join me, sir?”

“Gladly,” said Francis, and they began to play. They played for an hour in silence, and Francis won three times to his opponent’s twice.

“You’ll be a college man, sir?” asked old Lawrie.

“Dublin,” said Francis, and helped himself to tobacco from the greasy old pouch that lay on the table.

“I’ve a great reverence for college men, having missed it myself. I had two or three friends in Edinburgh, but I was never there except in their letters. I’ve never been anywhere except in books, and wherever I go, and whatever I do, and whatever I be, I think there’s always the printed page between me and myself. . . . Do you understand that?”

“I don’t think so.”

[Pg 147]

“It’s like this. There’s such a thing as a habit of loneliness, and if it really fastens on a man there’s nothing can break through it, not love, not misery, not great joy, nor a wife and bairns, nothing. Living like that, a man gets a clear brain like a searchlight so that he can see all his comings out and his goings in and the play of his thoughts, honest and dishonest, and he prowls about and about his own self like a caged beast. Do you know that?”

“Something like it.”

“Nine-tenths of us are condemned to it. My father was a minister up in Galloway. A real hell-fire man he was, but he died of a consumption, hell-fire being nothing against the mists of the place he lived in. Several men from our glen, my uncles among them, had gone to England and made money. They said it was easy, so I came down the first. I had a head stuffed full of poetry and the Bible and Scots righteousness—you need to be a Scot to know what that means—and for years I was desperately lonely. Two of my brothers followed me. They did well, as they call it. They made money and saved and saved, and made more money. They both married rich women. I got lonelier and lonelier, and more and more caught up in the trick of watching myself. I lived with my mother for years. I married to get away from her, and it was an awful day for the woman that married me. I could not let her in to me. . . . Can you make anything of that? You’re a younger man than I am. Can you make anything of that? I’m an old white-bearded sinner, and if all my life was to be written they’d say it was an awful tragedy. But it isn’t that. It’s a fool’s comedy. There’s no tragedy save in a strong man who can put up a fight against his own weakness. Men like me, and that’s most of us, waste our lives in fighting against our own strength. Oh! I tell you there’s many a thing a man thinks of in his loneliness, but it’s all thought, thought, thought; it never grows into action. One thing a man realises pretty quickly, and that is that there is nothing wrong with the world except the monstrous egoism of men [Pg 148]and women. It is easy to realise but almost impossible to fight against. All along the line we refuse to accept the laws and principles that govern the universe because they are so little flattering to our precious vanity. We make laws against nature, organise ourselves into churches or states and nations against her, invent trumpery codes of morality in the blind hope of cheating her. From generation to generation it is one long wasteful and pitifully vain struggle against nature. . . . Look at the result. Look at the places we live in. Look at what we call society. Why we haven’t even devised any method of insuring that every man and every woman shall have the bare necessaries of life; in thousands of years we haven’t learned to contrive that civilisation shall give the majority of men greater comfort and happiness than they can find in barbarism. We’ve tried this game of civilisation over and over again, but we have never got beyond the most stupid materialism. You can almost count the really civilised men—men who have been masters of life and lived it at all points and enriched it for all those with whom they came in contact—on two hands. The rest of us are caught up by the habit of loneliness, and we are prisoners all our lives. I know. I don’t give a brass farthing for material success or failure. I know the bitterness of spiritual failure. You want to talk to me about my son. I know nothing of him. He knows nothing of me. That is my fault, not his. Now, what have you to say?”

“This is all very interesting,” replied Francis, rather at a loss where to begin. “My eldest son would discuss the merits and demerits of civilisation with you better than I, and certainly with more warmth than I can bring to bear on the subject.”

He had an uncomfortable feeling that he entirely agreed with old Lawrie, and an equally uncomfortable sense that he would agree also with the opposite side if it were presented, and suddenly candour made him say so. Lawrie chuckled and rode off on his crotchet of loneliness again:

“That is so. That is so. Because of the habit of [Pg 149]loneliness there cannot be unity among men. What men think is of no importance, because it has so little relation to what they do or what they are. The opinion of any body of men, even the most intelligent, is generally only the lowest common multiple of their prejudices. Theories are quite useless, so are opinions. When a man is in possession of the truth he acts. When he is not he theorises, or cowers behind his prejudicies, which amounts to the same thing. Look at the people in this town. How many of them are capable of action, how many are there whose days are not spent in superficial employments, first to get bread, and second to escape boredom when their work is done. They muddle through their work, they make a great deal of money for a few people who have no idea what to do with it when they have got it, and, since they are in an intolerable position, they have nothing to support them, and the monstrous system they have drifted into creating, but a hard, conceited pride. That makes them blinder than ever. They can do nothing to make their city beautiful, nothing to remedy the shiftless blundering of their fathers, nothing in the way of art to make amends to the people whose lives they have cramped and ruined in their factories and slums. Their only notion is to get more and more money out of them.”

“I never thought of it like that,” rejoined Francis. “All the people I meet seem to be very pleasant.”

“They don’t know they’re doing it. They follow their own little rules of expedience and call them the unchanging laws of God. Your Pharisee always imagines he has made things all right by taking God’s name in vain, vain indeed, for they beget nothing but vanity. I’m just as bad as they, for I’ve sold my three sons to them for a wage that begins at ten shillings a week and, in the course of thirty years, will grow into a salary of three hundred pounds a year.”

“I have worked for thirty years and more for very little more than that.”

“Aye, but you believe that you are working in a holy cause, so that the work itself is enough, and you’re [Pg 150]content while you can pay your way. All work ought to be in a holy cause and done in a holy spirit. . . . I used to think that when I was a young man. I used to feel it too. I think so now, but I don’t feel it any more. These things just go on, and I sit and watch them and do nothing, and I understand why everyone else does nothing either. It’s the old men who profit by it all and the young men are never wise enough to overturn it, and they could so easily by refusing to step into the old men’s shoes. But we must all grow old.”

“The youngest time in all my life,” said Francis, “was during the years after I first came here, when I had to fight to do things in my own way in my own church.”

“Exactly,” said old Lawrie. “That’s it. The fighting; the fighting to do things in your own way, in your own life; if you can do it, if you can keep it up, and hold out to the very end.”

Francis pounced on that as an opportunity of coming to his mission, and he set forth all that he had to say about Bennett.

Old Lawrie received it in blank astonishment.

“Well, well,” he said. “Wants to be a parson, does he? Is it the clothes he’s after? He was always a great one for dressing up.”

“I think it is more serious with him than that. I think it is very serious.”

Old Lawrie thought for a long time and tugged at his beard, while Francis gazed at him and said to himself what a fine face the old fellow had.

“Do you mind,” said the old man at length, “do you mind if I read you some poetry?” He took up a scrapbook and put spectacles on his beak-like nose and read in a great voice:

    Two shepherds on the windy fell

    Sat crackin’ in the peep o’ day.

    They heard the tolling o’ the bell

    That marked a soul had passed away.

[Pg 151]

    And white beard to old grey beard said,

    “Another soul has passed away.”

    But old grey beard this answer made,

    “The night is flowering into day.”

    “Nay, nay,” said white beard, “that’s not true,

    ’Tis day that’s sinking into night.”

    “Night into day!”—and high words flew.

    They cursed and swore with all their might.

    They argued on that windy fell

    And came to blows. . . . The twilight sped.

    The distant tolling of the bell

    Told the great sun a man was dead.

That was the end of the poem.

Francis said:

“Did you write that yourself?”

“I did. I wrote that myself. . . . You wish me to say will I or will I not let my son Bennett go for a parson. Have you a mind for irony? There’s irony in this. In the first place I have no money. In the second I cannot say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to that or any other thing in this house. You must see the boy’s mother. I’ll send you to her with a note. . . . What are you staring at, man? Have you never seen a prisoner before? When you live in a prison you comply with the regulations. . . . Do you see that scar on my forehead? My eldest son did that when he was a boy of twelve. He’s a man now and speaks to me once a month. He comes in here and stands by the door, and he says ‘How are you, father?’ And I say ‘I’m very well,’ and then he goes away. He’s a man now, and, let me tell you, he has a bath every morning.”

He had worked himself up to a great state of excitement, and Francis sat gaping at him like a child at a theatre. Old Lawrie went to the door and bawled:

“Tibby!”

The gaunt old Scotswoman came in, treading noiselessly, like a ghost, and stood (thought Francis) like a [Pg 152]gaoleress waiting orders from the chieftain of a Border clan.

Old Lawrie sat at table and wrote a note on a very dirty piece of paper, folded it up into a cocked hat, and with great care wrote on it in a neat, impersonal copperplate hand, “Mrs. James Lawrie.” He gave it to Tibby and commanded her to take it and Mr. Folyat to Mrs. Lawrie in the drawing-room. He shook Francis warmly by the hand, thanked him for listening to him so patiently and bowed with extraordinary dignity. Francis followed Tibby, feeling, as he said afterwards, like a captive in a strange land. It was very dark in the passage, and, like the night in Jorrocks, it smelled of cheese. At the drawing-room door Tibby whispered to him:

“Will you wait? She may be asleep.”

She pushed the door open stealthily and two cats darted out, and, on seeing Francis, rushed away, one upstairs, the other to the end of the passage, and they both sat rumbling like a kettle on the boil. Tibby moved noiselessly into the room, then turned:

“She’s no asleep. Ye may come in.”

Francis followed her. Tibby planted herself in front of Mrs. Folyat, gave her the note with this:

“From the master.”

(If it had been from the Emperor of Russia she could not have put more reverence into her voice.)

“From the master. This is the gentleman.”

With that she materialised out of her ghostliness and stalked out of the room, and Francis, on whom the humour of the whole household was beginning to dawn, found himself inventing her report to the Master:

“The prisoner has been boiled in oil, but made no confession.”

Mrs. James Lawrie was a large woman with a big face, surprisingly pink and young looking. She had her hair oiled and parted in the middle and surmounted with a tall lace cap adorned with pale-blue ribbons, and skewered on with white china-headed hat-pins that clearly passed through her head and came out on the other side. Her dress was very tight, and seemed to [Pg 153]be stretched to breaking-point in the effort to hold in her flesh. From her attitude, certain details of her dress, and a portrait on the wall, it was clear that she prided herself on her resemblance to Queen Victoria, then alive and enjoying all the lustre and celebrity of her Jubilee.

There was another cat on the sofa by the fireplace. In the window was a wire stand full of palms and india-rubber plants and maiden-hair ferns. The windows were closed. The pictures were religious, or views of various seaside resorts and spas, and five pastel drawings of children, and everywhere, on tables, on the piano, on brackets, on the mantelpiece, was a profusion of knick-knacks, cheap china, china ladies, china babies, china shepherdesses, china stags, china birds, and, on a table near where Francis was standing, among various Eastern trivialities, a large elephant’s tooth.

Mrs. Lawrie read her husband’s letter without giving any sign that she was aware of her visitor. Then she said:

“Sit down.”

She had a peculiar mouth that opened like a trap, the upper lip not moving at all, and the lower dropping and springing back as though she had not full control of it. It fascinated Francis so that he hardly heard what she said:

“You are a High Churchman, Mr. Folyat?”

“Yes.”

“I was born a Baptist, Mr. Folyat. On my marriage I became a Low Churchwoman. My husband is a Presbyterian.”

“Indeed.”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Lawrie’s lip sprang back so violently that Francis began to think grotesquely that she would never be able to open her mouth again. She contrived it, however. She pressed her forefinger into the middle of her cheek—(exactly like the portrait of Queen Victoria)—and went on:

“Let me tell you, Mr. Folyat, that we are not rich. [Pg 154]We are not rich, Mr. Folyat, but I have my pride. Mr. Lawrie’s relations have begged me on their knees to allow them to educate my children. I have refused. My children are the children of a poor man, they must do what the children of the poor have to do. They must earn their living, and they must be made safe. I believe in safety. My two eldest sons are in the biggest and safest bank in the town, and, if they behave themselves, they will be there all their lives. My youngest is in a very good position in Messrs. Keith’s warehouse, and he, too, if he behaves himself, will be there for the rest of his life. My youngest son is very foolish and volatile. I don’t believe he knows his own mind. I doubt very much whether he has a mind to know. I think it best that he should stay where he is. I am glad to know that he has found friends in your house and circle, Mr. Folyat. I do not call, or I would call on Mrs. Folyat.”

“Mrs. Folyat would, I am sure, be . . .” Francis dropped the remark as insincere. He added hastily, to cover it up:

“The boy seemed to think that his uncles would help.”

“I do not allow Mr. Lawrie’s brothers to interfere in my affairs in any way.”

“Then . . .”

“That is all, Mr. Folyat.”

Francis found himself forced to admiration of this woman. There was a sort of finality about her. He told himself that she was like a very large garden roller, a roller so heavy that no one man could move it. He had a trick of nicknaming people—(Minna had inherited it)—and he ticked her off in his mind as the garden-roller. When he had done that, he found that she was talking about the weather and Mr. Gladstone. When she had told him how she wept at the death of Charles Dickens, Francis thought it time to go. Mrs. Lawrie chatted amiably as she took him to the door, and she stood watching him as he walked down the asphalt path to the little rustic-gate. He turned down towards the bridge and took a long breath, and blew it out again. [Pg 155]How good the sky was! How good the air upon one’s face! . . . He remembered old Lawrie’s verses:

    The distant tolling of the bell

    Told the great sun a man was dead. . . .

What was dead? Old Lawrie? Hardly. The dead were surely not so mad as that. The woman? “Dead as a doornail,” said Francis, and he thought with pity of Bennett Lawrie, young, ardent, groping for life, coming back at night, tired from his dull work in his dull office, to that house.

Almost unconsciously he found himself comparing it with his own house and wondering what that might be like for the young people in it—for Minna, for Annette for Frederic. Not so bad as that, surely not so bad as that. And yet . . . He would not admit to himself that all was not well in his own house.

“How strange,” he thought. “How strange, to walk out of the street, an ordinary street, into lives like that! One would never have imagined it. . . . But the boy, Bennett; what’s to become of the boy?”