path: root/old/mkrd10.txt

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, by M. Rutherford
(##2 in our series by Mark Rutherford)

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Mark Rutherford's Deliverance

Author: Mark Rutherford

Release Date: March, 2004  [EBook #5338]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 2, 2002]
[Most recently updated: July 2, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MARK RUTHERFORD'S DELIVERANCE ***




Transcribed from the 1913 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




MARK RUTHERFORD'S DELIVERANCE




CHAPTER I--NEWSPAPERS



When I had established myself in my new lodgings in Camden Town, I
found I had ten pounds in my pocket, and again there was no outlook.
I examined carefully every possibility.  At last I remembered that a
relative of mine, who held some office in the House of Commons, added
to his income by writing descriptive accounts of the debates,
throwing in by way of supplement any stray scraps of gossip which he
was enabled to collect.  The rules of the House as to the admission
of strangers were not so strict then as they are now, and he assured
me that if I could but secure a commission from a newspaper, he could
pass me into one of the galleries, and, when there was nothing to be
heard worth describing, I could remain in the lobby, where I should
by degrees find many opportunities of picking up intelligence which
would pay.  So far, so good; but how to obtain the commission?  I
managed to get hold of a list of all the country papers, and I wrote
to nearly every one, offering my services.  I am afraid that I
somewhat exaggerated them, for I had two answers, and, after a little
correspondence, two engagements.  This was an unexpected stroke of
luck; but alas! both journals circulated in the same district.  I
never could get together more stuff than would fill about a column
and a half, and consequently I was obliged, with infinite pains, to
vary, so that it could not be recognised, the form of what, at
bottom, was essentially the same matter.  This was work which would
have been disagreeable enough, if I had not now ceased in a great
measure to demand what was agreeable.  In years past I coveted a
life, not of mere sensual enjoyment--for that I never cared--but a
life which should be filled with activities of the noblest kind, and
it was intolerable to me to reflect that all my waking hours were in
the main passed in merest drudgery, and that only for a few moments
at the beginning or end of the day could it be said that the higher
sympathies were really operative.  Existence to me was nothing but
these few moments, and consequently flitted like a shadow.  I was
now, however, the better of what was half disease and half something
healthy and good.  In the first place, I had discovered that my
appetite was far larger than my powers.  Consumed by a longing for
continuous intercourse with the best, I had no ability whatever to
maintain it, and I had accepted as a fact, however mysterious it
might be, that the human mind is created with the impulses of a
seraph and the strength of a man.  Furthermore, what was I that I
should demand exceptional treatment?  Thousands of men and women
superior to myself, are condemned, if that is the proper word to use,
to almost total absence from themselves.  The roar of the world for
them is never lulled to rest, nor can silence ever be secured in
which the voice of the Divine can be heard.

My letters were written twice a week, and as each contained a column
and a half, I had six columns weekly to manufacture.  These I was in
the habit of writing in the morning, my evenings being spent at the
House.  At first I was rather interested, but after a while the
occupation became tedious beyond measure, and for this reason.  In a
discussion of any importance about fifty members perhaps would take
part, and had made up their minds beforehand to speak.  There could
not possibly be more than three or four reasons for or against the
motion, and as the knowledge that what the intending orator had to
urge had been urged a dozen times before on that very night never
deterred him from urging it again, the same arguments, diluted,
muddled, and mispresented, recurred with the most wearisome
iteration.

The public outside knew nothing or very little of the real House of
Commons, and the manner in which time was squandered there, for the
reports were all of them much abbreviated.  In fact, I doubt whether
anybody but the Speaker, and one or two other persons in the same
position as myself, really felt with proper intensity what the waste
was, and how profound was the vanity of members and the itch for
expression; for even the reporters were relieved at stated intervals,
and the impression on their minds was not continuous.  Another evil
result of these attendances at the House was a kind of political
scepticism.  Over and over again I have seen a Government arraigned
for its conduct of foreign affairs.  The evidence lay in masses of
correspondence which it would have required some days to master, and
the verdict, after knowing the facts, ought to have depended upon the
application of principles, each of which admitted a contrary
principle for which much might be pleaded.  There were not fifty
members in the House with the leisure or the ability to understand
what it was which had actually happened, and if they had understood
it, they would not have had the wit to see what was the rule which
ought to have decided the case.  Yet, whether they understood or not,
they were obliged to vote, and what was worse, the constituencies
also had to vote, and so the gravest matters were settled in utter
ignorance.  This has often been adduced as an argument against an
extended suffrage, but, if it is an argument against anything, it is
an argument against intrusting the aristocracy and even the House
itself with the destinies of the nation; for no dock labourer could
possibly be more entirely empty of all reasons for action than the
noble lords, squires, lawyers, and railway directors whom I have seen
troop to the division bell.  There is something deeper than this
scepticism, but the scepticism is the easiest and the most obvious
conclusion to an open mind dealing so closely and practically with
politics as it was my lot to do at this time of my life.  Men must be
governed, and when it comes to the question, by whom? I, for one,
would far sooner in the long run trust the people at large than I
would the few, who in everything which relates to Government are as
little instructed as the many and more difficult to move.  The very
fickleness of the multitude, the theme of such constant declamation,
is so far good that it proves a susceptibility to impressions to
which men hedged round by impregnable conventionalities cannot yield.
{1}

When I was living in the country, the pure sky and the landscape
formed a large portion of my existence, so large that much of myself
depended on it, and I wondered how men could be worth anything if
they could never see the face of nature.  For this belief my early
training on the "Lyrical Ballads" is answerable.  When I came to
London the same creed survived, and I was for ever thirsting for
intercourse with my ancient friend.  Hope, faith, and God seemed
impossible amidst the smoke of the streets.  It was now very
difficult for me, except at rare opportunities, to leave London, and
it was necessary for me, therefore, to understand that all that was
essential for me was obtainable there, even though I should never see
anything more than was to be seen in journeying through the High
Street, Camden Town, Tottenham Court Road, the Seven Dials, and
Whitehall.  I should have been guilty of a simple surrender to
despair if I had not forced myself to make this discovery.  I cannot
help saying, with all my love for the literature of my own day, that
it has an evil side to it which none know except the millions of
sensitive persons who are condemned to exist in great towns.  It
might be imagined from much of this literature that true humanity and
a belief in God are the offspring of the hills or the ocean; and by
implication, if not expressly, the vast multitudes who hardly ever
see the hills or the ocean must be without a religion.  The long
poems which turn altogether upon scenery, perhaps in foreign lands,
and the passionate devotion to it which they breathe, may perhaps do
good in keeping alive in the hearts of men a determination to
preserve air, earth, and water from pollution; but speaking from
experience as a Londoner, I can testify that they are most
depressing, and I would counsel everybody whose position is what mine
was to avoid these books and to associate with those which will help
him in his own circumstances.

Half of my occupation soon came to an end.  One of my editors sent me
a petulant note telling me that all I wrote he could easily find out
himself, and that he required something more "graphic and personal."
I could do no better, or rather I ought to say, no worse than I had
been doing.  These letters were a great trouble to me.  I was always
conscious of writing so much of which I was not certain, and so much
which was indifferent to me.  The unfairness of parties haunted me.
But I continued to write, because I saw no other way of getting a
living, and surely it is a baser dishonesty to depend upon the
charity of friends because some pleasant, clean, ideal employment has
not presented itself, than to soil one's hands with a little of the
inevitable mud.  I don't think I ever felt anything more keenly than
I did a sneer from an acquaintance of mine who was in the habit of
borrowing money from me.  He was a painter, whose pictures were never
sold because he never worked hard enough to know how to draw, and it
came to my ears indirectly that he had said that "he would rather
live the life of a medieval ascetic than condescend to the
degradation of scribbling a dozen columns weekly of utter trash on
subjects with which he had no concern."  At that very moment he owed
me five pounds.  God knows that I admitted my dozen columns to be
utter trash, but it ought to have been forgiven by those who saw that
I was struggling to save myself from the streets and to keep a roof
over my head.  Degraded, however, as I might be, I could not get down
to the "graphic and personal," for it meant nothing less than the
absolutely false.  I therefore contrived to exist on the one letter,
which, excepting the mechanical labour of writing a second, took up
as much of my time as if I had to write two.

Never, but once or twice at the most, did my labours meet with the
slightest recognition beyond payment.  Once I remember that I accused
a member of a discreditable manoeuvre to consume the time of the
House, and as he represented a borough in my district, he wrote to
the editor denying the charge.  The editor without any inquiry--and I
believe I was mistaken--instantly congratulated me on having
"scored."  At another time, when Parliament was not sitting, I
ventured, by way of filling up my allotted space, to say a word on
behalf of a now utterly forgotten novel.  I had a letter from the
authoress thanking me, but alas! the illusion vanished.  I was
tempted by this one novel to look into others which I found she had
written, and I discovered that they were altogether silly.  The
attraction of the one of which I thought so highly, was due not to
any real merit which it possessed, but to something I had put into
it.  It was dead, but it had served as a wall to re-echo my own
voice.  Excepting these two occasions, I don't think that one
solitary human being ever applauded or condemned one solitary word of
which I was the author.  All my friends knew where my contributions
were to be found, but I never heard that they looked at them.  They
were never worth reading, and yet such complete silence was rather
lonely.  The tradesman who makes a good coat enjoys the satisfaction
of having fitted and pleased his customer, and a bricklayer, if he be
diligent, is rewarded by knowing that his master understands his
value, but I never knew what it was to receive a single response.  I
wrote for an abstraction; and spoke to empty space.  I cannot help
claiming some pity and even respect for the class to which I
belonged.  I have heard them called all kinds of hard names, hacks,
drudges, and something even more contemptible, but the injustice done
to them is monstrous.  Their wage is hardly earned; it is peculiarly
precarious, depending altogether upon their health, and no matter how
ill they may be they must maintain the liveliness of manner which is
necessary to procure acceptance.  I fell in with one poor fellow
whose line was something like my own.  I became acquainted with him
through sitting side by side with him at the House.  He lived in
lodgings in Goodge Street, and occasionally I walked with him as far
as the corner of Tottenham Court Road, where I caught the last
omnibus northward.  He wrote like me a "descriptive article" for the
country, but he also wrote every now and then--a dignity to which I
never attained--a "special" for London.  His "descriptive articles"
were more political than mine, and he was obliged to be violently
Tory.  His creed, however, was such a pure piece of professionalism,
that though I was Radical, and was expected to be so, we never
jarred, and often, as we wandered homewards, we exchanged notes, and
were mutually useful, his observations appearing in my paper, and
mine in his, with proper modifications.  How he used to roar in the
Gazette against the opposite party, and yet I never heard anything
from him myself but what was diffident and tender.  He had acquired,
as an instrument necessary to him, an extraordinarily extravagant
style, and he laid about him with a bludgeon, which inevitably
descended on the heads of all prominent persons if they happened not
to be Conservative, no matter what their virtues might be.  One
peculiarity, however, I noted in him.  Although he ought every now
and then, when the subject was uppermost, to have flamed out in the
Gazette on behalf of the Church, I never saw a word from him on that
subject.  He drew the line at religion.  He did not mind acting his
part in things secular, for his performances were, I am sure, mostly
histrionic, but there he stopped.  The unreality of his character was
a husk surrounding him, but it did not touch the core.  It was as if
he had said to himself, "Political controversy is nothing to me, and,
what is more, is so uncertain that it matters little whether I say
yes or no, nor indeed does it matter if I say yes AND no, and I must
keep my wife and children from the workhouse; but when it comes to
the relationship of man to God, it is a different matter."  His
altogether outside vehemence and hypocrisy did in fact react upon
him, and so far from affecting harmfully what lay deeper, produced a
more complete sincerity and transparency extending even to the finest
verbal distinctions.  Over and over again have I heard him preach to
his wife, almost with pathos, the duty of perfect exactitude in
speech in describing the commonest occurrences.  "Now, my dear, IS
that so?" was a perpetual remonstrance with him; and he always
insisted upon it that there is no training more necessary for
children than that of teaching them not merely to speak the truth in
the ordinary, vulgar sense of the term, but to speak it in a much
higher sense, by rigidly compelling, point by point, a correspondence
of the words with the fact external or internal.  He never would
tolerate in his own children a mere hackneyed, borrowed expression,
but demanded exact portraiture; and nothing vexed him more than to
hear one of them spoil and make worthless what he or she had seen, by
reporting it in some stale phrase which had been used by everybody.
This refusal to take the trouble to watch the presentment to the mind
of anything which had been placed before it, and to reproduce it in
its own lines and colours was, as he said, nothing but falsehood, and
he maintained that the principal reason why people are so
uninteresting is not that they have nothing to say.  It is rather
that they will not face the labour of saying in their own tongue what
they have to say, but cover it up and conceal it in commonplace, so
that we get, not what they themselves behold and what they think, but
a hieroglyphic or symbol invented as the representative of a certain
class of objects or emotions, and as inefficient to represent a
particular object or emotion as x or y to set forth the relation of
Hamlet to Ophelia.  He would even exercise his children in this art
of the higher truthfulness, and would purposely make them give him an
account of something which he had seen and they had seen, checking
them the moment he saw a lapse from originality.  Such was the Tory
correspondent of the Gazette.

I ought to say, by way of apology for him, that in his day it
signified little or nothing whether Tory or Whig was in power.
Politics had not become what they will one day become, a matter of
life or death, dividing men with really private love and hate.  What
a mockery controversy was in the House!  How often I have seen
members, who were furious at one another across the floor, quietly
shaking hands outside, and inviting one another to dinner!  I have
heard them say that we ought to congratulate ourselves that
parliamentary differences do not in this country breed personal
animosities.  To me this seemed anything but a subject of
congratulation.  Men who are totally at variance ought not to be
friends, and if Radical and Tory are not totally, but merely
superficially at variance, so much the worse for their Radicalism and
Toryism.

It is possible, and even probable, that the public fury and the
subsequent amity were equally absurd.  Most of us have no real loves
and no real hatreds.  Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but
thrice accursed is that indifference which is neither one nor the
other, the muddy mess which men call friendship.

M'Kay--for that was his name--lived, as I have said, in Goodge
Street, where he had unfurnished apartments.  I often spent part of
the Sunday with him, and I may forestall obvious criticism by saying
that I do not pretend for a moment to defend myself from
inconsistency in denouncing members of Parliament for their
duplicity, M'Kay and myself being also guilty of something very much
like it.  But there was this difference between us and our
parliamentary friends, that we always divested ourselves of all
hypocrisy when we were alone.  We then dropped the stage costume
which members continued to wear in the streets and at the dinner-
table, and in which some of them even slept and said their prayers.

London Sundays to persons who are not attached to any religious
community, and have no money to spend, are rather dreary.  We tried
several ways of getting through the morning.  If we heard that there
was a preacher with a reputation, we went to hear him.  As a rule,
however, we got no good in that way.  Once we came to a chapel where
there was a minister supposed to be one of the greatest orators of
the day.  We had much difficulty in finding standing room.  Just as
we entered we heard him say, "My friends, I appeal to those of you
who are parents.  You know that if you say to a child 'go,' he goeth,
and if you say 'come,' he cometh.  So the Lord"--But at this point
M'Kay, who had children, nudged me to come out; and out we went.  Why
does this little scene remain with me?  I can hardly say, but here it
stands.  It is remembered, not so much by reason of the preacher as
by reason of the apparent acquiescence and admiration of the
audience, who seemed to be perfectly willing to take over an
experience from their pastor--if indeed it was really an experience--
which was not their own.  Our usual haunts on Sunday were naturally
the parks and Kensington Gardens; but artificial limited enclosures
are apt to become wearisome after a time, and we longed for a little
more freedom if a little less trim.  So we would stroll towards
Hampstead or Highgate, the only drawback to these regions being the
squalid, ragged, half town, half suburb, through which it was
necessary to pass.  The skirts of London when the air is filled with
north-easterly soot, grit, and filth, are cheerless, and the least
cheerful part of the scene is the inability of the vast wandering
masses of people to find any way of amusing themselves.  At the
corner of one of the fields in Kentish Town, just about to be
devoured, stood a public-house, and opposite the door was generally
encamped a man who sold nothing but Brazil nuts.  Swarms of people
lazily wandered past him, most of them waiting for the public-house
to open.  Brazil nuts on a cold black Sunday morning are not
exhilarating, but the costermonger found many customers who bought
his nuts, and ate them, merely because they had nothing better to do.
We went two or three times to a freethinking hall, where we were
entertained with demonstrations of the immorality of the patriarchs
and Jewish heroes, and arguments to prove that the personal existence
of the devil was a myth, the audience breaking out into uproarious
laughter at comical delineations of Noah and Jonah.  One morning we
found the place completely packed.  A "celebrated Christian," as he
was described to us, having heard of the hall, had volunteered to
engage in debate on the claims of the Old Testament to Divine
authority.  He turned out to be a preacher whom we knew quite well.
He was introduced by his freethinking antagonist, who claimed for him
a respectful hearing.  The preacher said that before beginning he
should like to "engage in prayer."  Accordingly he came to the front
of the platform, lifted up his eyes, told God why he was there, and
besought Him to bless the discussion in the conversion "of these poor
wandering souls, who have said in their hearts that there is no God,
to a saving faith in Him and in the blood of Christ."  I expected
that some resentment would be displayed when the wandering souls
found themselves treated like errant sheep, but to my surprise they
listened with perfect silence; and when he had said "Amen," there
were great clappings of hands, and cries of "Bravo."  They evidently
considered the prayer merely as an elocutionary show-piece.  The
preacher was much disconcerted, but he recovered himself, and began
his sermon, for it was nothing more.  He enlarged on the fact that
men of the highest eminence had believed in the Old Testament.  Locke
and Newton had believed in it, and did it not prove arrogance in us
to doubt when the "gigantic intellect which had swept the skies, and
had announced the law which bound the universe together was
satisfied?"  The witness of the Old Testament to the New was another
argument, but his main reliance was upon the prophecies.  From Adam
to Isaiah there was a continuous prefigurement of Christ.  Christ was
the point to which everything tended; and "now, my friends," he said,
"I cannot sit down without imploring you to turn your eyes on Him who
never yet repelled the sinner, to wash in that eternal Fountain ever
open for the remission of sins, and to flee from the wrath to come.
I believe the sacred symbol of the cross has not yet lost its
efficacy.  For eighteen hundred years, whenever it has been exhibited
to the sons of men, it has been potent to reclaim and save them.  'I,
if I be lifted up,' cried the Great Sufferer, 'will draw all men unto
Me,' and He has drawn not merely the poor and ignorant but the
philosopher and the sage.  Oh, my brethren, think what will happen if
you reject Him.  I forbear to paint your doom.  And think again, on
the other hand, of the bliss which awaits you if you receive Him, of
the eternal companionship with the Most High and with the spirits of
just men made perfect."  His hearers again applauded vigorously, and
none less so than their appointed leader, who was to follow on the
other side.  He was a little man with small eyes; his shaven face was
dark with a black beard lurking under the skin, and his nose was
slightly turned up.  He was evidently a trained debater who had
practised under railway arches, discussion "forums," and in the
classes promoted by his sect.  He began by saying that he could not
compliment his friend who had just sat down on the inducements which
he had offered them to become Christians.  The New Cut was not a nice
place on a wet day, but he had rather sit at a stall there all day
long with his feet on a basket than lie in the bosom of some of the
just men made perfect portrayed in the Bible.  Nor, being married,
should he feel particularly at ease if he had to leave his wife with
David.  David certainly ought to have got beyond all that kind of
thing, considering it must be over 3000 years since he first saw
Bathsheba; but we are told that the saints are for ever young in
heaven, and this treacherous villain, who would have been tried by a
jury of twelve men and hung outside Newgate if he had lived in the
nineteenth century, might be dangerous now.  He was an amorous old
gentleman up to the very last.  (Roars of laughter.)  Nor did the
speaker feel particularly anxious to be shut up with all the bishops,
who of course are amongst the elect, and on their departure from this
vale of tears tempered by ten thousand a year, are duly supplied with
wings.  Much more followed in the same strain upon the immorality of
the Bible heroes, their cruelty, and the cruelty of the God who
sanctioned it.  Then followed a clever exposition of the
inconsistencies of the Old Testament history, the impossibility of
any reference to Jesus therein, and a really earnest protest against
the quibbling by which those who believed in the Bible as a
revelation sought to reconcile it with science.  "Finally," said the
speaker, "I am sure we all of us will pass a vote of thanks to our
reverend friend for coming to see us, and we cordially invite him to
come again.  If I might be allowed to offer a suggestion, it would be
that he should make himself acquainted with our case before he pays
us another visit, and not suppose that we are to be persuaded with
the rhetoric which may do very well for the young women of his
congregation, but won't go down here."  This was fair and just, for
the eminent Christian was nothing but an ordinary minister, who, when
he was prepared for his profession, had never been allowed to see
what are the historical difficulties of Christianity, lest he should
be overcome by them.  On the other hand, his sceptical opponents were
almost devoid of the faculty for appreciating the great remains of
antiquity, and would probably have considered the machinery of the
Prometheus Bound or of the Iliad a sufficient reason for a sneer.
That they should spend their time in picking the Bible to pieces when
there was so much positive work for them to do, seemed to me as
melancholy as if they had spent themselves upon theology.  To waste a
Sunday morning in ridiculing such stories as that of Jonah was surely
as imbecile as to waste it in proving their verbal veracity.



CHAPTER II--M'KAY



It was foggy and overcast as we walked home to Goodge Street.  The
churches and chapels were emptying themselves, but the great mass of
the population had been "nowhere."  I had dinner with M'Kay, and as
the day wore on the fog thickened.  London on a dark Sunday
afternoon, more especially about Goodge Street, is depressing.  The
inhabitants drag themselves hither and thither in languor and
uncertainty.  Small mobs loiter at the doors of the gin palaces.
Costermongers wander aimlessly, calling "walnuts" with a cry so
melancholy that it sounds as the wail of the hopelessly lost may be
imagined to sound when their anguish has been deadened by the
monotony of a million years.

About two or three o'clock decent working men in their best clothes
emerge from the houses in such streets as Nassau Street.  It is part
of their duty to go out after dinner on Sunday with the wife and
children.  The husband pushes the perambulator out of the dingy
passage, and gazes doubtfully this way and that way, not knowing
whither to go, and evidently longing for the Monday, when his work,
however disagreeable it may be, will be his plain duty.  The wife
follows carrying a child, and a boy and girl in unaccustomed apparel
walk by her side.  They come out into Mortimer Street.  There are no
shops open; the sky over their heads is mud, the earth is mud under
their feet, the muddy houses stretch in long rows, black, gaunt,
uniform.  The little party reach Hyde Park, also wrapped in
impenetrable mud-grey.  The man's face brightens for a moment as he
says, "It is time to go back," and so they return, without the
interchange of a word, unless perhaps they happen to see an omnibus
horse fall down on the greasy stones.  What is there worth thought or
speech on such an expedition?  Nothing!  The tradesman who kept the
oil and colour establishment opposite to us was not to be tempted
outside.  It was a little more comfortable than Nassau Street, and,
moreover, he was religious and did not encourage Sabbath-breaking.
He and his family always moved after their mid-day Sabbath repast
from the little back room behind the shop up to what they called the
drawing-room overhead.  It was impossible to avoid seeing them every
time we went to the window.  The father of the family, after his
heavy meal, invariably sat in the easy-chair with a handkerchief over
his eyes and slept.  The children were always at the windows,
pretending to read books, but in reality watching the people below.
At about four o'clock their papa generally awoke, and demanded a
succession of hymn tunes played on the piano.  When the weather
permitted, the lower sash was opened a little, and the neighbours
were indulged with the performance of "Vital Spark," the father
"coming in" now and then with a bass note or two at the end where he
was tolerably certain of the harmony.  At five o'clock a prophecy of
the incoming tea brought us some relief from the contemplation of the
landscape or brick-scape.  I say "some relief," for meals at M'Kay's
were a little disagreeable.  His wife was an honest, good little
woman, but so much attached to him and so dependent on him that she
was his mere echo.  She had no opinions which were not his, and
whenever he said anything which went beyond the ordinary affairs of
the house, she listened with curious effort, and generally responded
by a weakened repetition of M'Kay's own observations.  He
perpetually, therefore, had before him an enfeebled reflection of
himself, and this much irritated him, notwithstanding his love for
her; for who could help loving a woman who, without the least
hesitation, would have opened her veins at his command, and have
given up every drop of blood in her body for him?  Over and over
again I have heard him offer some criticism on a person or event, and
the customary chime of approval would ensue, provoking him to such a
degree that he would instantly contradict himself with much
bitterness, leaving poor Mrs. M'Kay in much perplexity.  Such a shot
as this generally reduced her to timid silence.  As a rule, he always
discouraged any topic at his house which was likely to serve as an
occasion for showing his wife's dependence on him.  He designedly
talked about her household affairs, asked her whether she had mended
his clothes and ordered the coals.  She knew that these things were
not what was upon his mind, and she answered him in despairing tones,
which showed how much she felt the obtrusive condescension to her
level.  I greatly pitied her, and sometimes, in fact, my emotion at
the sight of her struggles with her limitations almost overcame me
and I was obliged to get up and go.  She was childishly affectionate.
If M'Kay came in and happened to go up to her and kiss her, her face
brightened into the sweetest and happiest smile.  I recollect once
after he had been unusually annoyed with her he repented just as he
was leaving home, and put his lips to her head, holding it in both
his hands.  I saw her gently take the hand from her forehead and
press it to her mouth, the tears falling down her cheek meanwhile.
Nothing would ever tempt her to admit anything against her husband.
M'Kay was violent and unjust at times.  His occupation he hated, and
his restless repugnance to it frequently discharged itself
indifferently upon everything which came in his way.  His children
often thought him almost barbarous, but in truth he did not actually
see them when he was in one of these moods.  What was really present
with him, excluding everything else, was the sting of something more
than usually repulsive of which they knew nothing.  Mrs. M'Kay's
answer to her children's remonstrances when they were alone with her
always was, "He is so worried," and she invariably dwelt upon their
faults which had given him the opportunity for his wrath.

I think M'Kay's treatment of her wholly wrong.  I think that he ought
not to have imposed himself upon her so imperiously.  I think he
ought to have striven to ascertain what lay concealed in that modest
heart, to have encouraged its expression and development, to have
debased himself before her that she might receive courage to rise,
and he would have found that she had something which he had not; not
HIS something perhaps, but something which would have made his life
happier.  As it was, he stood upon his own ground above her.  If she
could reach him, well and good, if not, the helping hand was not
proffered, and she fell back, hopeless.  Later on he discovered his
mistake.  She became ill very gradually, and M'Kay began to see in
the distance a prospect of losing her.  A frightful pit came in view.
He became aware that he could not do without her.  He imagined what
his home would have been with other women whom he knew, and he
confessed that with them he would have been less contented.  He
acknowledged that he had been guilty of a kind of criminal epicurism;
that he rejected in foolish, fatal, nay, even wicked indifference,
the bread of life upon which he might have lived and thriven.  His
whole effort now was to suppress himself in his wife.  He read to
her, a thing he never did before, and when she misunderstood, he
patiently explained; he took her into his counsels and asked her
opinion; he abandoned his own opinion for hers, and in the presence
of her children he always deferred to her, and delighted to
acknowledge that she knew more than he did, that she was right and he
was wrong.  She was now confined to her house, and the end was near,
but this was the most blessed time of her married life.  She grew
under the soft rain of his loving care, and opened out, not, indeed,
into an oriental flower, rich in profound mystery of scent and
colour, but into a blossom of the chalk-down.  Altogether concealed
and closed she would have remained if it had not been for this
beneficent and heavenly gift poured upon her.  He had just time
enough to see what she really was, and then she died.  There are some
natures that cannot unfold under pressure or in the presence of
unregarding power.  Hers was one.  They require a clear space round
them, the removal of everything which may overmaster them, and
constant delicate attention.  They require too a recognition of the
fact, which M'Kay for a long time did not recognise, that it is folly
to force them and to demand of them that they shall be what they
cannot be.  I stood by the grave this morning of my poor, pale,
clinging little friend now for some years at peace, and I thought
that the tragedy of Promethean torture or Christ-like crucifixion may
indeed be tremendous, but there is a tragedy too in the existence of
a soul like hers, conscious of its feebleness and ever striving to
overpass it, ever aware that it is an obstacle to the return of the
affection of the man whom she loves.

Meals, as I have said, were disagreeable at M'Kay's, and when we
wanted to talk we went out of doors.  The evening after our visit to
the debating hall we moved towards Portland Place, and walked up and
down there for an hour or more.  M'Kay had a passionate desire to
reform the world.  The spectacle of the misery of London, and of the
distracted swaying hither and thither of the multitudes who inhabit
it, tormented him incessantly.  He always chafed at it, and he never
seemed sure that he had a right to the enjoyment of the simplest
pleasures so long as London was before him.  What a farce, he would
cry, is all this poetry, philosophy, art, and culture, when millions
of wretched mortals are doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of
the city!  Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with
exquisite emotions, with speculations upon the Infinite, with
addresses to flowers, with the worship of waterfalls and flying
clouds, and with the incessant portraiture of a thousand moods and
variations of love, while their neighbours lie grovelling in the
mire, and never know anything more of life or its duties than is
afforded them by a police report in a bit of newspaper picked out of
the kennel.  We went one evening to hear a great violin-player, who
played such music, and so exquisitely, that the limits of life were
removed.  But we had to walk up the Haymarket home, between eleven
and twelve o'clock, and the violin-playing became the merest
trifling.  M'Kay had been brought up upon the Bible.  He had before
him, not only there, but in the history of all great religious
movements, a record of the improvement of the human race, or of large
portions of it, not merely by gradual civilisation, but by
inspiration spreading itself suddenly.  He could not get it out of
his head that something of this kind is possible again in our time.
He longed to try for himself in his own poor way in one of the slums
about Drury Lane.  I sympathised with him, but I asked him what he
had to say.  I remember telling him that I had been into St. Paul's
Cathedral, and that I pictured to myself the cathedral full, and
myself in the pulpit.  I was excited while imagining the opportunity
offered me of delivering some message to three or four thousand
persons in such a building, but in a minute or two I discovered that
my sermon would be very nearly as follows:  "Dear friends, I know no
more than you know; we had better go home."  I admitted to him that
if he could believe in hell-fire, or if he could proclaim the Second
Advent, as Paul did to the Thessalonians, and get people to believe,
he might change their manners, but otherwise he could do nothing but
resort to a much slower process.  With the departure of a belief in
the supernatural departs once and for ever the chance of regenerating
the race except by the school and by science. {2}  However, M'Kay
thought he would try.  His earnestness was rather a hindrance than a
help to him, for it prevented his putting certain important questions
to himself, or at any rate it prevented his waiting for distinct
answers.  He recurred to the apostles and Bunyan, and was convinced
that it was possible even now to touch depraved men and women with an
idea which should recast their lives.  So it is that the main
obstacle to our success is a success which has preceded us.  We
instinctively follow the antecedent form, and consequently we either
pass by, or deny altogether, the life of our own time, because its
expression has changed.  We never do practically believe that the
Messiah is not incarnated twice in the same flesh.  He came as Jesus,
and we look for Him as Jesus now, overlooking the manifestation of
to-day, and dying, perhaps, without recognising it.

M'Kay had found a room near Parker Street, Drury Lane, in which he
proposed to begin, and that night, as we trod the pavement of
Portland Place, he propounded his plans to me, I listening without
much confidence, but loth nevertheless to take the office of Time
upon myself, and to disprove what experience would disprove more
effectually.  His object was nothing less than gradually to attract
Drury Lane to come and be saved.

The first Sunday I went with him to the room.  As we walked over the
Drury Lane gratings of the cellars a most foul stench came up, and
one in particular I remember to this day.  A man half dressed pushed
open a broken window beneath us, just as we passed by, and there
issued such a blast of corruption, made up of gases bred by filth,
air breathed and rebreathed a hundred times, charged with odours of
unnameable personal uncleanness and disease, that I staggered to the
gutter with a qualm which I could scarcely conquer.  At the doors of
the houses stood grimy women with their arms folded and their hair
disordered.  Grimier boys and girls had tied a rope to broken
railings, and were swinging on it.  The common door to a score of
lodgings stood ever open, and the children swarmed up and down the
stairs carrying with them patches of mud every time they came in from
the street.  The wholesome practice which amongst the decent poor
marks off at least one day in the week as a day on which there is to
be a change; when there is to be some attempt to procure order and
cleanliness; a day to be preceded by soap and water, by shaving, and
by as many clean clothes as can be procured, was unknown here.  There
was no break in the uniformity of squalor; nor was it even possible
for any single family to emerge amidst such altogether suppressive
surroundings.  All self-respect, all effort to do anything more than
to satisfy somehow the grossest wants, had departed.  The shops were
open; most of them exhibiting a most miscellaneous collection of
goods, such as bacon cut in slices, fire-wood, a few loaves of bread,
and sweetmeats in dirty bottles.  Fowls, strange to say, black as the
flagstones, walked in and out of these shops, or descended into the
dark areas.  The undertaker had not put up his shutters.  He had
drawn down a yellow blind, on which was painted a picture of a
suburban cemetery.  Two funerals, the loftiest effort of his craft,
were depicted approaching the gates.  When the gas was alight behind
the blind, an effect was produced which was doubtless much admired.
He also displayed in his window a model coffin, a work of art.  It
was about a foot long, varnished, studded with little brass nails,
and on the lid was fastened a rustic cross stretching from end to
end.  The desire to decorate existence in some way or other with more
or less care is nearly universal.  The most sensual and the meanest
almost always manifest an indisposition to be content with mere
material satisfaction.  I have known selfish, gluttonous, drunken men
spend their leisure moments in trimming a bed of scarlet geraniums,
and the vulgarest and most commonplace of mortals considers it a
necessity to put a picture in the room or an ornament on the
mantelpiece.  The instinct, even in its lowest forms, is divine.  It
is the commentary on the text that man shall not live by bread alone.
It is evidence of an acknowledged compulsion--of which art is the
highest manifestation--to ESCAPE.  In the alleys behind Drury Lane
this instinct, the very salt of life, was dead, crushed out utterly,
a symptom which seemed to me ominous, and even awful to the last
degree.  The only house in which it survived was in that of the
undertaker, who displayed the willows, the black horses, and the
coffin.  These may have been nothing more than an advertisement, but
from the care with which the cross was elaborated, and the neatness
with which it was made to resemble a natural piece of wood, I am
inclined to believe that the man felt some pleasure in his work for
its own sake, and that he was not utterly submerged.  The cross in
such dens as these, or, worse than dens, in such sewers!  If it be
anything, it is a symbol of victory, of power to triumph over
resistance, and even death.  Here was nothing but sullen subjugation,
the most grovelling slavery, mitigated only by a tendency to mutiny.
Here was a strength of circumstance to quell and dominate which
neither Jesus nor Paul could have overcome--worse a thousandfold than
Scribes or Pharisees, or any form of persecution.  The preaching of
Jesus would have been powerless here; in fact, no known stimulus,
nothing ever held up before men to stir the soul to activity, can do
anything in the back streets of great cities so long as they are the
cesspools which they are now.

We came to the room.  About a score of M'Kay's own friends were
there, and perhaps half-a-dozen outsiders, attracted by the notice
which had been pasted on a board at the entrance.  M'Kay announced
his errand.  The ignorance and misery of London he said were
intolerable to him.  He could not take any pleasure in life when he
thought upon them.  What could he do? that was the question.  He was
not a man of wealth.  He could not buy up these hovels.  He could not
force an entrance into them and persuade their inhabitants to improve
themselves.  He had no talents wherewith to found a great
organisation or create public opinion.  He had determined, after much
thought, to do what he was now doing.  It was very little, but it was
all he could undertake.  He proposed to keep this room open as a
place to which those who wished might resort at different times, and
find some quietude, instruction, and what fortifying thoughts he
could collect to enable men to endure their almost unendurable
sufferings.  He did not intend to teach theology.  Anything which
would be serviceable he would set forth, but in the main he intended
to rely on holding up the examples of those who were greater than
ourselves and were our redeemers.  He meant to teach Christ in the
proper sense of the word.  Christ now is admired probably more than
He had ever been.  Everybody agrees to admire Him, but where are the
people who really do what He did?  There is no religion now-a-days.
Religion is a mere literature.  Cultivated persons sit in their
studies and write overflowingly about Jesus, or meet at parties and
talk about Him; but He is not of much use to me unless I say to
myself, HOW IS IT WITH THEE? unless I myself become what He was.
This was the meaning of Jesus to the Apostle Paul.  Jesus was in him;
he had put on Jesus; that is to say, Jesus lived in him like a second
soul, taking the place of his own soul and directing him accordingly.
That was religion, and it is absurd to say that the English nation at
this moment, or any section of it, is religious.  Its educated
classes are inhabited by a hundred minds.  We are in a state of
anarchy, each of us with a different aim and shaping himself
according to a different type; while the uneducated classes are
entirely given over to the "natural man."  He was firmly persuaded
that we need religion, poor and rich alike.  We need some controlling
influence to bind together our scattered energies.  We do not know
what we are doing.  We read one book one day and another book another
day, but it is idle wandering to right and left; it is not advancing
on a straight road.  It is not possible to bind ourselves down to a
certain defined course, but still it is an enormous, an incalculable
advantage for us to have some irreversible standard set up in us by
which everything we meet is to be judged.  That is the meaning of the
prophecy--whether it will ever be fulfilled God only knows--that
Christ shall judge the world.  All religions have been this.  They
have said that in the midst of the infinitely possible--infinitely
possible evil and infinitely possible good too--we become distracted.
A thousand forces good and bad act upon us.  It is necessary, if we
are to be men, if we are to be saved, that we should be rescued from
this tumult, and that our feet should be planted upon a path.  His
object, therefore, would be to preach Christ, as before said, and to
introduce into human life His unifying influence.  He would try and
get them to see things with the eyes of Christ, to love with His
love, to judge with His judgment.  He believed Christ was fitted to
occupy this place.  He deliberately chose Christ as worthy to be our
central, shaping force.  He would try by degrees to prove this; to
prove that Christ's way of dealing with life is the best way, and so
to create a genuinely Christian spirit, which, when any choice of
conduct is presented to us, will prompt us to ask first of all, HOW
WOULD CHRIST HAVE IT? or, when men and things pass before us, will
decide through him what we have to say about them.  M'Kay added that
he hoped his efforts would not be confined to talking.  He trusted to
be able, by means of this little meeting, gradually to gain
admittance for himself and his friends into the houses of the poor
and do some practical good.  At present he had no organisation and no
plans.  He did not believe in organisation and plans preceding a
clear conception of what was to be accomplished.  Such, as nearly as
I can now recollect, is an outline of his discourse.  It was
thoroughly characteristic of him.  He always talked in this fashion.
He was for ever insisting on the aimlessness of modern life, on the
powerlessness of its vague activities to mould men into anything
good, to restrain them from evil or moderate their passions, and he
was possessed by a vision of a new Christianity which was to take the
place of the old and dead theologies.  I have reported him in my own
language.  He strove as much as he could to make his meaning plain to
everybody.  Just before he finished, three or four out of the half-a-
dozen outsiders who were present whistled with all their might and
ran down the stairs shouting to one another.  As we went out they had
collected about the door, and amused themselves by pushing one
another against us, and kicking an old kettle behind us and amongst
us all the way up the street, so that we were covered with splashes.
Mrs. M'Kay went with us, and when we reached home, she tried to say
something about what she had heard.  The cloud came over her
husband's face at once; he remained silent for a minute, and getting
up and going to the window, observed that it ought to be cleaned, and
that he could hardly see the opposite house.  The poor woman looked
distressed, and I was just about to come to her rescue by continuing
what she had been saying, when she rose, not in anger, but in
trouble, and went upstairs.



CHAPTER III--MISS LEROY



During the great French war there were many French prisoners in my
native town.  They led a strange isolated life, for they knew nothing
of our language, nor, in those days, did three people in the town
understand theirs.  The common soldiers amused themselves by making
little trifles and selling them.  I have now before me a box of
coloured straw with the date 1799 on the bottom, which was bought by
my grandfather.  One of these prisoners was an officer named Leroy.
Why he did not go back to France I never heard, but I know that
before I was born he was living near our house on a small income;
that he tried to teach French, and that he had as his companion a
handsome daughter who grew up speaking English.  What she was like
when she was young I cannot say, but I have had her described to me
over and over again.  She had rather darkish brown hair, and she was
tall and straight as an arrow.  This she was, by the way, even into
old age.  She surprised, shocked, and attracted all the sober persons
in our circle.  Her ways were not their ways.  She would walk out by
herself on a starry night without a single companion, and cause
thereby infinite talk, which would have converged to a single focus
if it had not happened that she was also in the habit of walking out
at four o'clock on a summer's morning, and that in the church porch
of a little village not far from us, which was her favourite resting-
place, a copy of the De Imitatione Christi was found which belonged
to her.  So the talk was scattered again and its convergence
prevented.  She used to say doubtful things about love.  One of them
struck my mother with horror.  Miss Leroy told a male person once,
and told him to his face, that if she loved him and he loved her, and
they agreed to sign one another's foreheads with a cross as a
ceremony, it would be as good to her as marriage.  This may seem a
trifle, but nobody now can imagine what was thought of it at the time
it was spoken.  My mother repeated it every now and then for fifty
years.  It may be conjectured how easily any other girls of our
acquaintance would have been classified, and justly classified, if
they had uttered such barefaced Continental immorality.  Miss Leroy's
neighbours were remarkably apt at classifying their fellow-creatures.
They had a few, a very few holes, into which they dropped their
neighbours, and they must go into one or the other.  Nothing was more
distressing than a specimen which, notwithstanding all the violence
which might be used to it, would not fit into a hole, but remained an
exception.  Some lout, I believe, reckoning on the legitimacy of his
generalisation, and having heard of this and other observations
accredited to Miss Leroy, ventured to be slightly rude to her.  What
she said to him was never known, but he was always shy afterwards of
mentioning her name, and when he did he was wont to declare that she
was "a rum un."  She was not particular, I have heard, about personal
tidiness, and this I can well believe, for she was certainly not
distinguished when I knew her for this virtue.  She cared nothing for
the linen-closet, the spotless bed-hangings, and the bright poker,
which were the true household gods of the respectable women of those
days.  She would have been instantly set down as "slut," and as
having "nasty dirty forrin ways," if a peculiar habit of hers had not
unfortunately presented itself, most irritating to her critics, so
anxious promptly to gratify their philosophic tendency towards
scientific grouping.  Mrs. Mobbs, who lived next door to her, averred
that she always slept with the window open.  Mrs. Mobbs, like
everybody else, never opened her window except to "air the room."
Mrs. Mobbs' best bedroom was carpeted all over, and contained a great
four-post bedstead, hung round with heavy hangings, and protected at
the top from draughts by a kind of firmament of white dimity.  Mrs.
Mobbs stuffed a sack of straw up the chimney of the fireplace, to
prevent the fall of the "sutt," as she called it.  Mrs. Mobbs, if she
had a visitor, gave her a hot supper, and expected her immediately
afterwards to go upstairs, draw the window curtains, get into this
bed, draw the bed curtains also, and wake up the next morning
"bilious."  This was the proper thing to do.  Miss Leroy's sitting-
room was decidedly disorderly; the chairs were dusty; "yer might
write yer name on the table," Mrs. Mobbs declared; but, nevertheless,
the casement was never closed night nor day; and, moreover, Miss
Leroy was believed by the strongest circumstantial evidence to wash
herself all over every morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought
"weakening," and somehow connected with ethical impropriety.  When
Miss Leroy was married, and first as an elderly woman became known to
me, she was very inconsequential in her opinions, or at least
appeared so to our eyes.  She must have been much more so when she
was younger.  In our town we were all formed upon recognised
patterns, and those who possessed any one mark of the pattern, had
all.  The wine-merchant, for example, who went to church, eminently
respectable, Tory, by no means associating with the tradesfolk who
displayed their goods in the windows, knowing no "experience," and
who had never felt the outpouring of the Spirit, was a specimen of a
class like him.  Another class was represented by the dissenting
ironmonger, deacon, presiding at prayer-meetings, strict Sabbatarian,
and believer in eternal punishments; while a third was set forth by
"Guffy," whose real name was unknown, who got drunk, unloaded barges,
assisted at the municipal elections, and was never once seen inside a
place of worship.  These patterns had existed amongst us from the
dimmest antiquity, and were accepted as part of the eternal order of
things; so much so, that the deacon, although he professed to be sure
that nobody who had not been converted would escape the fire--and the
wine-merchant certainly had not been converted--was very far from
admitting to himself that the wine-merchant ought to be converted, or
that it would be proper to try and convert him.  I doubt, indeed,
whether our congregation would have been happy, or would have thought
any the better of him, if he had left the church.  Such an event,
however, could no more come within the reach of our vision than a
reversal of the current of our river.  It would have broken up our
foundations and party-walls, and would have been considered as
ominous, and anything but a subject for thankfulness.  But Miss Leroy
was not the wine-merchant, nor the ironmonger, nor Guffy, and even
now I cannot trace the hidden centre of union from which sprang so
much that was apparently irreconcilable.  She was a person whom
nobody could have created in writing a novel, because she was so
inconsistent.  As I have said before, she studied Thomas a Kempis,
and her little French Bible was brown with constant use.  But then
she read much fiction in which there were scenes which would have
made our hair stand on end.  The only thing she constantly abhorred
in books was what was dull and opaque.  Yet, as we shall see
presently, her dislike to dulness, once at least in her life, notably
failed her.  She was not Catholic, and professed herself Protestant,
but such a Protestantism!  She had no sceptical doubts.  She believed
implicitly that the Bible was the Word of God, and that everything in
it was true, but her interpretation of it was of the strangest kind.
Almost all our great doctrines seemed shrunk to nothing in her eyes,
while others, which were nothing to us, were all-important to her.
The atonement, for instance, I never heard her mention, but
Unitarianism was hateful to her, and Jesus was her God in every sense
of the word.  On the other hand, she was partly Pagan, for she knew
very little of that consideration for the feeble, and even for the
foolish, which is the glory of Christianity.  She was rude to foolish
people, and she instinctively kept out of the way of all disease and
weakness, so that in this respect she was far below the commonplace
tradesman's wife, who visited the sick, sat up with them, and, in
fact, never seemed so completely in her element as when she could be
with anybody who was ill in bed.

Miss Leroy's father was republican, and so was my grandfather.  My
grandfather and old Leroy were the only people in our town who
refused to illuminate when a victory was gained over the French.
Leroy's windows were spared on the ground that he was not a Briton,
but the mob endeavoured to show my grandfather the folly of his
belief in democracy by smashing every pane of glass in front of his
house with stones.  This drew him and Leroy together, and the result
was, that although Leroy himself never set foot inside any chapel or
church, Miss Leroy was often induced to attend our meeting-house in
company with a maiden aunt of mine, who rather "took to her."  Now
comes the for ever mysterious passage in history.  There was amongst
the attendants at that meeting-house a young man who was apprentice
to a miller.  He was a big, soft, quiet, plump-faced, awkward youth,
very good, but nothing more.  He wore on Sunday a complete suit of
light pepper-and-salt clothes, and continued to wear pepper-and-salt
on Sunday all his life.  He taught in the Sunday-school, and
afterwards, as he got older, he was encouraged to open his lips at a
prayer-meeting, and to "take the service" in the village chapels on
Sunday evening.  He was the most singularly placid, even-tempered
person I ever knew.  I first became acquainted with him when I was a
child and he was past middle life.  What he was then, I am told, he
always was; and I certainly never heard one single violent word
escape his lips.  His habits, even when young, had a tendency to
harden.  He went to sleep after his mid-day dinner with the greatest
regularity, and he never could keep awake if he sat by a fire after
dark.  I have seen him, when kneeling at family worship and praying
with his family, lose himself for an instant and nod his head, to the
confusion of all who were around him.  He is dead now, but he lived
to a good old age, which crept upon him gradually with no pain, and
he passed away from this world to the next in a peaceful doze.  He
never read anything, for the simple reason that whenever he was not
at work or at chapel he slumbered.  To the utter amazement of
everybody, it was announced one fine day that Miss Leroy and he--
George Butts--were to be married.  They were about the last people in
the world, who, it was thought, could be brought together.  My mother
was stunned, and never completely recovered.  I have seen her, forty
years after George Butts' wedding-day, lift up her hands, and have
heard her call out with emotion, as fresh as if the event were of
yesterday, "What made that girl have George I can NOT think--but
there!"  What she meant by the last two words we could not
comprehend.  Many of her acquaintances interpreted them to mean that
she knew more than she dared communicate, but I think they were
mistaken.  I am quite certain if she had known anything she must have
told it, and, in the next place, the phrase "but there" was not
uncommon amongst women in our town, and was supposed to mark the
consciousness of a prudently restrained ability to give an
explanation of mysterious phenomena in human relationships.  For my
own part, I am just as much in the dark as my mother.  My father, who
was a shrewd man, was always puzzled, and could not read the riddle.
He used to say that he never thought George could have "made up" to
any young woman, and it was quite clear that Miss Leroy did not
either then or afterwards display any violent affection for him.  I
have heard her criticise and patronise him as a "good soul," but
incapable, as indeed he was, of all sympathy with her.  After
marriage she went her way and he his.  She got up early, as she was
wont to do, and took her Bible into the fields while he was snoring.
She would then very likely suffer from a terrible headache during the
rest of the day, and lie down for hours, letting the house manage
itself as best it could.  What made her selection of George more
obscure was that she was much admired by many young fellows, some of
whom were certainly more akin to her than he was; and I have heard
from one or two reports of encouraging words, and even something more
than words, which she had vouchsafed to them.  A solution is
impossible.  The affinities, repulsions, reasons in a nature like
that of Miss Leroy's are so secret and so subtle, working towards
such incalculable and not-to-be-predicted results, that to attempt to
make a major and minor premiss and an inevitable conclusion out of
them would be useless.  One thing was clear, that by marrying George
she gained great freedom.  If she had married anybody closer to her,
she might have jarred with him; there might have been collision and
wreck as complete as if they had been entirely opposed; for she was
not the kind of person to accommodate herself to others even in the
matter of small differences.  But George's road through space lay
entirely apart from hers, and there was not the slightest chance of
interference.  She was under the protection of a husband; she could
do things that, as an unmarried woman, especially in a foreign land,
she could not do, and the compensatory sacrifice to her was small.
This is really the only attempt at elucidation I can give.  She went
regularly all her life to chapel with George, but even when he became
deacon, and "supplied" the villages round, she never would join the
church as a member.  She never agreed with the minister, and he never
could make anything out of her.  They did not quarrel, but she
thought nothing of his sermons, and he was perplexed and
uncomfortable in the presence of a nondescript who did not respond to
any dogmatic statement of the articles of religion, and who yet could
not be put aside as "one of those in the gallery"--that is to say, as
one of the ordinary unconverted, for she used to quote hymns with
amazing fervour, and she quoted them to him with a freedom and a
certain superiority which he might have expected from an aged brother
minister, but certainly not from one of his own congregation.  He was
a preacher of the Gospel, it was true; and it was his duty, a duty on
which he insisted, to be "instant in season and out of season" in
saying spiritual things to his flock; but then they were things
proper, decent, conventional, uttered with gravity at suitable times-
-such as were customary amongst all the ministers of the
denomination.  It was not pleasant to be outbid in his own
department, especially by one who was not a communicant, and to be
obliged, when he went on a pastoral visit to a house in which Mrs.
Butts happened to be, to sit still and hear her, regardless of the
minister's presence, conclude a short mystical monologue with
Cowper's verse -


"Exults our rising soul,
   Disburdened of her load,
And swells unutterably full
   Of glory and of God."


This was NOT pleasant to our minister, nor was it pleasant to the
minister's wife.  But George Butts held a responsible position in our
community, and the minister's wife held also a responsible position,
so that she taxed all her ingenuity to let her friends understand at
tea-parties what she thought of Mrs. Butts without saying anything
which could be the ground of formal remonstrance.  Thus did Mrs.
Butts live among us, as an Arabian bird with its peculiar habits,
cries, and plumage might live in one of our barn-yards with the
ordinary barn-door fowls.

I was never happier when I was a boy than when I was with Mrs. Butts
at the mill, which George had inherited.  There was a grand freedom
in her house.  The front door leading into the garden was always
open.  There was no precise separation between the house and the
mill.  The business and the dwelling-place were mixed up together,
and covered with flour.  Mr. Butts was in the habit of walking out of
his mill into the living-room every now and then, and never dreamed
when one o'clock came that it was necessary for him to change his
floury coat before he had his dinner.  His cap he also often
retained, and in any weather, not extraordinarily cold, he sat in his
shirtsleeves.  The garden was large and half-wild.  A man from the
mill, if work was slack, gave a day to it now and then, but it was
not trimmed and raked and combed like the other gardens in the town.
It was full of gooseberry trees, and I was permitted to eat the
gooseberries without stint.  The mill-life, too, was inexpressibly
attractive--the dark chamber with the great, green, dripping wheel in
it, so awfully mysterious as the central life of the whole structure;
the machinery connected with the wheel--I knew not how; the hole
where the roach lay by the side of the mill-tail in the eddy; the
haunts of the water-rats which we used to hunt with Spot, the black
and tan terrier, and the still more exciting sport with the ferrets--
all this drew me down the lane perpetually.  I liked, and even loved
Mrs. Butts, too, for her own sake.  Her kindness to me was unlimited,
and she was never overcome with the fear of "spoiling me," which
seemed the constant dread of most of my hostesses.  I never lost my
love for her.  It grew as I grew, despite my mother's scarcely
suppressed hostility to her, and when I heard she was ill, and was
likely to die, I went to be with her.  She was eighty years old then.
I sat by her bedside with her hand in mine.  I was there when she
passed away, and--but I have no mind and no power to say any more,
for all the memories of her affection and of the sunny days by the
water come over me and prevent the calmness necessary for a
chronicle.  She with all her faults and eccentricities will always
have in my heart a little chapel with an ever-burning light.  She was
one of the very very few whom I have ever seen who knew how to love a
child.

Mrs. Butts and George had one son who was named Clement.  He was
exactly my own age, and naturally we were constant companions.  We
went to the same school.  He never distinguished himself at his
books, but he was chief among us.  He had a versatile talent for
almost every accomplishment in which we delighted, but he was not
supreme in any one of them.  There were better cricketers, better
football players, better hands at setting a night-line, better
swimmers than Clem, but he could do something, and do it well, in all
these departments.  He generally took up a thing with much eagerness
for a time, and then let it drop.  He was foremost in introducing new
games and new fashions, which he permitted to flourish for a time,
and then superseded.  As he grew up he displayed a taste for drawing
and music.  He was soon able to copy little paintings of flowers, or
even little country scenes, and to play a piece of no very great
difficulty with tolerable effect.  But as he never was taught by a
master, and never practised elementary exercises and studies, he was
deficient in accuracy.  When the question came what was to be done
with him after he left school, his father naturally wished him to go
into the mill.  Clem, however, set his face steadily against this
project, and his mother, who was a believer in his genius, supported
him.  He actually wanted to go to the University, a thing unheard of
in those days amongst our people; but this was not possible, and
after dangling about for some time at home, he obtained the post of
usher in a school, an occupation which he considered more congenial
and intellectual than that of grinding flour.  Strange to say,
although he knew less than any of his colleagues, he succeeded better
than any of them.  He managed to impress a sense of his own
importance upon everybody, including the headmaster.  He slid into a
position of superiority. above three or four colleagues who would
have shamed him at an examination, and who uttered many a curse
because they saw themselves surpassed and put in the shade by a
stranger, who, they were confident, could hardly construct a
hexameter.  He never quarrelled with them nor did he grossly
patronise them, but he always let them know that he considered
himself above them.  His reading was desultory; in fact, everything
he did was desultory.  He was not selfish in the ordinary sense of
the word.  Rather was he distinguished by a large and liberal open-
handedness; but he was liberal also to himself to a remarkable
degree, dressing himself expensively, and spending a good deal of
money in luxuries.  He was specially fond of insisting on his half
French origin, made a great deal of his mother, was silent as to his
father, and always signed himself C. Leroy Butts, although I don't
believe the second Christian name was given him in baptism.
Notwithstanding his generosity he was egotistical and hollow at
heart.  He knew nothing of friendship in the best sense of the word,
but had a multitude of acquaintances, whom he invariably sought
amongst those who were better off than himself.  He was popular with
them, for no man knew better than he how to get up an entertainment,
or to make a success of an evening party.  He had not been at his
school for two years before he conceived the notion of setting up for
himself.  He had not a penny, but he borrowed easily what was wanted
from somebody he knew, and in a twelvemonth more he had a dozen
pupils.  He took care to get the ablest subordinates he could find,
and he succeeded in passing a boy for an open scholarship at Oxford,
against two competitors prepared by the very man whom he had formerly
served.  After this he prospered greatly, and would have prospered
still more, if his love of show and extravagance had not increased
with his income.  His talents were sometimes taxed when people who
came to place their sons with him supposed ignorantly that his origin
and attainments were what might be expected from his position; and
poor Chalmers, a Glasgow M.A., who still taught, for 80 pounds a
year, the third class in the establishment in which Butts began life,
had some bitter stories on that subject.  Chalmers was a perfect
scholar, but he was not agreeable.  He had black finger-nails, and
wore dirty collars.  Having a lively remembrance of his friend's
"general acquaintance" with Latin prosody, Chalmers' opinion of
Providence was much modified when he discovered what Providence was
doing for Butts.  Clem took to the Church when he started for
himself.  It would have been madness in him to remain a Dissenter.
But in private, if it suited his purpose, he could always be airily
sceptical, and he had a superficial acquaintance, second-hand, with a
multitude of books, many of them of an infidel turn.  I once rebuked
him for his hypocrisy, and his defence was that religious disputes
were indifferent to him, and that at any rate a man associates with
gentlemen if he is a churchman.  Cultivation and manners he thought
to be of more importance than Calvinism.  I believe that he partly
meant what he said.  He went to church because the school would have
failed if he had gone to chapel; but he was sufficiently keen-sighted
and clever to be beyond the petty quarrels of the sects, and a song
well sung was of much greater moment to him than an essay on paedo-
baptism.  It was all very well of Chalmers to revile him for his
shallowness.  He was shallow, and yet he possessed in some mysterious
way a talent which I greatly coveted, and which in this world is
inestimably precious--the talent of making people give way before
him--a capacity of self-impression.  Chalmers could never have
commanded anybody.  He had no power whatever, even when he was right,
to put his will against the wills of others, but yielded first this
way and then the other.  Clem, on the contrary, without any
difficulty or any effort, could conquer all opposition, and smilingly
force everybody to do his bidding.

Clem had a peculiar theory with regard to his own rights and those of
the class to which he considered that he belonged.  He always held
implicitly and sometimes explicitly that gifted people live under a
kind of dispensation of grace; the law existing solely for dull
souls.  What in a clown is a crime punishable by the laws of the land
might in a man of genius be a necessary development, or at any rate
an excusable offence.  He had nothing to say for the servant-girl who
had sinned with the shopman, but if artist or poet were to carry off
another man's wife, it might not be wrong.

He believed, and acted upon the belief, that the inferior ought to
render perpetual incense to the superior, and that the superior
should receive it as a matter of course.  When his father was ill he
never waited on him or sat up a single night with him.  If duty was
disagreeable to him Clem paid homage to it afar off, but pleaded
exemption.  He admitted that waiting on the sick is obligatory on
people who are fitted for it, and is very charming.  Nothing was more
beautiful to him than tender, filial care spending itself for a
beloved object.  But it was not his vocation.  His nerves were more
finely ordered than those of mankind generally, and the sight of
disease and suffering distressed him too much.  Everything was
surrendered to him in the houses of his friends.  If any
inconvenience was to be endured, he was the first person to be
protected from it, and he accepted the greatest sacrifices, with a
graceful acknowledgment, it is true, but with no repulse.  To what
better purpose could the best wine be put than in cherishing his
imagination.  It was simple waste to allow it to be poured out upon
the earth, and to give it to a fool was no better.  After he
succeeded so well in the world, Clem, to a great extent, deserted me,
although I was his oldest friend and the friend of his childhood.  I
heard that he visited a good many rich persons, that he made much of
them, and they made much of him.  He kept up a kind of acquaintance
with me, not by writing to me, but by the very cheap mode of sending
me a newspaper now and then with a marked paragraph in it announcing
the exploits of his school at a cricket-match, or occasionally with a
report of a lecture which he had delivered.  He was a decent orator,
and from motives of business if from no other, he not unfrequently
spoke in public.  One or two of these lectures wounded me a good
deal.  There was one in particular on As You Like It, in which he
held up to admiration the fidelity which is so remarkable in
Shakespeare, and lamented that in these days it was so rare to find
anything of the kind, he thought that we were becoming more
indifferent to one another.  He maintained, however, that man should
be everything to man, and he then enlarged on the duty of really
cultivating affection, of its superiority to books, and on the
pleasure and profit of self-denial.  I do not mean to accuse Clem of
downright hypocrisy.  I have known many persons come up from the
country and go into raptures over a playhouse sun and moon who have
never bestowed a glance or a thought on the real sun and moon to be
seen from their own doors; and we are all aware it by no means
follows because we are moved to our very depths by the spectacle of
unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance in a novel, that therefore we
can step over the road to waste an hour or a sixpence upon the
unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance of the poor lone woman left a
widow in the little villa there.  I was annoyed with myself because
Clem's abandonment of me so much affected me.  I wished I could cut
the rope and carelessly cast him adrift as he had cast me adrift, but
I could not.  I never could make out and cannot make out what was the
secret of his influence over me; why I was unable to say, "If you do
not care for me I do not care for you."  I longed sometimes for
complete rupture, so that we might know exactly where we were, but it
never came.  Gradually our intercourse grew thinner and thinner,
until at last I heard that he had been spending a fortnight with some
semi-aristocratic acquaintance within five miles of me, and during
the whole of that time he never came near me.  I met him in a railway
station soon afterwards, when he came up to me effusive and
apparently affectionate.  "It was a real grief to me, my dear
fellow," he said, "that I could not call on you last month, but the
truth was I was so driven:  they would make me go here and go there,
and I kept putting off my visit to you till it was too late."
Fortunately my train was just starting, or I don't know what might
have happened.  I said not a word; shook hands with him; got into the
carriage; he waved his hat to me, and I pretended not to see him, but
I did see him, and saw him turn round immediately to some well-
dressed officer-like gentleman with whom he walked laughing down the
platform.  The rest of that day was black to me.  I cared for
nothing.  I passed away from the thought of Clem, and dwelt upon the
conviction which had long possessed me that I was INSIGNIFICANT, that
there was NOTHING MUCH IN ME, and it was this which destroyed my
peace.  We may reconcile ourselves to poverty and suffering, but few
of us can endure the conviction that there is NOTHING IN US, and that
consequently we cannot expect anybody to gravitate towards us with
any forceful impulse.  It is a bitter experience.  And yet there is
consolation.  The universe is infinite.  In the presence of its
celestial magnitudes who is there who is really great or small, and
what is the difference between you and me, my work and yours?  I
sought refuge in the idea of GOD, the God of a starry night with its
incomprehensible distances; and I was at peace, content to be the
meanest worm of all the millions that crawl on the earth.



CHAPTER IV--A NECESSARY DEVELOPMENT



The few friends who have read the first part of my autobiography may
perhaps remember that in my younger days I had engaged myself to a
girl named Ellen, from whom afterwards I parted.  After some two or
three years she was left an orphan, and came into the possession of a
small property, over which unfortunately she had complete power.  She
was attractive and well-educated, and I heard long after I had broken
with her, and had ceased to have intercourse with Butts, that the two
were married.  He of course, living so near her, had known her well,
and he found her money useful.  How they agreed I knew not save by
report, but I was told that after the first child was born, the only
child they ever had, Butts grew indifferent to her, and that she, to
use my friend's expression, "went off," by which I suppose he meant
that she faded.  There happened in those days to live near Butts a
small squire, married, but with no family.  He was a lethargic
creature, about five-and-thirty years old, farming eight hundred
acres of his own land.  He did not, however, belong to the farming
class.  He had been to Harrow, was on the magistrates' bench, and
associated with the small aristocracy of the country round.  He was
like every other squire whom I remember in my native county, and I
can remember scores of them.  He read no books and tolerated the
usual conventional breaches of the moral law, but was an intense
worshipper of respectability, and hated a scandal.  On one point he
differed from his neighbours.  He was a Whig and they were all
Tories.  I have said he read no books, and this, on the whole, is
true, but nevertheless he did know something about the history of the
early part of the century, and he was rather fond at political
gatherings of making some allusion to Mr. Fox.  His father had sat in
the House of Commons when Fox was there, and had sternly opposed the
French war.  I don't suppose that anybody not actually IN IT--no
Londoner certainly--can understand the rigidity of the bonds which
restricted county society when I was young, and for aught I know may
restrict it now.  There was with us one huge and dark exception to
the general uniformity.  The earl had broken loose, had ruined his
estate, had defied decorum and openly lived with strange women at
home and in Paris, but this black background did but set off the
otherwise universal adhesion to the Church and to authorised manners,
an adhesion tempered and rendered tolerable by port wine.  It must
not, however, be supposed that human nature was different from the
human nature of to-day or a thousand years ago.  There were then,
even as there were a thousand years ago, and are to-day, small,
secret doors, connected with mysterious staircases, by which access
was gained to freedom; and men and women, inmates of castles with
walls a yard thick, and impenetrable portcullises, sought those doors
and descended those stairs night and day.  But nobody knew, or if we
did know, the silence was profound.  The broad-shouldered, yellow-
haired Whig squire, had a wife who was the opposite of him.  She came
from a distant part of the country, and had been educated in France.
She was small, with black hair, and yet with blue eyes.  She spoke
French perfectly, was devoted to music, read French books, and,
although she was a constant attendant at church, and gave no
opportunity whatever for the slightest suspicion, the matrons of the
circle in which she moved were never quite happy about her.  This was
due partly to her knowledge of French, and partly to her having no
children.  Anything more about her I do not know.  She was beyond us,
and although I have seen her often enough I never spoke to her.
Butts, however, managed to become a visitor at the squire's house.
Fancy MY going to the squire's!  But Butts did, was accepted there,
and even dined there with a parson, and two or three half-pay
officers.  The squire never called on Butts.  That was an understood
thing, nor did Mrs. Butts accompany her husband.  That also was an
understood thing.  It was strange that Butts could tolerate and even
court such a relationship.  Most men would scorn with the scorn of a
personal insult an invitation to a house from which their wives were
expressly excluded.  The squire's lady and Clem became great friends.
She discovered that his mother was a Frenchwoman, and this was a bond
between them.  She discovered also that Clem was artistic, that he
was devotedly fond of music, that he could draw a little, paint a
little, and she believed in the divine right of talent wherever it
might be found to assert a claim of equality with those who were
better born.  The women in the country-side were shy of her; for the
men she could not possibly care, and no doubt she must at times have
got rather weary of her heavy husband with his one outlook towards
the universal in the person of George James Fox, and the Whig policy
of 1802.  I am under some disadvantage in telling this part of my
story, because I was far away from home, and only knew afterwards at
second hand what the course of events had been; but I learned them
from one who was intimately concerned, and I do not think I can be
mistaken on any essential point.  I imagine that by this time Mrs.
Butts must have become changed into what she was in later years.  She
had grown older since she and I had parted; she had seen trouble; her
child had been born, and although she was not exactly estranged from
Clem, for neither he nor she would have admitted any coolness, she
had learned that she was nothing specially to him.  I have often
noticed what an imperceptible touch, what a slight shifting in the
balance of opposing forces, will alter the character.  I have
observed a woman, for example, essentially the same at twenty and
thirty--who is there who is not always essentially the same?--and
yet, what was a defect at twenty, has become transformed and
transfigured into a benignant virtue at thirty; translating the whole
nature from the human to the divine.  Some slight depression has been
wrought here, and some slight lift has been given there, and beauty
and order have miraculously emerged from what was chaotic.  The same
thing may continually be noticed in the hereditary transmission of
qualities.  The redeeming virtue of the father palpably present in
the son becomes his curse, through a faint diminution of the strength
of the check which caused that virtue to be the father's salvation.
The propensity, too, which is a man's evil genius, and leads him to
madness and utter ruin, gives vivid reality to all his words and
thoughts, and becomes all his strength, if by divine assistance it
can just be subdued and prevented from rising in victorious
insurrection.  But this is a digression, useful, however, in its way,
because it will explain Mrs. Butts when we come a little nearer to
her in the future.

For a time Clem's visits to the squire's house always took place when
the squire was at home, but an amateur concert was to be arranged in
which Clem was to take part together with the squire's lady.  Clem
consequently was obliged to go to the Hall for the purpose of
practising, and so it came to pass that he was there at unusual hours
and when the master was afield.  These morning and afternoon calls
did not cease when the concert was over.  Clem's wife did not know
anything about them, and, if she noticed his frequent absence, she
was met with an excuse.  Perhaps the worst, or almost the worst
effect of relationships which we do not like to acknowledge, is the
secrecy and equivocation which they beget.  From the very first
moment when the intimacy between the squire's wife and Clem began to
be anything more than harmless, he was compelled to shuffle and to
become contemptible.  At the same time I believe he defended himself
against himself with the weapons which were ever ready when self rose
against self because of some wrong-doing.  He was not as other men.
It was absurd to class what he did with what an ordinary person might
do, although externally his actions and those of the ordinary person
might resemble one another.  I cannot trace the steps by which the
two sinners drew nearer and nearer together, for the simple reason
that this is an autobiography, and not a novel.  I do not know what
the development was, nor did anybody except the person concerned.
Neither do I know what was the mental history of Mrs. Butts during
this unhappy period.  She seldom talked about it afterwards.  I do,
however, happen to recollect hearing her once say that her greatest
trouble was the cessation, from some unknown cause, of Clem's
attempts--they were never many--to interest and amuse her.  It is
easy to understand how this should be.  If a man is guilty of any
defection from himself, of anything of which he is ashamed,
everything which is better becomes a farce to him.  After he has been
betrayed by some passion, how can he pretend to the perfect enjoyment
of what is pure?  The moment he feels any disposition to rise, he is
stricken through as if with an arrow, and he drops.  Not until weeks,
months, and even years have elapsed, does he feel justified in
surrendering himself to a noble emotion.  I have heard of persons who
have been able to ascend easily and instantaneously from the mud to
the upper air, and descend as easily; but to me at least they are
incomprehensible.  Clem, less than most men, suffered permanently, or
indeed in any way from remorse, because he was so shielded by his
peculiar philosophy; but I can quite believe that when he got into
the habit of calling at the Hall at mid-day, his behaviour to his
wife changed.

One day in December the squire had gone out with the hounds.  Clem,
going on from bad to worse, had now reached the point of planning to
be at the Hall when the squire was not at home.  On that particular
afternoon Clem was there.  It was about half-past four o'clock, and
the master was not expected till six.  There had been some music, the
lady accompanying, and Clem singing.  It was over, and Clem, sitting
down beside her at the piano, and pointing out with his right hand
some passage which had troubled him, had placed his left arm on her
shoulder, and round her neck, she not resisting.  He always swore
afterwards that never till then had such a familiarity as this been
permitted, and I believe that he did not tell a lie.  But what was
there in that familiarity?  The worst was already there, and it was
through a mere accident that it never showed itself.  The accident
was this.  The squire, for some unknown reason, had returned earlier
than usual, and dismounting in the stable-yard, had walked round the
garden on the turf which came close to the windows of the ground
floor.  Passing the drawing-room window, and looking in by the edge
of the drawn-down blind, he saw his wife and Clem just at the moment
described.  He slipped round to the door, took off his boots so that
he might not be heard, and as there was a large screen inside the
room he was able to enter it unobserved.  Clem caught sight of him
just as he emerged from behind the screen, and started up instantly
in great confusion, the lady, with greater presence of mind,
remaining perfectly still.  Without a word the squire strode up to
Clem, struck out at him, caught him just over the temple, and felled
him instantaneously.  He lay for some time senseless, and what passed
between husband and wife I cannot say.  After about ten minutes,
perhaps, Clem came to himself; there was nobody to be seen; and he
managed to get up and crawl home.  He told his wife he had met with
an accident; that he would go to bed, and that she should know all
about it when he was better.  His forehead was dressed, and to bed he
went.  That night Mrs. Butts had a letter.  It ran as follows:-


"MADAM,--It may at first sight seem a harsh thing for me to write and
tell you what I have to say, but I can assure you I do not mean to be
anything but kind to you, and I think it will be better, for reasons
which I will afterwards explain, that I should communicate with you
rather than with your husband.  For some time past I have suspected
that he was too fond of my wife, and last night I caught him with his
arms round her neck.  In a moment of not unjustifiable anger I
knocked him down.  I have not the honour of knowing you personally,
but from what I have heard of you I am sure that he has not the
slightest reason for playing with other women.  A man who will do
what he has done will be very likely to conceal from you the true
cause of his disaster, and if you know the cause you may perhaps be
able to reclaim him.  If he has any sense of honour left in him, and
of what is due to you, he will seek your pardon for his baseness, and
you will have a hold on him afterwards which you would not have if
you were in ignorance of what has happened.  For him I do not care a
straw, but for you I feel deeply, and I believe that my frankness
with you, although it may cause you much suffering now, will save you
more hereafter.  I have only one condition to make.  Mr. Butts must
leave this place, and never let me see his face again.  He has ruined
my peace.  Nothing will be published through me, for, as far as I can
prevent it, I will have no public exposure.  If Mr. Butts were to
remain here it would be dangerous for us to meet, and probably
everything, by some chance, would become common property.--Believe me
to be, Madam, with many assurances of respect, truly yours,--."


I cannot distinguish the precise proportion of cruelty in this
letter.  Did the writer designedly torture Butts by telling his wife,
or did he really think that she would in the end be happier because
Butts would not have a secret reserved from her,--a temptation to
lying--and because with this secret in her possession, he might
perhaps be restrained in future?  Nobody knows.  All we know is that
there are very few human actions of which it can be said that this or
that taken by itself produced them.  With our inborn tendency to
abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not
exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are
too simple, and which, in fact, have no being in rerum natura.
Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone.
There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician.  I
see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not
unite in one resulting deed, and think it very probable that the
squire was both cruel and merciful to the same person in the letter;
influenced by exactly conflicting passions, whose conflict ended SO.

As to the squire and his wife, they lived together just as before.  I
do not think, that, excepting the four persons concerned, anybody
ever heard a syllable about the affair, save myself a long while
afterwards.  Clem, however, packed up and left the town, after
selling his business.  He had a reputation for restlessness; and his
departure, although it was sudden, was no surprise.  He betook
himself to Australia, his wife going with him.  I heard that they had
gone, and heard also that he was tired of school-keeping in England,
and had determined to try his fortune in another part of the world.
Our friendship had dwindled to nothing, and I thought no more about
him.  Mrs. Butts never uttered one word of reproach to her husband.
I cannot say that she loved him as she could have loved, but she had
accepted him, and she said to herself that as perhaps it was through
her lack of sympathy with him that he had strayed, it was her duty
more and more to draw him to herself.  She had a divine disposition,
not infrequent amongst women, to seek in herself the reason for any
wrong which was done to her.  That almost instinctive tendency in
men, to excuse, to transfer blame to others, to be angry with
somebody else when they suffer from the consequences of their own
misdeeds, in her did not exist.

During almost the whole of her married life, before this affair
between the squire and Clem, Mrs. Butts had had much trouble,
although her trouble was, perhaps, rather the absence of joy than the
presence of any poignant grief.  She was much by herself.  She had
never been a great reader, but in her frequent solitude she was
forced to do something in order to obtain relief, and she naturally
turned to the Bible.  It would be foolish to say that the Bible alone
was to be credited with the support she received.  It may only have
been the occasion for a revelation of the strength that was in her.
Reading, however, under such circumstances, is likely to be
peculiarly profitable.  It is never so profitable as when it is
undertaken in order that a positive need may be satisfied or an
inquiry answered.  She discovered in the Bible much that persons to
whom it is a mere literature would never find.  The water of life was
not merely admirable to the eye; she drank it, and knew what a
property it possessed for quenching thirst.  No doubt the thought of
a heaven hereafter was especially consolatory.  She was able to
endure, and even to be happy because the vision of lengthening sorrow
was bounded by a better world beyond.  "A very poor, barbarous
gospel," thinks the philosopher who rests on his Marcus Antoninus and
Epictetus.  I do not mean to say, that in the shape in which she
believed this doctrine, it was not poor and barbarous, but yet we all
of us, whatever our creed may be, must lay hold at times for
salvation upon something like it.  Those who have been plunged up to
the very lips in affliction know its necessity.  To such as these it
is idle work for the prosperous and the comfortable to preach
satisfaction with the life that now is.  There are seasons when it is
our sole resource to recollect that in a few short years we shall be
at rest.  While upon this subject I may say, too, that some injustice
has been done to the Christian creed of immortality as an influence
in determining men's conduct.  Paul preached the imminent advent of
Christ and besought his disciples, therefore, to watch, and we ask
ourselves what is the moral value to us of such an admonition.  But
surely if we are to have any reasons for being virtuous, this is as
good as any other.  It is just as respectable to believe that we
ought to abstain from iniquity because Christ is at hand, and we
expect to meet Him, as to abstain from it because by our abstention
we shall be healthier or more prosperous.  Paul had a dream--an
absurd dream let us call it--of an immediate millennium, and of the
return of his Master surrounded with divine splendour, judging
mankind and adjusting the balance between good and evil.  It was a
baseless dream, and the enlightened may call it ridiculous.  It is
anything but that, it is the very opposite of that.  Putting aside
its temporary mode of expression, it is the hope and the prophecy of
all noble hearts, a sign of their inability to concur in the present
condition of things.

Going back to Clem's wife; she laid hold, as I have said, upon
heaven.  The thought wrought in her something more than forgetfulness
of pain or the expectation of counterpoising bliss.  We can
understand what this something was, for although we know no such
heaven as hers, a new temper is imparted to us, a new spirit breathed
into us; I was about to say a new hope bestowed upon us, when we
consider that we live surrounded by the soundless depths in which the
stars repose.  Such a consideration has a direct practical effect
upon us, and so had the future upon the mind of Mrs. Butts.  "Why
dost thou judge thy brother," says Paul, "for we shall all stand
before the judgment-seat of God."  Paul does not mean that God will
punish him and that we may rest satisfied that our enemy will be
turned into hell fire.  Rather does he mean, what we, too, feel,
that, reflecting on the great idea of God, and upon all that it
involves, our animosities are softened, and our heat against our
brother is cooled.

One or two reflections may perhaps be permitted here on this passage
in Mrs. Butts' history.

The fidelity of Clem's wife to him, if not entirely due to the New
Testament, was in a great measure traceable to it.  She had learned
from the Epistle to the Corinthians that charity beareth all things,
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; and she
interpreted this to mean, not merely charity to those whom she loved
by nature, but charity to those with whom she was not in sympathy,
and who even wronged her.  Christianity no doubt does teach such a
charity as this, a love which is to be:  independent of mere personal
likes and dislikes, a love of the human in man.  The natural man, the
man of this century, uncontrolled by Christianity, considers himself
a model of what is virtuous and heroic if he really loves his
friends, and he permits all kinds of savage antipathies to those of
his fellow creatures with whom he is not in harmony.  Jesus on the
other hand asks with His usual perfect simplicity, "If ye love them
which love you, what reward have ye?  Do not even the publicans the
same?"  It would be a great step in advance for most of us to love
anybody, and the publicans of the time of Jesus must have been a much
more Christian set than most Christians of the present day; but that
we should love those who do not love us is a height never scaled now,
except by a few of the elect in whom Christ still survives.  In the
gospel of Luke, also, Mrs. Butts read that she was to hope for
nothing again from her love, and that she was to be merciful, as her
Father in heaven is merciful.  That is really the expression of the
IDEA in morality, and incalculable is the blessing that our great
religious teacher should have been bold enough to teach the idea, and
not any limitation of it.  He always taught it, the inward born, the
heavenly law towards which everything strives.  He always trusted it;
He did not deal in exceptions; He relied on it to the uttermost,
never despairing.  This has always seemed to me to be the real
meaning of the word faith.  It is permanent confidence in the idea, a
confidence never to be broken down by apparent failure, or by
examples by which ordinary people prove that qualification is
necessary.  It was precisely because Jesus taught the idea, and
nothing below it, that He had such authority over a soul like my
friend's, and the effect produced by Him could not have been produced
by anybody nearer to ordinary humanity.

It must be admitted, too, that the Calvinism of those days had a
powerful influence in enabling men and women to endure, although I
object to giving the name of Calvin to a philosophy which is a
necessity in all ages.  "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father."
This is the last word which can be said.  Nothing can go beyond it,
and at times it is the only ground which we feel does not shake under
our feet.  All life is summed up, and due account is taken of it,
according to its degree.  Mrs. Butts' Calvinism, however, hardly took
the usual dogmatic form.  She was too simple to penetrate the depths
of metaphysical theology, and she never would have dared to set down
any of her fellow creatures as irrevocably lost.  She adapted the
Calvinistic creed to something which suited her.  For example, she
fully understood what St. Paul means when he tells the Thessalonians
that BECAUSE they were called, THEREFORE they were to stand fast.
She thought with Paul that being called; having a duty plainly laid
upon her; being bidden as if by a general to do something, she OUGHT
to stand fast; and she stood fast, supported against all pressure by
the consciousness of fulfilling the special orders of One who was her
superior.  There is no doubt that this dogma of a personal calling is
a great consolation, and it is a great truth.  Looking at the masses
of humanity, driven this way and that way, the Christian teaching is
apt to be forgotten that for each individual soul there is a vocation
as real as if that soul were alone upon the planet.  Yet it is a
fact.  We are blinded to it and can hardly believe it, because of the
impotency of our little intellects to conceive a destiny which shall
take care of every atom of life on the globe:  we are compelled to
think that in such vast crowds of people as we behold, individuals
must elude the eye of the Maker, and be swept into forgetfulness.
But the truth of truths is that the mind of the universe is not our
mind, or at any rate controlled by our limitations.

This has been a long digression which I did not intend; but I could
not help it.  I was anxious to show how Mrs. Butts met her trouble
through her religion.  The apostle says that "they drank of that
spiritual Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ."  That
was true of her.  The way through the desert was not annihilated; the
path remained stony and sore to the feet, but it was accompanied to
the end by a sweet stream to which she could turn aside, and from
which she could obtain refreshment and strength.

Just about the time that we began our meetings near Drury Lane, I
heard that Clem was dead; that he had died abroad.  I knew nothing
more; I thought about him and his wife perhaps for a day, but I had
parted from both long ago, and I went on with my work.



CHAPTER V--WHAT IT ALL CAME TO



For two years or thereabouts, M'Kay and myself continued our labours
in the Drury Lane neighbourhood.  There is a proverb that it is the
first step which is the most difficult in the achievement of any
object, and the proverb has been altered by ascribing the main part
of the difficulty to the last step.  Neither the first nor the last
has been the difficult step with me, but rather what lies between.
The first is usually helped by the excitement and the promise of new
beginnings, and the last by the prospect of triumph; but the
intermediate path is unassisted by enthusiasm, and it is here we are
so likely to faint.  M'Kay nevertheless persevered, supporting me,
who otherwise might have been tempted to despair, and at the end of
the two years we were still at our posts.  We had, however, learned
something.  We had learned that we could not make the slightest
impression on Drury Lane proper.  Now and then an idler, or sometimes
a dozen, lounged in, but what was said was strange to them; they were
out of their own world as completely as if they were in another
planet, and all our efforts to reach them by simplicity of statement
and by talking about things which we supposed would interest them
utterly failed.  I did not know, till I came in actual contact with
them, how far away the classes which lie at the bottom of great
cities are from those above them; how completely they are
inaccessible to motives which act upon ordinary human beings, and how
deeply they are sunk beyond ray of sun or stars, immersed in the
selfishness naturally begotten of their incessant struggle for
existence and the incessant warfare with society.  It was an awful
thought to me, ever present on those Sundays, and haunting me at
other times, that men, women, and children were living in such
brutish degradation, and that as they died others would take their
place.  Our civilisation seemed nothing but a thin film or crust
lying over a volcanic pit, and I often wondered whether some day the
pit would not break up through it and destroy us all.  Great towns
are answerable for the creation and maintenance of the masses of
dark, impenetrable, subterranean blackguardism, with which we became
acquainted.  The filthy gloom of the sky, the dirt of the street, the
absence of fresh air, the herding of the poor into huge districts
which cannot be opened up by those who would do good, are tremendous
agencies of corruption which are active at such a rate that it is
appalling to reflect what our future will be if the accumulation of
population be not checked.  To stand face to face with the insoluble
is not pleasant.  A man will do anything rather than confess it is
beyond him.  He will create pleasant fictions, and fancy a possible
escape here and there, but this problem of Drury Lane was round and
hard like a ball of adamant.  The only thing I could do was faintly,
and I was about to say stupidly, hope--for I had no rational,
tangible grounds for hoping--that some force of which we are not now
aware might some day develop itself which will be able to resist and
remove the pressure which sweeps and crushes into a hell, sealed from
the upper air, millions of human souls every year in one quarter of
the globe alone.

M'Kay's dreams therefore were not realised, and yet it would be a
mistake to say that they ended in nothing.  It often happens that a
grand attempt, although it may fail--miserably fail--is fruitful in
the end and leaves a result, not the hoped for result it is true, but
one which would never have been attained without it.  A youth strives
after the impossible, and he is apt to break his heart because he has
never even touched it, but nevertheless his whole life is the sweeter
for the striving; and the archer who aims at a mark a hundred yards
away will send his arrow further than he who sets his bow and his arm
for fifty yards.  So it was with M'Kay.  He did not convert Drury
Lane, but he saved two or three.  One man whom we came to know was a
labourer in Somerset House, a kind of coal porter employed in
carrying coals into the offices there from the cellars below, and in
other menial duties.  He had about fifteen or sixteen shillings a
week, and as the coals must necessarily be in the different rooms
before ten o'clock in the morning, he began work early, and was
obliged to live within an easy distance of the Strand.  This man had
originally been a small tradesman in a country town.  He was honest,
but he never could or never would push his trade in any way.  He was
fond of all kinds of little mechanical contrivings, disliked his
shop, and ought to have been a carpenter or cabinet-maker--not as a
master but as a journeyman, for he had no ability whatever to control
men or direct large operations.  He was married, and a sense of duty
to his wife--he fortunately had no children--induced him to stand or
sit behind his counter with regularity, but people would not come to
buy of him, because he never seemed to consider their buying as any
favour conferred on him; and thus he became gradually displaced by
his more energetic or more obsequious rivals.  In the end he was
obliged to put up his shutters.  Unhappily for him, he had never been
a very ardent attendant at any of the places of religious worship in
the town, and he had therefore no organisation to help him.  Not
being master of any craft, he was in a pitiable plight, and was
slowly sinking, when he applied to the solicitor of the political
party for which he had always voted to assist him.  The solicitor
applied to the member, and the member, much regretting the difficulty
of obtaining places for grown-up men, and explaining the pressure
upon the Treasury, wrote to say that the only post at his disposal
was that of labourer.  He would have liked to offer a messengership,
but the Treasury had hundreds of applications from great people who
wished to dispose of favourite footmen whose services they no longer
required.  Our friend Taylor had by this time been brought very low,
or he would have held out for something better, but there was nothing
to be done.  He was starving, and he therefore accepted; came to
London; got a room, one room only, near Clare Market, and began his
new duties.  He was able to pick up a shilling or two more weekly by
going on errands for the clerks during his slack time in the day, so
that altogether on the average he made up about eighteen shillings.
Wandering about the Clare Market region on Sunday he found us out,
came in, and remained constant.  Naturally, as we had so few
adherents, we gradually knew these few very intimately, and Taylor
would often spend a holiday or part of the Sunday with us.  He was
not eminent for anything in particular, and an educated man,
selecting as his friends those only who stand for something, would
not have taken the slightest notice of him.  He had read nothing
particular, and thought nothing particular--he was indeed one of the
masses--but in this respect different, that he had not the tendency
to association, aggregation, or clanship which belong to the masses
generally.  He was different, of course, in all his ways from his
neighbours born and bred to Clare Market and its alleys.  Although
commonplace, he had demands made upon him for an endurance by no
means commonplace, and he had sorrows which were as exquisite as
those of his betters.  He did not much resent his poverty.  To that I
think he would have submitted, and in fact he did submit to it
cheerfully.  What rankled in him was the brutal disregard of him at
the office.  He was a servant of servants.  The messengers, who
themselves were exposed to all the petty tyrannies of the clerks, and
dared not reply, were Taylor's masters, and sought a compensation for
their own serfdom by making his ten times worse.  The head messenger,
who had been a butler, swore at him, and if Taylor had "answered" he
would have been reported.  He had never been a person of much
importance, but at least he had been independent, and it was a new
experience for him to feel that he was a thing fit for nothing but to
be cuffed and cursed.  Upon this point he used to get eloquent--as
eloquent as he could be, for he had small power of expression, and he
would describe to me the despair which came over him down in those
dark vaults at the prospect of life continuing after this fashion,
and with not the minutest gleam of light even at the very end.
Nobody ever cared to know the most ordinary facts about him.  Nobody
inquired whether he was married or single; nobody troubled himself
when he was ill.  If he was away, his pay was stopped; and when he
returned to work nobody asked if he was better.  Who can wonder that
at first, when he was an utter stranger in a strange land, he was
overcome by the situation, and that the world was to him a dungeon
worse than that of Chillon?  Who can wonder that he was becoming
reckless?  A little more of such a life would have transformed him
into a brute.  He had not the ability to become revolutionary, or it
would have made him a conspirator.  Suffering of any kind is hard to
bear, but the suffering which especially damages character is that
which is caused by the neglect or oppression of man.  At any rate it
was so in Taylor's case.  I believe that he would have been patient
under any inevitable ordinance of nature, but he could not lie still
under contempt, the knowledge that to those about him he was of less
consequence than the mud under their feet.  He was timid and, after
his failure as a shopkeeper, and the near approach to the workhouse,
he dreaded above everything being again cast adrift.  Strange
conflict arose in him, for the insults to which he was exposed drove
him almost to madness; and yet the dread of dismissal in a moment
checked him when he was about to "fire up," as he called it, and
reduced him to a silence which was torture.  Once he was ordered to
bring some coals for the messenger's lobby.  The man who gave him the
order, finding that he was a long time bringing them, went to the top
of the stairs, and bawled after him with an oath to make haste.  The
reason of the delay was that Taylor had two loads to bring up--one
for somebody else.  When he got to the top of the steps, the
messenger with another oath took the coals, and saying that he "would
teach him to skulk there again," kicked the other coal-scuttle down
to the bottom.  Taylor himself told me this; and yet, although he
would have rejoiced if the man had dropped down dead, and would
willingly have shot him, he was dumb.  The check operated in an
instant.  He saw himself without a penny, and in the streets.  He
went down into the cellar, and raged and wept for an hour.  Had he
been a workman, he would probably have throttled his enemy, or tried
to do it, or what is more likely, his enemy would not have dared to
treat him in such fashion, but he was powerless, and once losing his
situation he would have sunk down into the gutter, whence he would
have been swept by the parish into the indiscriminate heap of London
pauperism, and carted away to the Union, a conclusion which was worse
to him than being hung.

Another of our friends was a waiter in one of the public-houses and
chop-houses combined, of which there are so many in the Strand.  He
lived in a wretched alley which ran from St. Clement's Church to
Boswell Court--I have forgotten its name--a dark crowded passage.  He
was a man of about sixty--invariably called John, without the
addition of any surname.  I knew him long before we opened our room,
for I was in the habit of frequently visiting the chop-house in which
he served.  His hours were incredible.  He began at nine o'clock in
the morning with sweeping the dining-room, cleaning the tables and
the gas globes, and at twelve business commenced with early
luncheons.  Not till three-quarters of an hour after midnight could
he leave, for the house was much used by persons who supped there
after the theatres.  During almost the whole of this time he was on
his legs, and very often he was unable to find two minutes in the day
in which to get his dinner.  Sundays, however, were free.  John was
not a head waiter, but merely a subordinate, and I never knew why at
his time of life he had not risen to a better position.  He used to
say that "things had been against him," and I had no right to seek
for further explanations.  He was married, and had had three
children, of whom one only was living--a boy of ten years old, whom
he hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning.
Like Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely--
crushed him out of all shape, so that what he was originally, or
might have been, it was almost impossible to tell.  There was no
particular character left in him.  He may once have been this or
that, but every angle now was knocked off, as it is knocked off from
the rounded pebbles which for ages have been dragged up and down the
beach by the waves.  For a lifetime he had been exposed to all sorts
of whims and caprices, generally speaking of the most unreasonable
kind, and he had become so trained to take everything without
remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life came to him as
a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a
cinder.  Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not
accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference.  His
wife was a drunkard.  This was an awful trial to him.  The worst
consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk.  The
neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man
when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner
when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when
he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and
many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o'clock, crawled
downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that "she was very
bad, and he could not go to sleep."  The father, then, had to keep
his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and
manage in the best way he could.  Over and over again was he obliged
to sit by this wretched woman's bedside till breakfast time, and then
had to go to work as usual.  Let anybody who has seen a case of this
kind say whether the State ought not to provide for the relief of
such men as John, and whether he ought not to have been able to send
his wife away to some institution where she might have been tended
and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but her husband
and her child.  John hardly bore up under this sorrow.  A man may
endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when
his day's toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he
falls.  Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which
not a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear
that while he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days,
whose close nevertheless he dreaded!  Beaten down, baffled,
disappointed, if we are in tolerable health we can contrive to live
on some almost impossible chance, some most distant flicker of hope.
It is astonishing how minute a crack in the heavy uniform cloud will
relieve us; but when with all our searching we can see nothing, then
at last we sink.  Such was John's case when I first came to know him.
He attracted me rather, and bit by bit he confided his story to me.
He found out that I might be trusted, and that I could sympathise,
and he told me what he had never told to anybody before.  I was
curious to discover whether religion had done anything for him, and I
put the question to him in an indirect way.  His answer was that
"some on 'em say there's a better world where everything will be put
right, but somehow it seemed too good to be true."  That was his
reason for disbelief, and heaven had not the slightest effect on him.
He found out the room, and was one of our most constant friends.

Another friend was of a totally different type.  His name was
Cardinal.  He was a Yorkshireman, broad-shouldered, ruddy in the
face, short-necked, inclined apparently to apoplexy, and certainly to
passion.  He was a commercial traveller in the cloth trade, and as he
had the southern counties for his district, London was his home when
he was not upon his journeys.  His wife was a curious contrast to
him.  She was dark-haired, pinched-up, thin-lipped, and always seemed
as if she suffered from some chronic pain or gnawing--not sufficient
to make her ill, but sufficient to make her miserable.  They had no
children.  Cardinal in early life had been a member of an orthodox
Dissenting congregation, but he had fallen away.  He had nobody to
guide him, and the position into which he fell was peculiar.  He
never busied himself about religion or philosophy; indeed he had had
no training which would have led him to take an interest in abstract
questions, but he read all kinds of romances and poetry without any
order and upon no system.  He had no discriminating faculty, and
mixed up together the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery novels,
French translations, and the best English authors, provided only they
were unworldly or sentimental.  Neither did he know how far to take
what he read and use it in his daily life.  He often selected some
fantastical motive which he had found set forth as operative in one
of his heroes, and he brought it into his business, much to the
astonishment of his masters and customers.  For this reason he was
not stable.  He changed employers two or three times; and, so far as
I could make out, his ground of objection to each of the firms whom
he left might have been a ground of dislike in a girl to a suitor,
but certainly nothing more.  During the intervals of his engagements,
unless he was pressed for money, he did nothing--not from laziness,
but because he had got a notion in his head that his mind wanted rest
and reinvigoration.  His habit then was to consume the whole day--day
after day--in reading or in walking out by himself.  It may easily be
supposed that with a temperament like his, and with nobody near him
to take him by the hand, he made great mistakes.  His wife and he
cared nothing for one another, but she was jealous to the last
degree.  I never saw such jealousy.  It was strange that, although
she almost hated him, she watched him with feline sharpness and
patience, and would even have killed any woman whom she knew had won
his affection.  He, on the other hand, openly avowed that marriage
without love was nothing, and flaunted without the least modification
the most ideal theories as to the relation between man and woman.
Not that he ever went actually wrong.  His boyish education, his
natural purity, and a fear never wholly suppressed, restrained him.
He exasperated people by his impracticability, and it must be
acknowledged that it is very irritating in a difficult complexity
demanding the gravest consideration--the balancing of this against
that--to hear a man suddenly propose some naked principle with which
everybody is acquainted, and decide by it solely.  I came to know him
through M'Kay, who had known him for years; but M'Kay at last broke
out against him, and called him a stupid fool when he threw up a
handsome salary and refused to serve any longer under a house which
had always treated him well, because they, moving with the times, had
determined to offer their customers a cheaper description of goods,
which Cardinal thought was dishonest.  M'Kay said, and said truly,
that many poor persons would buy these goods who could buy nothing
else, and that Cardinal, before yielding to such scruples, ought to
satisfy himself that, by yielding, he would not become a burden upon
others less fanciful.  This was just what happened.  Cardinal could
get no work again for a long time, and had to borrow money.  I was
sorry; but for my part, this and other eccentricities did not disturb
my confidence in him.  He was an honest, affectionate soul, and his
peculiarities were a necessary result of the total chaos of a time
without any moral guidance.  With no church, no philosophy, no
religion, the wonder is that anybody on whom use and wont relax their
hold should ever do anything more than blindly rove hither and
thither, arriving at nothing.  Cardinal was adrift, like thousands
and hundreds of thousands of others, and amidst the storm and pitchy
darkness of the night, thousands and hundreds of thousands of voices
offer us pilotage.  It spoke well for him that he did nothing worse
than take a few useless phantoms on board which did him no harm, and
that he held fast to his own instinct for truth and goodness.  I
never let myself be annoyed by what he produced to me from his books.
All that I discarded.  Underneath all that was a solid worth which I
loved, and which was mostly not vocal.  What was vocal in him was, I
am bound to say, not of much value.

About the time when our room opened, Mrs. Cardinal had become almost
insupportable to her husband.  Poor woman; I always pitied her; she
was alone sometimes for a fortnight at a stretch; she read nothing;
there was no child to occupy her thoughts; she knew that her husband
lived in a world into which she never entered, and she had nothing to
do but to brood over imaginary infidelities.  She was literally
possessed, and who shall be hard upon her?  Nobody cared for her;
everybody with whom her husband associated disliked her, and she knew
perfectly well they never asked her to their houses except for his
sake.  Cardinal vowed at last he would endure her no longer, and that
they must separate.  He was induced one Sunday morning, when his
resolution was strong within him, and he was just about to give
effect to it, to come with us.  The quiet seemed to soothe him, and
he went home with me afterwards.  He was not slow to disclose to me
his miserable condition, and his resolve to change it.  I do not know
now what I said, but it appeared to me that he ought not to change
it, and that change would be for him most perilous.  I thought that
with a little care life might become at least bearable with his wife;
that by treating her not so much as if she were criminal, but as if
she were diseased, hatred might pass into pity, and pity into
merciful tenderness to her, and that they might dwell together upon
terms not harder than those upon which many persons who have made
mistakes in youth agree to remain with each other; terms which, after
much consideration, they adjudge it better to accept than to break
loose, and bring upon themselves and those connected with them all
that open rupture involves.  The difficulty was to get Cardinal to
give up his theory of what two abstract human beings should do
between whom no love exists.  It seemed to him something like atheism
to forsake his clearly-discerned, simple rule for a course which was
dictated by no easily-grasped higher law, and it was very difficult
to persuade him that there is anything of equal authority in a law
less rigid in its outline.  However, he went home.  I called on him
some time afterwards, and saw that a peace, or at any rate a truce,
was proclaimed, which lasted up to the day of his death.  M'Kay and I
agreed to make as much of Mrs. Cardinal as we could, and yielding to
urgent invitation, she came to the room.  This wonderfully helped to
heal her.  She began to feel that she was not overlooked, put on one
side, or despised, and the bonds which bound her constricted lips
into bitterness were loosened.

Another friend, and the last whom I shall name, was a young man named
Clark.  He was lame, and had been so from childhood.  His father was
a tradesman, working hard from early morning till late at night, and
burdened with a number of children.  The boy Richard, shut out from
the companionship of his fellows, had a great love of books.  When he
left school his father did not know what to do with him--in fact
there was only one occupation open to him, and that was clerical work
of one kind or another.  At last he got a place in a house in Fleet
Street, which did a large business in those days in sending
newspapers into the country.  His whole occupation all day long was
to write addresses, and for this he received twenty-five shillings a
week, his hours being from nine o'clock till seven.  The office in
which he sat was crowded, and in order to squeeze the staff into the
smallest space, rent being dear, a gallery had been run round the
wall about four feet from the ceiling.  This was provided with desks
and gas lamps, and up there Clark sat, artificial light being
necessary four days out of five.  He came straight from the town in
which his father lived to Fleet Street, and once settled in it there
seemed no chance of change for the better.  He knew what his father's
struggles were; he could not go back to him, and he had not the
energy to attempt to lift himself.  It is very doubtful too whether
he could have succeeded in achieving any improvement, whatever his
energy might have been.  He had got lodgings in Newcastle Street, and
to these he returned in the evening, remaining there alone with his
little library, and seldom moving out of doors.  He was unhealthy
constitutionally, and his habits contributed to make him more so.
Everything which he saw which was good seemed only to sharpen the
contrast between himself and his lot, and his reading was a curse to
him rather than a blessing.  I sometimes wished that he had never
inherited any love whatever for what is usually considered to be the
Best, and that he had been endowed with an organisation coarse and
commonplace, like that of his colleagues.  If he went into company
which suited him, or read anything which interested him, it seemed as
if the ten hours of the gallery in Fleet Street had been made thereby
only the more insupportable, and his habitual mood was one of
despondency, so that his fellow clerks who knew his tastes not
unnaturally asked what was the use of them if they only made him
wretched; and they were more than ever convinced that in their
amusements lay true happiness.  Habit, which is the saviour of most
of us, the opiate which dulls the otherwise unbearable miseries of
life, only served to make Clark more sensitive.  The monotony of that
perpetual address-copying was terrible.  He has told me with a kind
of shame what an effect it had upon him--that sometimes for days he
would feed upon the prospect of the most childish trifle because it
would break in some slight degree the uniformity of his toil.  For
example, he would sometimes change from quill to steel pens and back
again, and he found himself actually looking forward with a kind of
joy--merely because of the variation--to the day on which he had
fixed to go back to the quill after using steel.  He would determine,
two or three days beforehand, to get up earlier, and to walk to Fleet
Street by way of Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn Fields, and
upon this he would subsist till the day came.  He could make no
longer excursions because of his lameness.  All this may sound very
much like simple silliness to most people, but those who have not
been bound to a wheel do not know what thoughts come into the head of
the strongest man who is extended on it.  Clark sat side by side in
his gallery with other young men of rather a degraded type, and the
confinement bred in them a filthy grossness with which they tormented
him.  They excited in him loathsome images, from which he could not
free himself either by day or night.  He was peculiarly weak in his
inability to cast off impressions, or to get rid of mental pictures
when once formed, and his distress at being haunted by these hateful,
disgusting thoughts was pitiable.  They were in fact almost more than
thoughts, they were transportations out of himself--real visions.  It
would have been his salvation if he could have been a carpenter or a
bricklayer, in country air, but this could not be.

Clark had no power to think connectedly to a conclusion.  When an
idea came into his head, he dwelt upon it incessantly, and no
correction of the false path upon which it set him was possible,
because he avoided society.  Work over, he was so sick of people that
he went back to himself.  So it came to pass that when brought into
company, what he believed and cherished was frequently found to be
open to obvious objection, and was often nothing better than nonsense
which was rudely, and as he himself was forced to admit, justly
overthrown.  He ought to have been surrounded with intelligent
friends, who would have enabled him to see continually the other
side, and who would have prevented his long and useless wanderings.
Like many other persons, too, whom I have known--just in proportion
to his lack of penetrative power was his tendency to occupy himself
with difficult questions.  By a cruel destiny he was impelled to
dabble in matters for which he was totally unfitted.  He never could
go beyond his author a single step, and he lost himself in endless
mazes.  If he could but have been persuaded to content himself with
sweet presentations of wholesome happy existence, with stories and
with history, how much better it would have been for him!  He had had
no proper training whatever for anything more, he was ignorant of the
exact meaning of the proper terminology of science, and an unlucky
day it was for him when he picked up on a bookstall some very early
translation of some German book on philosophy.  One reason, as may be
conjectured, for his mistakes was his education in dissenting
Calvinism, a religion which is entirely metaphysical, and encourages,
unhappily, in everybody a taste for tremendous problems.  So long as
Calvinism is unshaken, the mischief is often not obvious, because a
ready solution taken on trust is provided; but when doubts arise, the
evil results become apparent, and the poor helpless victim, totally
at a loss, is torn first in this direction and then in the other, and
cannot let these questions alone.  He has been taught to believe they
are connected with salvation, and he is compelled still to busy
himself with them, rather than with simple external piety.



CHAPTER VI--DRURY LANE THEOLOGY



Such were some of our disciples.  I do not think that church or
chapel would have done them much good.  Preachers are like unskilled
doctors with the same pill and draught for every complaint.  They do
not know where the fatal spot lies on lung or heart or nerve which
robs us of life.  If any of these persons just described had gone to
church or chapel they would have heard discourses on the usual set
topics, none of which would have concerned them.  Their trouble was
not the forgiveness of sins, the fallacies of Arianism, the
personality of the Holy Ghost, or the doctrine of the Eucharist.
They all WANTED something distinctly.  They had great gaping needs
which they longed to satisfy, intensely practical and special.  Some
of these necessities no words could in any way meet.  It was obvious,
for instance, that Clark must at once be taken away from his gallery
and his copying if he was to live--at least in sanity.  He had
fortunately learned shorthand, and M'Kay got him employment on a
newspaper.  His knowledge of his art was by no means perfect at
first, but he was sent to attend meetings where verbatim reports were
not necessary, and he quickly advanced.  Taylor, too, we tried to
remove, and we succeeded in attaching him to a large club as an out-
of-doors porter.  The poor man was now at least in the open air, and
freed from insolent tyranny.  This, however, was help such as anybody
might have given.  The question of most importance is, What gospel
had we to give?  Why, in short, did we meet on the Sunday?  What was
our justification?  In the first place, there was the simple
quietude.  The retreat from the streets and from miserable cares into
a place where there was peace and room for reflection was something.
It is all very well for cultivated persons with libraries to scoff at
religious services.  To the poor the cathedral or the church might be
an immense benefit, if only for the reason that they present a
barrier to worldly noise, and are a distinct invitation by
architecture and symbolic decoration to meditation on something
beyond the business which presses on them during the week.  Poor
people frequently cannot read for want of a place in which to read.
Moreover, they require to be provoked by a stronger stimulus than
that of a book.  They willingly hear a man talk if he has anything to
say, when they would not care to look at what he said if it were
printed.  But to come more closely to the point.  Our main object was
to create in our hearers contentment with their lot; and even some
joy in it.  That was our religion; that was the central thought of
all we said and did, giving shape and tendency to everything.  We
admitted nothing which did not help us in that direction, and
everything which did help us.  Our attempts, to any one who had not
the key, may have seemed vague and desultory.  We might by a stranger
have been accused of feeble wandering, of idle dabbling, now in this
subject and now in that, but after a while he would have found that
though we were weak creatures, with no pretence to special knowledge
in any subject, we at least knew what we meant, and tried to
accomplish it.  For my own part, I was happy when I had struck that
path.  I felt as if somehow, after many errors, I had once more
gained a road, a religion in fact, and one which essentially was not
new but old, the religion of the Reconciliation, the reconciliation
of man with God; differing from the current creed in so far as I did
not lay stress upon sin as the cause of estrangement, but yet
agreeing with it in making it my duty of duties to suppress revolt,
and to submit calmly and sometimes cheerfully to the Creator.  This
surely, under a thousand disguises, has been the meaning of all the
forms of worship which we have seen in the world.  Pain and death are
nothing new, and men have been driven into perplexed scepticism, and
even insurrection by them, ever since men came into being.  Always,
however, have the majority, the vast majority of the race, felt
instinctively that in this scepticism and insurrection they could not
abide, and they have struggled more or less blindly after
explanation; determined not to desist till they had found it, and
reaching a result embodied in a multitude of shapes irrational and
absurd to the superficial scoffer, but of profound interest to the
thoughtful.  I may observe, in passing, that this is a reason why all
great religions should be treated with respect, and in a certain
sense preserved.  It is nothing less than a wicked waste of
accumulated human strivings to sneer them out of existence.  They
will be found, every one of them, to have incarnated certain vital
doctrines which it has cost centuries of toil and devotion properly
to appreciate.  Especially is this true of the Catholic faith, and if
it were worth while, it might be shown how it is nothing less than a
divine casket of precious remedies, and if it is to be brutally
broken, it will take ages to rediscover and restore them.  Of one
thing I am certain, that their rediscovery and restoration will be
necessary.  I cannot too earnestly insist upon the need of our
holding, each man for himself, by some faith which shall anchor him.
It must not be taken up by chance.  We must fight for it, for only so
will it become OUR faith.  The halt in indifference or in hostility
is easy enough and seductive enough.  The half-hearted thinks that
when he has attained that stage he has completed the term of human
wisdom.  I say go on:  do not stay there; do not take it for granted
that there is nothing beyond; incessantly attempt an advance, and at
last a light, dim it may be, will arise.  It will not be a completed
system, perfect in all points, an answer to all our questions, but at
least it will give ground for hope.

We had to face the trials of our friends, and we had to face death.
I do not say for an instant that we had any effectual reply to these
great arguments against us.  We never so much as sought for one,
knowing how all men had sought and failed.  But we were able to say
there is some compensation, that there is another side, and this is
all that man can say.  No theory of the world is possible.  The
storm, the rain slowly rotting the harvest, children sickening in
cellars are obvious; but equally obvious are an evening in June, the
delight of men and women in one another, in music, and in the
exercise of thought.  There can surely be no question that the sum of
satisfaction is increasing, not merely in the gross but for each
human being, as the earth from which we sprang is being worked out of
the race, and a higher type is being developed.  I may observe, too,
that although it is usually supposed, it is erroneously supposed,
that it is pure doubt which disturbs or depresses us.  Simple
suspense is in fact very rare, for there are few persons so
constituted as to be able to remain in it.  It is dogmatism under the
cloak of doubt which pulls us down.  It is the dogmatism of death,
for example, which we have to avoid.  The open grave is dogmatic, and
we say THAT MAN HAS GONE, but this is as much a transgression of the
limits of certitude as if we were to say HE IS AN ANGEL IN BLISS.
The proper attitude, the attitude enjoined by the severest exercise
of the reason is, I DO NOT KNOW; and in this there is an element of
hope, now rising and now falling, but always sufficient to prevent
that blank despair which we must feel if we consider it as settled
that when we lie down under the grass there is an absolute end.

The provision in nature of infinity ever present to us is an immense
help.  No man can look up to the stars at night and reflect upon what
lies behind them without feeling that the tyranny of the senses is
loosened, and the tyranny, too, of the conclusions of his logic.  The
beyond and the beyond, let us turn it over as we may, let us consider
it as a child considers it, or by the light of the newest philosophy,
is a constant, visible warning not to make our minds the measure of
the universe.  Underneath the stars what dreams, what conjectures
arise, shadowy enough, it is true; but one thing we cannot help
believing as irresistibly as if by geometrical deduction--that the
sphere of that understanding of ours, whose function it seems to be
to imprison us, is limited.

Going through a churchyard one afternoon I noticed that nearly all
the people who were buried there, if the inscriptions on the
tombstones might be taken to represent the thoughts of the departed
when they were alive, had been intent solely on their own personal
salvation.  The question with them all seemed to have been, shall _I_
go to heaven?  Considering the tremendous difference between heaven
and hell in the popular imagination, it was very natural that these
poor creatures should be anxious above everything to know whether
they would be in hell or heaven for ever.  Surely, however, this is
not the highest frame of mind, nor is it one to be encouraged.  I
would rather do all I can to get out of it, and to draw others out of
it too.  Our aim ought not so much to be the salvation of this poor
petty self, but of that in me which alone makes it worth while to
save me; of that alone which I hope will be saved, immortal truth.
The very centre of the existence of the ordinary chapel-goer and
church-goer needs to be shifted from self to what is outside self,
and yet is truly self, and the sole truth of self.  If the truth
lives, WE live, and if it dies, we are dead.  Our theology stands in
need of a reformation greater than that of Luther's.  It may be said
that the attempt to replace the care for self in us by a care for the
universal is ridiculous.  Man cannot rise to that height.  I do not
believe it.  I believe we can rise to it.  Every ordinary unselfish
act is a proof of the capacity to rise to it; and the mother's denial
of all care for her own happiness, if she can but make her child
happy, is a sublime anticipation.  It may be called an instinct, but
in the course of time it will be possible to develop a wider instinct
in us, so that our love for the truth shall be even maternally
passionate and self-forgetting.

After all our searching it was difficult to find anything which, in
the case of a man like John the waiter, for example, could be of any
service to him.  At his age efficient help was beyond us, and in his
case the problem presented itself in its simple nakedness.  What
comfort is there discoverable for the wretched which is not based
upon illusion?  We could not tell him that all he endured was right
and proper.  But even to him we were able to offer something.  We did
all we could to soothe him.  On the Sunday, at least, he was able to
find some relief from his labours, and he entered into a different
region.  He came to see us in the afternoon and evening occasionally,
and brought his boy.  Father and son were pulled up out of the vault,
brought into the daylight, and led into an open expanse.  We tried
above everything to interest them, even in the smallest degree, in
what is universal and impersonal, feeling that in that direction lies
healing.  We explained to the child as well as we could some morsels
of science, and in explaining to him we explained to the father as
well.  When the anguish begotten by some outbreak on the part of the
wife more violent than usual became almost too much to bear, we did
our best to counsel, and as a last consolation we could point to
Death, divine Death, and repose.  It was but for a few more years at
the utmost, and then must come a rest which no sorrow could invade.
"Having death as an ally, I do not tremble at shadows," is an
immortal quotation from some unknown Greek author.  Providence, too,
by no miracle, came to our relief.  The wife died, as it was foreseen
she must, and that weight being removed, some elasticity and recoil
developed itself.  John's one thought now was for his child, and by
means of the child the father passed out of himself, and connected
himself with the future.  The child did in fact teach the father
exactly what we tried to teach, and taught it with a power of
conviction which never could have been produced by any mere appeals
to the reason.  The father felt that he was battered, useless, and a
failure, but that in the boy there were unknown possibilities, and
that he might in after life say that it was to this battered, useless
failure of a father he owed his success.  There was nothing now that
he would not do to help Tom's education, and we joyfully aided as
best we could.  So, partly I believe by us, but far more by nature
herself, John's salvation was wrought out at least in a measure;
discord by the intervention of another note resolved itself into a
kind of harmony, and even through the skylight in the Strand a
glimpse of the azure was obtained.

I hope my readers, if I should ever have any, will remember that what
I wish to do is to give some account of the manner in which we sought
to be of service to the small and very humble circle of persons whom
we had collected about us.  I have preserved no record of anything; I
am merely putting down what now comes into my mind--the two or three
articles, not thirty-nine, nor, alas! a third of that number--which
we were able to hold.  I recollect one or two more which perhaps are
worth preservation.  In my younger days the aim of theologians was
the justification of the ways of God to man.  They could not succeed.
They succeeded no better than ourselves in satisfying the intellect
with a system.  Nor does the Christian religion profess any such
satisfaction.  It teaches rather the great doctrine of a Remedy, of a
Mediator; and therein it is profoundly true.  It is unphilosophical
in the sense that it offers no explanation from a single principle,
and leaves the ultimate mystery as dark as before, but it is in
accordance with our intuitions.  Everywhere in nature we see exaction
of penalties down to the uttermost farthing, but following after this
we discern forgiveness, obliterating and restorative.  Both
tendencies exist.  Nature is Rhadamanthine, and more so, for she
visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; but there is in her
also an infinite Pity, healing all wounds, softening all calamities,
ever hastening to alleviate and repair.  Christianity in strange
historical fashion is an expression of nature, a projection of her
into a biography and a creed.

We endeavoured to follow Christianity in the depth of its distinction
between right and wrong.  Herein this religion is of priceless value.
Philosophy proclaims the unity of our nature.  To philosophy every
passion is as natural as every act of saintlike negation, and one of
the usual effects of thinking or philosophising is to bring together
all that is apparently contrary in man, and to show how it proceeds
really from one centre.  But Christianity had not to propound a
theory of man; it had to redeem the world.  It laid awful stress on
the duality in us, and the stress laid on that duality is the world's
salvation.  The words right and wrong are not felt now as they were
felt by Paul.  They shade off one into the other.  Nevertheless, if
mankind is not to be lost, the ancient antagonism must be maintained.
The shallowest of mortals is able now to laugh at the notion of a
personal devil.  No doubt there is no such thing existent; but the
horror at evil which could find no other expression than in the
creation of a devil is no subject for laughter, and if it do not in
some shape or other survive, the race itself will not survive.  No
religion, so far as I know, has dwelt like Christianity with such
profound earnestness on the bisection of man--on the distinction
within him, vital to the very last degree, between the higher and the
lower, heaven and hell.  What utter folly is it because of an antique
vesture to condemn as effete what the vesture clothes!  Its doctrine
and its sacred story are fixtures in concrete form of precious
thoughts purchased by blood and tears.

I fancy I see the sneer of theologians and critics at our efforts.
The theologians will mock us because we had nothing better to say.  I
can only reply that we did our best.  We said all we knew, and we
would most thankfully have said more, had we been sure that it must
be true.  I would remind, too, those of our judges who think that we
were such wretched mortals, blind leaders of the blind, that there
have been long ages during which men never pretended to understand
more than we professed to understand.  To say nothing of the Jews,
whose meagre system would certainly not have been thought either
satisfying or orthodox by modern Christians, the Greeks and Romans
lived in no clearer light than that which shines on me.  The critics,
too, will condemn because of our weakness; but this defect I at once
concede.  The severest critic could not possibly be so severe as I am
upon myself.  I KNOW my failings.  He, probably, would miss many of
them.  But, again I urge that men are not to be debarred by reason of
weakness from doing what little good may lie within reach of their
hands.  Had we attempted to save scholars and thinkers we should have
deserved the ridicule with which no doubt we shall be visited.  We
aspired to save nobody.  We knew no salvation ourselves.  We ventured
humbly to bring a feeble ray of light into the dwellings of two or
three poor men and women; and if Prometheus, fettered to his rock,
dwelt with pride on the blind hopes which he had caused to visit
mortals, the hopes which "stopped the continued anticipation of their
destiny," we perhaps may be pardoned if at times we thought that what
we were doing was not altogether vanity.



CHAPTER VII--QUI DEDIT IN MARI VIAM



From time to time I received a newspaper from my native town, and one
morning, looking over the advertisements, I caught sight of one which
arrested me.  It was as follows:-


"A Widow Lady desires a situation as Daily Governess to little
children.  Address E. B., care of Mrs. George Andrews, Fancy Bazaar,
High Street."


Mrs. George Andrews was a cousin of Ellen Butts, and that this was
her advertisement I had not the slightest doubt.  Suddenly, without
being able to give the least reason for it, an unconquerable desire
to see her arose within me.  I could not understand it.  I
recollected that memorable resolution after Miss Arbour's story years
ago.  How true that counsel of Miss Arbour's was! and yet it had the
defect of most counsel.  It was but a principle; whether it suited
this particular case was the one important point on which Miss Arbour
was no authority.  What WAS it which prompted this inexplicable
emotion?  A thousand things rushed through my head without reason or
order.  I begin to believe that a first love never dies.  A boy falls
in love at eighteen or nineteen.  The attachment comes to nothing.
It is broken off for a multitude of reasons, and he sees its
absurdity.  He marries afterwards some other woman whom he even
adores, and he has children for whom he spends his life; yet in an
obscure corner of his soul he preserves everlastingly the cherished
picture of the girl who first was dear to him.  She, too, marries.
In process of time she is fifty years old, and he is fifty-two.  He
has not seen her for thirty years or more, but he continually turns
aside into the little oratory, to gaze upon the face as it last
appeared to him when he left her at her gate and saw her no more.  He
inquires now and then timidly about her whenever he gets the chance.
And once in his life he goes down to the town where she lives, solely
in order to get a sight of her without her knowing anything about it.
He does not succeed, and he comes back and tells his wife, from whom
he never conceals any secrets, that he has been away on business.  I
did not for a moment confess that my love for Ellen had returned.  I
knew who she was and what she was, and what had led to our
separation; but nevertheless, all this obstinately remained in the
background, and all the passages of love between us, all our kisses,
and above everything, her tears at that parting in her father's
house, thrust themselves upon me.  It was a mystery to me.  What
should have induced that utterly unexpected resurrection of what I
believed to be dead and buried, is beyond my comprehension.  However,
the fact remains.  I did not to myself admit that this was love, but
it WAS love, and that it should have shot up with such swift vitality
merely because I had happened to see those initials was miraculous.
I pretended to myself that I should like once more to see Mrs. Butts-
-perhaps she might be in want and I could help her.  I shrank from
writing to her or from making myself known to her, and at last I hit
upon the expedient of answering her advertisement in a feigned name,
and requesting her to call at the King's Arms hotel upon a gentleman
who wished to engage a widow lady to teach his children.  To prevent
any previous inquiries on her part, I said that my name was Williams,
that I lived in the country at some little distance from the town,
but that I should be there on business on the day named.  I took up
my quarters at the King's Arms the night before.  It seemed very
strange to be in an inn in the place in which I was born.  I retired
early to my bedroom, and looked out in the clear moonlight over the
river.  The landscape seemed haunted by ghosts of my former self.  At
one particular point, so well known, I stood fishing.  At another,
equally well known, where the water was dangerously deep, I was
examining the ice; and round the corner was the boathouse where we
kept the little craft in which I had voyaged so many hundreds of
miles on excursions upwards beyond where the navigation ends, or,
still more fascinating, down to where the water widens and sails are
to be seen, and there is a foretaste of the distant sea.  It is no
pleasure to me to revisit scenes in which earlier days have been
passed.  I detest the sentimental melancholy which steals over me;
the sense of the lapse of time, and the reflection that so many whom
I knew are dead.  I would always, if possible, spend my holiday in
some new scene, fresh to me, and full of new interest.  I slept but
little, and when the morning came, instead of carrying out my purpose
of wandering through the streets, I was so sick of the mood by which
I had been helplessly overcome, that I sat at a distance from the
window in the coffee-room, and read diligently last week's Bell's
Weekly Messenger.  My reading, however, was nothing.  I do not
suppose I comprehended the simplest paragraph.  My thoughts were
away, and I watched the clock slowly turning towards the hour when
Ellen was to call.  I foresaw that I should not be able to speak to
her at the inn.  If I have anything particular to say to anybody, I
can always say it so much better out of doors.  I dreaded the
confinement of the room, and the necessity for looking into her face.
Under the sky, and in motion, I should be more at liberty.  At last
eleven struck from the church in the square, and five minutes
afterwards the waiter entered to announce Mrs. Butts.  I was
therefore right, and she was "E. B."  I was sure that I should not be
recognised.  Since I saw her last I had grown a beard, my hair had
got a little grey, and she was always a little short-sighted.  She
came in, and as she entered she put away over her bonnet her thick
black veil.  Not ten seconds passed before she was seated on the
opposite side of the table to that on which I was sitting, but I re-
read in her during those ten seconds the whole history of years.  I
cannot say that externally she looked worn or broken.  I had imagined
that I should see her undone with her great troubles, but to some
extent, and yet not altogether, I was mistaken.  The cheek-bones were
more prominent than of old, and her dark-brown hair drawn tightly
over her forehead increased the clear paleness of the face; the just
perceptible tint of colour which I recollect being now altogether
withdrawn.  But she was not haggard, and evidently not vanquished.
There was even a gaiety on her face, perhaps a trifle enforced, and
although the darkness of sorrow gleamed behind it, the sorrow did not
seem to be ultimate, but to be in front of a final background, if not
of joy, at least of resignation.  Her ancient levity of manner had
vanished, or at most had left nothing but a trace.  I thought I
detected it here and there in a line about the mouth, and perhaps in
her walk.  There was a reminiscence of it too in her clothes.
Notwithstanding poverty and distress, the old neatness--that
particular care which used to charm me so when I was little more than
a child, was there still.  I was always susceptible to this virtue,
and delicate hands and feet, with delicate care bestowed thereon,
were more attractive to me than slovenly beauty.  I noticed that the
gloves, though mended, fitted with the same precision, and that her
dress was unwrinkled and perfectly graceful.  Whatever she might have
had to endure, it had not destroyed that self-centred satisfaction
which makes life tolerable.

I was impelled at once to say that I had to beg her pardon for asking
her there.  Unfortunately I was obliged to go over to Cowston, a
village which was about three miles from the town.  Perhaps she would
not mind walking part of the way with me through the meadows, and
then we could talk with more freedom, as I should not feel pressed
for time.  To this arrangement she at once agreed, and dropping her
thick veil over her face, we went out.  In a few minutes we were
clear of the houses, and I began the conversation.

"Have you been in the habit of teaching?"

"No.  The necessity for taking to it has only lately arisen."

"What can you teach?"

"Not much beyond what children of ten or eleven years old are
expected to know; but I could take charge of them entirely."

"Have you any children of your own?"

"One."

"Could you take a situation as resident teacher if you have a child?"

"I must get something to do, and if I can make no arrangement by
which my child can live with me, I shall try and place her with a
friend.  I may be able to hear of some appointment as a daily
governess."

"I should have thought that in your native town you would have been
easily able to find employment--you must be well known?"

There was a pause, and after a moment or so she said:-

"We were well known once, but we went abroad and lost all our money.
My husband died abroad.  When I returned, I found that there was very
little which my friends could do for me.  I am not accomplished, and
there are crowds of young women who are more capable than I am.
Moreover, I saw that I was becoming a burden, and people called on me
rather as a matter of duty than for any other reason.  You don't know
how soon all but the very best insensibly neglect very poor relatives
if they are not gifted or attractive.  I do not wonder at being made
to feel this, nor do I blame anybody.  My little girl is a cripple,
my rooms are dull, and I have nothing in me with which to amuse or
entertain visitors.  Pardon my going into this detail.  It was
necessary to say something in order to explain my position."

"May I ask what salary you will require if you live in the house?"

"Five-and-thirty pounds a year, but I might take less if I were asked
to do so."

"Are you a member of the Church of England?"

"No."

"To what religious body do you belong?"

"I am an Independent, but I would go to Church if my employers wished
it."

"I thought the Independents objected to go to Church."

"They do; but I should not object, if I could hear anything at the
Church which would help me."

"I am rather surprised at your indifference."

"I was once more particular, but I have seen much suffering, and some
things which were important to me are not so now, and others which
were not important have become so."

I then made up a little story.  My sister and I lived together.  We
were about to take up our abode at Cowston, but were as yet strangers
to it.  I was left a widower with two little children whom my sister
could not educate, as she could not spare the time.  She would
naturally have selected the governess herself, but she was at some
distance.  She would like to see Mrs. Butts before engaging her
finally, but she thought that as this advertisement presented itself,
I might make some preliminary inquiries.  Perhaps, however, now that
Mrs. Butts knew the facts, she would object to living in the house.
I put it in this way, feeling sure that she would catch my meaning.

"I am afraid that this situation will not suit me.  I could not go
backwards and forwards so far every day."

"I understand you perfectly, and feared that this would be your
decision.  But if you hesitate, I can give you the best of
references.  I had not thought of that before.  References of course
will be required by you as well as by me."

I put my hand in my pocket for my pocket-book, but I could not find
it.  We had now reached a part of our road familiar enough to both of
us.  Along that very path Ellen and I had walked years ago.  Under
those very trees, on that very seat had we sat, and she and I were
there again.  All the old confidences, confessions, tendernesses,
rushed upon me.  What is there which is more potent than the
recollection of past love to move us to love, and knit love with
closest bonds?  Can we ever cease to love the souls who have once
shared all that we know and feel?  Can we ever be indifferent to
those who have our secrets, and whose secrets we hold?  As I looked
at her, I remembered what she knew about me, and what I knew about
her, and this simple thought so overmastered me, that I could hold
out no longer.  I said to her that if she would like to rest for one
moment, I might be able to find my papers.  We sat down together, and
she drew up her veil to read the address which I was about to give
her.  She glanced at me, as I thought, with a strange expression of
excited interrogation, and something swiftly passed across her face,
which warned me that I had not a moment to lose.  I took out one of
my own cards, handed it to her, and said, "Here is a reference which
perhaps you may know."  She bent over it, turned to me, fixed her
eyes intently and directly on mine for one moment, and then I thought
she would have fallen.  My arm was around her in an instant, her head
was on my shoulder, and my many wanderings were over.  It was broad,
high, sunny noon, the most solitary hour of the daylight in those
fields.  We were roused by the distant sound of the town clock
striking twelve; we rose and went on together to Cowston by the river
bank, returning late in the evening.



CHAPTER VIII--FLAGELLUM NON APPROQUINABIT TABERNACULO TUO



I suppose that the reason why in novels the story ends with a
marriage is partly that the excitement of the tale ceases then, and
partly also because of a theory that marriage is an epoch,
determining the career of life after it.  The epoch once announced,
nothing more need be explained; everything else follows as a matter
of course.  These notes of mine are autobiographical, and not a
romance.  I have never known much about epochs.  I have had one or
two, one specially when I first began to read and think; but after
that, if I have changed, it has been slowly and imperceptibly.  My
life, therefore, is totally unfitted to be the basis of fiction.  My
return to Ellen, and our subsequent marriage, were only partially an
epoch.  A change had come, but it was one which had long been
preparing.  Ellen's experiences had altered her position, and mine
too was altered.  She had been driven into religion by trouble, and
knowing nothing of criticism or philosophy, retained the old forms
for her religious feeling.  But the very quickness of her emotion
caused her to welcome all new and living modes of expressing it.  It
is only when feeling has ceased to accompany a creed that it becomes
fixed, and verbal departures from it are counted heresy.  I too cared
less for argument, and it even gave me pleasure to talk in her
dialect, so familiar to me, but for so many years unused.

It was now necessary for me to add to my income.  I had nothing upon
which to depend save my newspaper, which was obviously insufficient.
At last, I succeeded in obtaining some clerical employment.  For no
other work was I fit, for my training had not been special in any one
direction.  My hours were long, from ten in the morning till seven in
the evening, and as I was three miles distant from the office, I was
really away from home for eleven hours every day, excepting on
Sundays.  I began to calculate that my life consisted of nothing but
the brief spaces allowed to me for rest, and these brief spaces I
could not enjoy because I dwelt upon their brevity.  There was some
excuse for me.  Never could there be any duty incumbent upon man much
more inhuman and devoid of interest than my own.  How often I thought
about my friend Clark, and his experiences became mine.  The whole
day I did nothing but write, and what I wrote called forth no single
faculty of the mind.  Nobody who has not tried such an occupation can
possibly forecast the strange habits, humours, fancies, and diseases
which after a time it breeds.  I was shut up in a room half below the
ground.  In this room were three other men besides myself, two of
them between fifty and sixty, and one about three or four-and-twenty.
All four of us kept books or copied letters from ten to seven, with
an interval of three-quarters of an hour for dinner.  In all three of
these men, as in the case of Clark's companions, there had been
developed, partly I suppose by the circumstance of enforced idleness
of brain, the most loathsome tendency to obscenity.  This was the one
subject which was common ground, and upon which they could talk.  It
was fostered too by a passion for beer, which was supplied by the
publican across the way, who was perpetually travelling to and fro
with cans.  My horror when I first found out into what society I was
thrust was unspeakable.  There was a clock within a hundred yards of
my window which struck the hours and quarters.  How I watched that
clock!  My spirits rose or fell with each division of the day.  From
ten to twelve there was nothing but gloom.  By half-past twelve I
began to discern dinner time, and the prospect was brighter.  After
dinner there was nothing to be done but doggedly to endure until
five, and at five I was able to see over the distance from five to
seven.  My disgust at my companions, however, came to be mixed with
pity.  I found none of them cruel, and I received many little
kindnesses from them.  I discovered that their trade was largely
answerable for the impurity of thought and speech which so shocked
me.  Its monotony compelled some countervailing stimulus, and as they
had never been educated to care for anything in particular, they
found the necessary relief in sensuality.  At first they "chaffed"
and worried me a good deal because of my silence, but at last they
began to think I was "religious," and then they ceased to torment me.
I rather encouraged them in the belief that I had a right to
exemption from their conversation, and I passed, I believe, for a
Plymouth brother.  The only thing which they could not comprehend was
that I made no attempt to convert them.

The whole establishment was under the rule of a deputy-manager, who
was the terror of the place.  He was tall, thin, and suffered
occasionally from spitting of blood, brought on no doubt from
excitement.  He was the strangest mixture of exactitude and passion.
He had complete mastery over every detail of the business, and he
never blundered.  All his work was thorough, down to the very bottom,
and he had the most intolerant hatred of everything which was loose
and inaccurate.  He never passed a day without flaming out into oaths
and curses against his subordinates, and they could not say in his
wildest fury that his ravings were beside the mark.  He was wrong in
his treatment of men--utterly wrong--but his facts were always
correct.  I never saw anybody hated as he was, and the hatred against
him was the more intense because nobody could convict him of a
mistake.  He seemed to enjoy a storm, and knew nothing whatever of
the constraints which with ordinary men prevent abusive and brutal
language to those around them.  Some of his clerks suffered greatly
from him, and he almost broke down two or three from the constant
nervous strain upon them produced by fear of his explosions.  For my
own part, although I came in for a full share of his temper, I at
once made up my mind as soon as I discovered what he was, not to open
my lips to him except under compulsion.  My one object now was to get
a living.  I wished also to avoid the self-mortification which must
ensue from altercation.  I dreaded, as I have always dreaded beyond
what I can tell, the chaos and wreck which, with me, follows
subjugation by anger, and I held to my resolve under all provocation.
It was very difficult, but how many times I have blessed myself for
adhesion to it.  Instead of going home undone with excitement, and
trembling with fear of dismissal, I have walked out of my dungeon
having had to bite my lips till the blood came, but still conqueror,
and with peace of mind.

Another stratagem of defence which I adopted at the office was never
to betray to a soul anything about myself.  Nobody knew anything
about me, whether I was married or single, where I lived, or what I
thought upon a single subject of any importance.  I cut off my office
life in this way from my life at home so completely that I was two
selves, and my true self was not stained by contact with my other
self.  It was a comfort to me to think the moment the clock struck
seven that my second self died, and that my first self suffered
nothing by having anything to do with it.  I was not the person who
sat at the desk downstairs and endured the abominable talk of his
colleagues and the ignominy of serving such a chief.  I knew nothing
about him.  I was a citizen walking London streets; I had my opinions
upon human beings and books; I was on equal terms with my friends; I
was Ellen's husband; I was, in short, a man.  By this scrupulous
isolation, I preserved myself, and the clerk was not debarred from
the domain of freedom.

It is very terrible to think that the labour by which men are to live
should be of this order.  The ideal of labour is that it should be
something in which we can take an interest and even a pride.  Immense
masses of it in London are the merest slavery, and it is as
mechanical as the daily journey of the omnibus horse.  There is no
possibility of relieving it, and all the ordinary copybook advice of
moralists and poets as to the temper in which we should earn our
bread is childish nonsense.  If a man is a painter, or a physician,
or a barrister, or even a tradesman, well and good.  The maxims of
authors may be of some service to him, and he may be able to
exemplify them; but if he is a copying clerk they are an insult, and
he can do nothing but arch his back to bear his burden and find some
compensation elsewhere.  True it is, that beneficent Nature here, as
always, is helpful.  Habit, after a while, mitigated much of the
bitterness of destiny.  The hard points of the flint became smoothed
and worn away by perpetual tramping over them, so that they no longer
wounded with their original sharpness; and the sole of the foot was
in time provided with a merciful callosity.  Then, too, there was
developed an appetite which was voracious for all that was best.  Who
shall tell the revulsion on reaching home, which I should never have
known had I lived a life of idleness!  Ellen was fond of hearing me
read, and with a little care I was able to select what would bear
reading--dramas, for example.  She liked the reading for the
reading's sake, and she liked to know that what I thought was
communicated to her; that she was not excluded from the sphere in
which I lived.  Of the office she never heard a word, and I never
would tell her anything about it; but there was scarcely a single
book in my possession which could be read aloud, that we did not go
through together in this way.  I don't prescribe this kind of life to
everybody.  Some of my best friends, I know, would find it
intolerable, but it suited us.  Philosophy and religion I did not
touch.  It was necessary to choose themes with varying human
interest, such as the best works of fiction, a play, or a poem; and
these perhaps, on the whole, did me more good at that time than
speculation.  Oh, how many times have I left my office humiliated by
some silently endured outbreak on the part of my master, more galling
because I could not put it aside as altogether gratuitous; and in
less than an hour it was two miles away, and I was myself again.  If
a man wants to know what the potency of love is, he must be a menial;
he must be despised.  Those who are prosperous and courted cannot
understand its power.  Let him come home after he has suffered what
is far worse than hatred--the contempt of a superior, who knows that
he can afford to be contemptuous, seeing that he can replace his
slave at a moment's notice.  Let him be trained by his tyrant to
dwell upon the thought that he belongs to the vast crowd of people in
London who are unimportant; almost useless; to whom it is a charity
to offer employment; who are conscious of possessing no gift which
makes them of any value to anybody, and he will then comprehend the
divine efficacy of the affection of that woman to whom he is dear.
God's mercy be praised ever more for it!  I cannot write poetry, but
if I could, no theme would tempt me like that of love to such a
person as I was--not love, as I say again, to the hero, but love to
the Helot.  Over and over again, when I have thought about it, I have
felt my poor heart swell with a kind of uncontrollable fervour.  I
have often, too, said to myself that this love is no delusion.  If we
were to set it down as nothing more than a merciful cheat on the part
of the Creator, however pleasant it might be, it would lose its
charm.  If I were to think that my wife's devotion to me is nothing
more than the simple expression of a necessity to love somebody, that
there is nothing in me which justifies such devotion, I should be
miserable.  Rather, I take it, is the love of woman to man a
revelation of the relationship in which God stands to him--of what
OUGHT to be, in fact.  In the love of a woman to the man who is of no
account God has provided us with a true testimony of what is in His
own heart.  I often felt this when looking at myself and at Ellen.
"What is there in me?" I have said, "is she not the victim of some
self-created deception?" and I was wretched till I considered that in
her I saw the Divine Nature itself, and that her passion was a stream
straight from the Highest.  The love of woman is, in other words, a
living witness never failing of an actuality in God which otherwise
we should never know.  This led me on to connect it with
Christianity; but I am getting incoherent and must stop.

My employment now was so incessant, for it was still necessary that I
should write for my newspaper--although my visits to the House of
Commons had perforce ceased--that I had no time for any schemes or
dreams such as those which had tormented me when I had more leisure.
In one respect this was a blessing.  Destiny now had prescribed for
me.  I was no longer agitated by ignorance of what I ought to do.  My
present duty was obviously to get my own living, and having got that,
I could do little besides save continue the Sundays with M'Kay.

We were almost entirely alone.  We had no means of making any
friends.  We had no money, and no gifts of any kind.  We were neither
of us witty nor attractive, but I have often wondered, nevertheless,
what it was which prevented us from obtaining acquaintance with
persons who thronged to houses in which I could see nothing worth a
twopenny omnibus fare.  Certain it is, that we went out of our way
sometimes to induce people to call upon us whom we thought we should
like; but, if they came once or twice, they invariably dropped off,
and we saw no more of them.  This behaviour was so universal that,
without the least affectation, I acknowledge there must be something
repellent in me, but what it is I cannot tell.  That Ellen was the
cause of the general aversion, it is impossible to believe.  The only
theory I have is, that partly owing to a constant sense of fatigue,
due to imperfect health, and partly to chafing irritation at mere
gossip, although I had no power to think of anything better, or say
anything better myself, I was avoided both by the commonplace and
those who had talent.  Commonplace persons avoided me because I did
not chatter, and persons of talent because I stood for nothing.
"There was nothing in me."  We met at M'Kay's two gentlemen whom we
thought we might invite to our house.  One of them was an
antiquarian.  He had discovered in an excavation in London some Roman
remains.  This had led him on to the study of the position and
boundaries of the Roman city.  He had become an authority upon this
subject, and had lectured upon it.  He came; but as we were utterly
ignorant, and could not, with all our efforts, manifest any sympathy
which he valued at the worth of a pin, he soon departed, and departed
for ever.  The second was a student of Elizabethan literature, and I
rashly concluded at once that he must be most delightful.  He
likewise came.  I showed him my few poor books, which he condemned,
and I found that such observations as I could make he considered as
mere twaddle.  I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the editions
or the curiosities, or the proposed emendations of obscure passages,
and he, too, departed abruptly.  I began to think after he had gone
that my study of Shakespeare was mere dilettantism but I afterwards
came to the conclusion that if a man wishes to spoil himself for
Shakespeare, the best thing he can do is to turn Shakespearian
critic.

My worst enemy at this time was ill health, and it was more
distressing than it otherwise would have been, because I had such
responsibilities upon me.  When I lived alone I knew that if anything
should happen to me it would be of no particular consequence, but now
whenever I felt sick I was anxious on account of Ellen.  What would
become of her--this was the thought which kept me awake night after
night when the terrors of depression were upon me, as they often
were.  But still, terrors with growing years had lost their ancient
strength.  My brain and nerves were quiet compared with what they
were in times gone by, and I had gradually learned the blessed lesson
which is taught by familiarity with sorrow, that the greater part of
what is dreadful in it lies in the imagination.  The true Gorgon head
is seldom seen in reality.  That it exists I do not doubt, but it is
not so commonly visible as we think.  Again, as we get older we find
that all life is given us on conditions of uncertainty, and yet we
walk courageously on.  The labourer marries and has children, when
there is nothing but his own strength between him and ruin.  A
million chances are encountered every day, and any one of the million
accidents which might happen would cripple him or kill him, and put
into the workhouse those who depend upon him.  Yet he treads his path
undisturbed.  Life to all of us is a narrow plank placed across a
gulf, which yawns on either side, and if we were perpetually looking
down into it we should fall.  So at last, the possibility of disaster
ceased to affright me.  I had been brought off safely so many times
when destruction seemed imminent, that I grew hardened, and lay down
quietly at night, although the whim of a madman might to-morrow cast
me on the pavement.  Frequently, as I have said, I could not do this,
but I strove to do it, and was able to do it when in health.

I tried to think about nothing which expressed whatever in the world
may be insoluble or simply tragic.  A great change is just beginning
to come over us in this respect.  So many books I find are written
which aim merely at new presentation of the hopeless.  The
contradictions of fate, the darkness of death, the fleeting of man
over this brief stage of existence, whence we know not, and whither
we know not, are favourite subjects with writers who seem to think
that they are profound, because they can propose questions which
cannot be answered.  There is really more strength of mind required
for resolving the commonest difficulty than is necessary for the
production of poems on these topics.  The characteristic of so much
that is said and written now is melancholy; and it is melancholy, not
because of any deeper acquaintance with the secrets of man than that
which was possessed by our forefathers, but because it is easy to be
melancholy, and the time lacks strength.

As I am now setting down, without much order or connection, the
lessons which I had to learn, I may perhaps be excused if I add one
or two others.  I can say of them all, that they are not book
lessons.  They have been taught me by my own experience, and as a
rule I have always found that in my own most special perplexities I
got but little help from books or other persons.  I had to find out
for myself what was for me the proper way of dealing with them.

My love for Ellen was great, but I discovered that even such love as
this could not be left to itself.  It wanted perpetual cherishing.
The lamp, if it was to burn brightly, required daily trimming, for
people became estranged and indifferent, not so much by open quarrel
or serious difference, as by the intervention of trifles which need
but the smallest, although continuous effort for their removal.  The
true wisdom is to waste no time over them, but to eject them at once.
Love, too, requires that the two persons who love one another shall
constantly present to one another what is best in them, and to
accomplish this, deliberate purpose, and even struggle, are
necessary.  If through relapse into idleness we do not attempt to
bring soul and heart into active communion day by day, what wonder if
this once exalted relationship become vulgar and mean?

I was much overworked.  It was not the work itself which was such a
trial, but the time it consumed.  At best, I had but a clear space of
an hour, or an hour and a half at home, and to slave merely for this
seemed such a mockery!  Day after day sped swiftly by, made up of
nothing but this infernal drudgery, and I said to myself--Is this
life?  But I made up my mind that NEVER WOULD I GIVE MYSELF TONGUE.
I clapped a muzzle on my mouth.  Had I followed my own natural bent,
I should have become expressive about what I had to endure, but I
found that expression reacts on him who expresses and intensifies
what is expressed.  If we break out into rhetoric over a toothache,
the pangs are not the easier, but the worse to be borne.

I naturally contracted a habit of looking forward from the present
moment to one beyond.  The whole week seemed to exist for the Sunday.
On Monday morning I began counting the hours till Sunday should
arrive.  The consequence was, that when it came, it was not enjoyed
properly, and I wasted it in noting the swiftness of its flight.  Oh,
how absurd is man!  If we were to reckon up all the moments which we
really enjoy for their own sake, how few should we find them to be!
The greatest part, far the greatest part, of our lives is spent in
dreaming over the morrow, and when it comes, it, too, is consumed in
the anticipation of a brighter morrow, and so the cheat is prolonged,
even to the grave.  This tendency, unconquerable though it may appear
to be, can to a great extent at any rate, be overcome by strenuous
discipline.  I tried to blind myself to the future, and many and many
a time, as I walked along that dreary New Road or Old St. Pancras
Road, have I striven to compel myself not to look at the image of
Hampstead Heath or Regent's Park, as yet six days in front of me, but
to get what I could out of what was then with me.

The instinct which leads us perpetually to compare what we are with
what we might be is no doubt of enormous value, and is the spring
which prompts all action, but, like every instinct, it is the source
of greatest danger.  I remember the day and the very spot on which it
flashed into me, like a sudden burst of the sun's rays, that I had no
right to this or that--to so much happiness, or even so much virtue.
What title-deeds could I show for such a right?  Straightway it
seemed as if the centre of a whole system of dissatisfaction were
removed, and as if the system collapsed.  God, creating from His
infinite resources a whole infinitude of beings, had created me with
a definite position on the scale, and that position only could I
claim.  Cease the trick of contrast.  If I can by any means get
myself to consider myself alone without reference to others,
discontent will vanish.  I walk this Old St. Pancras Road on foot--
another rides.  Keep out of view him who rides and all persons
riding, and I shall not complain that I tramp in the wet.  So also
when I think how small and weak I am.

How foolish it is to try and cure by argument what time will cure so
completely and so gently if left to itself.  As I get older, the
anxiety to prove myself right if I quarrel dies out.  I hold my
tongue and time vindicates me, if it is possible to vindicate me, or
convicts me if I am wrong.  Many and many a debate too which I have
had with myself alone has been settled in the same way.  The question
has been put aside and has lost its importance.  The ancient Church
thought, and seriously enough, no doubt, that all the vital interests
of humanity were bound up with the controversies upon the Divine
nature; but the centuries have rolled on, and who cares for those
controversies now.  The problems of death and immortality once upon a
time haunted me so that I could hardly sleep for thinking about them.
I cannot tell how, but so it is, that at the present moment, when I
am years nearer the end, they trouble me but very little.  If I could
but bury and let rot things which torment me and come to no
settlement--if I could always do this--what a blessing it would be.



CHAPTER IX--HOLIDAYS



I have said that Ellen had a child by her first husband.  Marie, for
that was her name, was now ten years old.  She was like neither her
mother nor father, and yet was SHOT as it were with strange gleams
which reminded me of her paternal grandmother for a moment, and then
disappeared.  She had rather coarse dark hair, small black eyes,
round face, and features somewhat blunt or blurred, the nose in
particular being so.  She had a tendency to be stout.  For books she
did not care, and it was with the greatest difficulty we taught her
to read.  She was not orderly or careful about her person, and in
this respect was a sore disappointment--not that she was positively
careless, but she took no pride in dress, nor in keeping her room and
her wardrobe neat.  She was fond of bright colours, which was another
trial to Ellen, who disliked any approach to gaudiness.  She was not
by any means a fool, and she had a peculiarly swift mode of
expressing herself upon persons and things.  A stranger looking at
her would perhaps have adjudged her inclined to sensuousness, and
dull.  She was neither one nor the other.  She ate little, although
she was fond of sweets.  Her rather heavy face, with no clearly cut
outline in it, was not the typical face for passion; but she was
capable of passion to an extraordinary degree, and what is more
remarkable, it was not explosive passion, or rather it was not
passion which she suffered to explode.  I remember once when she was
a little mite she was asked out somewhere to tea.  She was dressed
and ready, but it began to rain fast, and she was told she could not
go.  She besought, but it was in vain.  We could not afford cabs, and
there was no omnibus.  Marie, finding all her entreaties were
useless, quietly walked out of the room; and after some little time
her mother, calling her and finding she did not come, went to look
for her.  She had gone into the back-yard, and was sitting there in
the rain by the side of the water-butt.  She was soaked, and her best
clothes were spoiled.  I must confess that I did not take very kindly
to her.  I was irritated at her slowness in learning; it was, in
fact, painful to be obliged to teach her.  I thought that perhaps she
might have some undeveloped taste for music, but she showed none, and
our attempts to get her to sing ordinary melodies were a failure.
She was more or less of a locked cabinet to me.  I tried her with the
two or three keys which I had, but finding that none of them fitted,
I took no more pains about her.

One Sunday we determined upon a holiday.  It was a bold adventure for
us, but we had made up our minds.  There was an excursion train to
Hastings, and accordingly Ellen, Marie, and myself were at London
Bridge Station early in the morning.  It was a lovely summer's day in
mid-July.  The journey down was uncomfortable enough in consequence
of the heat and dust, but we heeded neither one nor the other in the
hope of seeing the sea.  We reached Hastings at about eleven o'clock,
and strolled westwards towards Bexhill.  Our pleasure was exquisite.
Who can tell, save the imprisoned Londoner, the joy of walking on the
clean sea-sand!  What a delight that was, to say nothing of the
beauty of the scenery!  To be free of the litter and filth of a
London suburb, of its broken hedges, its brickbats, its torn
advertisements, its worn and trampled grass in fields half given over
to the speculative builder:  in place of this, to tread the
immaculate shore over which breathed a wind not charged with soot; to
replace the dull, shrouding obscurity of the smoke by a distance so
distinct that the masts of the ships whose hulls were buried below
the horizon were visible--all this was perfect bliss.  It was not
very poetic bliss, perhaps; but nevertheless it is a fact that the
cleanness of the sea and the sea air was as attractive to us as any
of the sea attributes.  We had a wonderful time.  Only in the country
is it possible to note the change of morning into mid-day, of mid-day
into afternoon, and of afternoon into evening; and it is only in the
country, therefore, that a day seems stretched out into its proper
length.  We had brought all our food with us, and sat upon the shore
in the shadow of a piece of the cliff.  A row of heavy white clouds
lay along the horizon almost unchangeable and immovable, with their
summit-lines and the part of the mass just below them steeped in
sunlight.  The level opaline water differed only from a floor by a
scarcely perceptible heaving motion, which broke into the faintest of
ripples at our feet.  So still was the great ocean, so quietly did
everything lie in it, that the wavelets which licked the beach were
as pure and bright as if they were a part of the mid-ocean depths.
About a mile from us, at one o'clock, a long row of porpoises
appeared, showing themselves in graceful curves for half-an-hour or
so, till they went out farther to sea off Fairlight.  Some fishing-
boats were becalmed just in front of us.  Their shadows slept, or
almost slept, upon the water, a gentle quivering alone showing that
it was not complete sleep, or if sleep, that it was sleep with
dreams.  The intensity of the sunlight sharpened the outlines of
every little piece of rock, and of the pebbles, in a manner which
seemed supernatural to us Londoners.  In London we get the heat of
the sun, but not his light, and the separation of individual parts
into such vivid isolation was so surprising that even Marie noticed
it, and said it "all seemed as if she were looking through a glass."
It was perfect--perfect in its beauty--and perfect because, from the
sun in the heavens down to the fly with burnished wings on the hot
rock, there was nothing out of harmony.  Everything breathed one
spirit.  Marie played near us; Ellen and I sat still, doing nothing.
We wanted nothing, we had nothing to achieve; there were no
curiosities to be seen, there was no particular place to be reached,
no "plan of operations," and London was forgotten for the time.  It
lay behind us in the north-west, and the cliff was at the back of us
shutting out all thought of it.  No reminiscences and no
anticipations disturbed us; the present was sufficient, and occupied
us totally.

I should like, if I could, to write an essay upon the art of enjoying
a holiday.  It is sad to think how few people know how to enjoy one,
although they are so precious.  We do not sufficiently consider that
enjoyment of every kind is an art carefully to be learnt, and
specially the art of making the most of a brief space set apart for
pleasure.  It is foolish, for example, if a man, city bred, has but
twelve hours before him, to spend more of it in eating and drinking
than is necessary.  Eating and drinking produce stupidity, at least
in some degree, which may just as well be reserved for town.  It is
foolish also to load the twelve hours with a task--so much to be
done.  The sick person may perhaps want exercise, but to the
tolerably healthy the best of all recreation is the freedom from
fetters even when they are self-imposed.

Our train homewards was due at Bexhill a little after seven.  By five
o'clock a change gradual but swift was observed.  The clouds which
had charmed us all through the morning and afternoon were in reality
thunder-clouds, which woke up like a surprised army under perfect
discipline, and moved magnificently towards us.  Already afar off we
heard the softened echoing roll of the thunder.  Every now and then
we saw a sharp thrust of lightning down into the water, and shuddered
when we thought that perhaps underneath that stab there might be a
ship with living men.  The battle at first was at such a distance
that we watched it with intense and solemn delight.  As yet not a
breath of air stirred, but presently, over in the south-east, a dark
ruffled patch appeared on the horizon, and we agreed that it was time
to go.  The indistinguishable continuous growl now became articulated
into distinct crashes.  I had miscalculated the distance to the
station, and before we got there the rain, skirmishing in advance,
was upon us.  We took shelter in a cottage for a moment in order that
Ellen might get a glass of water--bad-looking stuff it was, but she
was very thirsty--and put on her cloak.  We then started again on our
way.  We reached the station at about half-past six, before the
thunder was overhead, but not before Ellen had got wet, despite all
my efforts to protect her.  She was also very hot from hurrying, and
yet there was nothing to be done but to sit in a kind of covered shed
till the train came up.  The thunder and lightning were, however, so
tremendous, that we thought of nothing else.  When they were at their
worst, the lightning looked like the upset of a cauldron of white
glowing metal--with such strength, breadth, and volume did it
descend.  Just as the train arrived, the roar began to abate, and in
about half-an-hour it had passed over to the north, leaving behind
the rain, cold and continuous, which fell all round us from a dark,
heavy, grey sky.  The carnage in which we were was a third-class,
with seats arranged parallel to the sides.  It was crowded, and we
were obliged to sit in the middle, exposed to the draught which the
tobacco smoke made necessary.  Some of the company were noisy, and
before we got to Red Hill became noisier, as the brandy-flasks which
had been well filled at Hastings began to work.  Many were drenched,
and this was an excuse for much of the drinking; although for that
matter, any excuse or none is generally sufficient.  At Red Hill we
were stopped by other trains, and before we came to Croydon we were
an hour late.  We had now become intolerably weary.  The songs were
disgusting, and some of the women who were with the men had also been
drinking, and behaved in a manner which it was not pleasant that
Ellen and Marie should see.  The carriage was lighted fortunately by
one dim lamp only which hung in the middle, and I succeeded at last
in getting seats at the further end, where there was a knot of more
decent persons who had huddled up there away from the others.  All
the glory of the morning was forgotten.  Instead of three happy,
exalted creatures, we were three dejected, shivering mortals, half
poisoned with foul air and the smell of spirits.  We crawled up to
London Bridge at the slowest pace, and, finally, the railway company
discharged us on the platform at ten minutes past eleven.  Not a
place in any omnibus could be secured, and we therefore walked for a
mile or so till I saw a cab, which--unheard-of expense for me--I
engaged, and we were landed at our own house exactly at half-past
twelve.  The first thing to be done was to get Marie to bed.  She was
instantly asleep, and was none the worse for her journey.  With Ellen
the case was different.  She could not sleep, and the next morning
was feverish.  She insisted that it was nothing more than a bad cold,
and would on no account permit me even to give her any medicine.  She
would get up presently, and she and Marie could get on well enough
together.  But when I reached home on Monday evening, Ellen was
worse, and was still in bed.

I sent at once for the doctor, who would give no opinion for a day or
two, but meanwhile directed that she was to remain where she was, and
take nothing but the lightest food.  Tuesday night passed, and the
fever still increased.  I had become very anxious, but I dared not
stay with her, for I knew not what might happen if I were absent from
my work.  I was obliged to try and think of somebody who would come
and help us.  Our friend Taylor, who once was the coal-porter at
Somerset House, came into my mind.  He, as I have said when talking
about him, was married, but had no children.  To him accordingly I
went.  I never shall forget the alacrity with which he prompted his
wife to go, and with which she consented.  I was shut up in my own
sufferings, but I remember a flash of joy that all our efforts in our
room had not been in vain.  I was delighted that I had secured
assistance, but I do believe the uppermost thought was delight that
we had been able to develop gratitude and affection.  Mrs. Taylor was
an "ordinary woman."  She was about fifty, rather stout, and entirely
uneducated.  But when she took charge at our house, all her best
qualities found expression.  It is true enough, omnium consensu capax
imperii nisi imperasset, but it is equally true that under the
pressure of trial and responsibility we are often stronger than when
there is no pressure.  Many a man will acknowledge that in difficulty
he has surprised himself by a resource and coolness which he never
suspected before.  Mrs. Taylor I always thought to be rather weak and
untrustworthy, but I found that when WEIGHT was placed upon her, she
was steady as a rock, a systematic and a perfect manager.  There was
no doubt in a very short time as to the nature of the disease.  It
was typhoid fever, the cause probably being the impure water drunk as
we were coming home.  I have no mind to describe what Ellen suffered.
Suffice it to say, that her treatment was soon reduced to watching
her every minute night and day, and administering small quantities of
milk.  Her prostration and emaciation were excessive, and without the
most constant attention she might at any moment have slipped out of
our hands.  I was like a man shipwrecked and alone in a polar
country, whose existence depends upon one spark of fire, which he
tries to cherish, left glimmering in a handful of ashes.  Oh those
days, prolonged to weeks, during which that dreadful struggle lasted-
-days swallowed up with one sole, intense, hungry desire that her
life might be spared!--days filled with a forecast of the blackness
and despair before me if she should depart.  I tried to obtain
release from the office.  The answer was that nobody could of course
prevent my being away, but that it was not usual for a clerk to be
absent merely because his wife was not well.  The brute added with a
sneer that a wife was "a luxury" which he should have thought I could
hardly afford.  We divided between us, however, at home the twenty-
four hours during which we stood sentinels against death, and
occasionally we were relieved by one or two friends.  I went on duty
from about eight in the evening till one in the morning, and was then
relieved by Mrs. Taylor, who remained till ten or eleven.  She then
went to bed, and was replaced by little Marie.  What a change came
over that child!  I was amazed at her.  All at once she seemed to
have found what she was born to do.  The key had been discovered,
which unlocked and revealed what there was in her, of which hitherto
I had been altogether unaware.  Although she was so little, she
became a perfect nurse.  Her levity disappeared; she was grave as a
matron, moved about as if shod in felt, never forgot a single
direction, and gave proper and womanly answers to strangers who
called.  Faculties unsuspected grew almost to full height in a single
day.  Never did she relax during the whole of that dreadful time, or
show the slightest sign of discontent.  She sat by her mother's side,
intent, vigilant; and she had her little dinner prepared and taken up
into the sickroom by Mrs. Taylor before she went to bed.  I remember
once going to her cot in the night, as she lay asleep, and almost
breaking my heart over her with remorse and thankfulness--remorse,
that I, with blundering stupidity, had judged her so superficially;
and thankfulness, that it had pleased God to present to me so much of
His own divinest grace.  Fool that I was, not to be aware that
messages from Him are not to be read through the envelope in which
they are enclosed.  I never should have believed, if it had not been
for Marie, that any grown-up man could so love a child.  Such love, I
should have said, was only possible between man and woman, or,
perhaps, between man and man.  But now I doubt whether a love of that
particular kind could be felt towards any grown-up human being, love
so pure, so imperious, so awful.  My love to Marie was love of God
Himself as He is--an unrestrained adoration of an efflux from Him,
adoration transfigured into love, because the revelation had clothed
itself with a child's form.  It was, as I say, the love of God as He
is.  It was not necessary, as it so often is necessary, to qualify,
to subtract, to consider the other side, to deplore the obscurity or
the earthly contamination with which the Word is delivered to us.
This was the Word itself, without even consciousness on the part of
the instrument selected for its vocalisation.  I may appear
extravagant, but I can only put down what I felt and still feel.  I
appeal, moreover, to Jesus Himself for justification.  I had seen the
kingdom of God through a little child.  I, in fact, have done nothing
more than beat out over a page in my own words what passed through
His mind when He called a little child and set him in the midst of
His disciples.  How I see the meaning of those words now! and so it
is that a text will be with us for half a lifetime, recognised as
great and good, but not penetrated till the experience comes round to
us in which it was born.

Six weeks passed before the faint blue point of light which flickered
on the wick began to turn white and show some strength.  At last,
however, day by day, we marked a slight accession of vitality which
increased with change of diet.  Every evening when I came home I was
gladdened by the tidings which showed advance, and Ellen, I believe,
was as much pleased to see how others rejoiced over her recovery as
she was pleased for her own sake.  She, too, was one of those
creatures who always generously admit improvement.  For my own part,
I have often noticed that when I have been ill, and have been getting
better, I have refused to acknowledge it, and that it has been an
effort to me to say that things were not at their worst.  She,
however, had none of this niggardly baseness, and always, if only for
the sake of her friends, took the cheerful side.  Mrs. Taylor now
left us.  She left us a friend whose friendship will last, I hope, as
long as life lasts.  She had seen all our troubles and our poverty:
we knew that she knew all about us:  she had helped us with the most
precious help--what more was there necessary to knit her to us?--and
it is worth noting that the assistance which she rendered, and her
noble self-sacrifice, so far from putting us, in her opinion, in her
debt, only seemed to her a reason why she should be more deeply
attached to us.

It was late in the autumn before Ellen had thoroughly recovered, but
at last we said that she was as strong as she was before, and we
determined to celebrate our deliverance by one more holiday before
the cold weather came.  It was again Sunday--a perfectly still, warm,
autumnal day, with a high barometer and the gentlest of airs from the
west.  The morning in London was foggy, so much so that we doubted at
first whether we should go; but my long experience of London fog told
me that we should escape from it with that wind if we got to the
chalk downs away out by Letherhead and Guildford.  We took the early
train to a point at the base of the hills, and wound our way up into
the woods at the top.  We were beyond the smoke, which rested like a
low black cloud over the city in the north-east, reaching a third of
the way up to the zenith.  The beech had changed colour, and glowed
with reddish-brown fire.  We sat down on a floor made of the leaves
of last year.  At mid-day the stillness was profound, broken only by
the softest of whispers descending from the great trees which spread
over us their protecting arms.  Every now and then it died down
almost to nothing, and then slowly swelled and died again, as if the
Gods of the place were engaged in divine and harmonious talk.  By
moving a little towards the external edge of our canopy we beheld the
plain all spread out before us, bounded by the heights of Sussex and
Hampshire.  It was veiled with the most tender blue, and above it was
spread a sky which was white on the horizon and deepened by degrees
into azure over our heads.  The exhilaration of the air satisfied
Marie, although she had no playmate, and there was nothing special
with which she could amuse herself.  She wandered about looking for
flowers and ferns, and was content.  We were all completely happy.
We strained our eyes to see the furthest point before us, and we
tried to find it on the map we had brought with us.  The season of
the year, which is usually supposed to make men pensive, had no such
effect upon us.  Everything in the future, even the winter in London,
was painted by Hope, and the death of the summer brought no sadness.
Rather did summer dying in such fashion fill our hearts with repose,
and even more than repose--with actual joy.


Here ends the autobiography.  A month after this last holiday my
friend was dead and buried.  He had unsuspected disease of the heart,
and one day his master, of whom we have heard something, was more
than usually violent.  Mark, as his custom was, was silent, but
evidently greatly excited.  His tyrant left the room; and in a few
minutes afterwards Mark was seen to turn white and fall forward in
his chair.  It was all over!  His body was taken to a hospital and
thence sent home.  The next morning his salary up to the day of his
death came in an envelope to his widow, without a single word from
his employers save a request for acknowledgment.  Towards mid-day,
his office coat, and a book found in his drawer, arrived in a brown
paper parcel, carriage unpaid.

On looking over his papers, I found the sketch of his life and a mass
of odds and ends, some apparently written for publication.  Many of
these had evidently been in envelopes, and had most likely,
therefore, been offered to editors or publishers, but all, I am sure,
had been refused.  I add one or two by way of appendix, and hope they
will be thought worth saving.

R. S.



Footnotes:

{1}  This was written many years ago, but is curiously pertinent to
the discussions of this year.--EDITOR, 1884.

{2}  Not exactly untrue, but it sounds strangely now when socialism,
nationalisation of the land, and other projects have renewed in men
the hope of regeneration by political processes.  The reader will,
however, please remember the date of these memoirs.--EDITOR, 1884.





*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MARK RUTHERFORD'S DELIVERANCE ***

This file should be named mkrd10.txt or mkrd10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, mkrd11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mkrd10a.txt

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04

Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*