Maggior dolore e ben la Ricordanza O nell’ amaro inferno amena stanza?
D. G. ROSSETTI
FRANCIS had many moments of doubt as to the wisdom of encouraging and abetting Bennett Lawrie in his desire to enter the Church. To begin with he had no money; he was engaged—Francis supposed it must be called an engagement—to Gertrude, and even supposing it were possible to take the young man as curate as soon as he was ordained, that meant at most eighty pounds a year, and he was already earning more than that. Without influence the prospect of his being granted a living was, to say the least of it, remote. To be sure the rector of St. James, Irlam, had begun life as an itinerant violinist, but then he had a fruity tenor voice which made him very popular with women; also he had married a lady with a snug fortune.
“One must,” thought Francis, half apologising to himself. “One must think of these things materially. If I had thought of it materially I should never have. . .”
He broke off the thought and began to tell himself that he ought to encourage the young in high-souled endeavour. Young Lawrie was certainly remarkable, talented, very much in earnest, and, as far as one could see, very much in love. To be sure Gertrude was a good ten years older than he, but that was no bad thing for a young man of an ardent temperament. Certainly from Gertrude’s point of view it was better for her to be the wife of a clergyman than the wife of a clerk. But ought one to let these social considerations weigh in the matter? It was very difficult (thought Francis), very difficult. [Pg 144]She would be poor in any case. She might have a large family. She was a little woman, rather plain, just the type that produces enormous families. And families—could there be anything more harassing than to have a large family and to have no means of making provision for them?
On that Francis’s reflections stopped. They went round and round. It was his business to encourage the production of children (in wedlock), and year in and year out he had faithfully fulfilled his duty, without ever pausing to consider whether he had practised what he preached. Now he saw that he had done so, and was shocked to find himself rather dismayed at the result, and reluctant to face the possibility of his daughter doing the same. For years he had hardly thought about his work. Since the death of his son and the brutal outbreak that followed it, hostilities had ceased (with the exception of an occasional splutter at an Easter vestry meeting) and the work of his church, like his domestic life, had run on automatically. Time had hardly existed for him. His thoughts from disuse had grown sluggish, and it was very very slowly borne in upon him that his children were beginning to claim a separate existence, and that they had every right to do so. When he realised it he was forced painfully to face the fact that he was impotent to help them either with money, or, what is more precious, real sympathy. It was only with an effort that he was able to set aside the grotesqueness of Gertrude’s fancy and to force himself to see it with her eyes and to take it seriously. He looked back over the years and caught a glimpse of the wasted opportunities, and though he never indulged in the luxury of self-torment he cried in his heart:
“God forbid that when they are as old as I they should be even as I am.”
He was not sufficiently skilled in self-analysis to lay his finger on the weakness that had brought him to such a pass. He thought no ill of his wife. He knew enough of human nature to admit that nothing outside a man’s own soul could dishonour him or bring him to harm. Unconsciously [Pg 145]he was disloyal to the tenets of his calling in considering his own case. With all others he professed that God moved in a mysterious way and that everything happened for the best according to God’s providence. He had long since abandoned all belief in the possibility of a noble collective life here on earth, for he had seen too much not to know that when two or three are gathered together it is not to seek God, but to promote knavery and jealousy. Moments of agony he had had when he had half seen his own scepticism, but the simple devotion of some of his parishioners, craftsmen, and factory hands, and his own great liking for many of his poor had kept him from throwing up his work, and he would say:
“Though I do it ill, yet it might be done worse.”
Besides, he could not afford to renounce the stipend. Every year he had made small inroads upon his capital, fifty pounds here and a hundred there to satisfy creditors or sudden demands of charity for larger sums than he could afford to pay out of income.
Well, well—no doubt he was making a mountain out of a molehill, and things were not nearly so bad as they seemed. The house had been much jollier since Serge came back and Annette brought youth and joy into it, and if none of the family seemed to be on the way to brilliant lives, after all there were better things in the world than success, and nothing mattered so much as affection and love. And yet, how small a part love played in human life! How soon it died!
In the end Francis laughed at himself, and told himself that thinking was no use. It neither made good better nor bad worse. Things were what they were and nothing would alter them. Young Lawrie, with his brain stuffed full of illusions, wished to enter into Holy Orders. So be it. He had promised to do all he could to help him: after all it was something to find a young man with thoughts higher than the pleasure next to hand, and the first step seemed to be to see his father.
So Francis Folyat wrote to James Lawrie in his awkward spidery hand—(he could not bear writing letters)—and [Pg 146]asked for an interview in order to discuss with him the future of his son Bennett.
James Lawrie replied courteously, appointing a day, and on it Francis walked across Dale Park and over the new Cromwell Bridge and up the shabby-genteel street from the river to the stucco Gothic house.
Tibby opened the door to him and looked him up and down.
“You’ll be Mr. Folyat,” she said.
“That is my name.”
“Our Bennett’s been a new lad since he went to your house, Mr. Folyat.”
“I’m glad of that.”
“It’s not all to the good,” said Tibby, grumpily, and she turned and led him down the long passage to the dining-room.
She announced:
“The Reverend Mr. Folyat to see you.”
James Lawrie was sitting at the table engrossed in a game of dominoes. He looked up at Francis and nodded, and pointed with the stem of his pipe to a chair on the other side of the table. Francis took it, and Tibby left them. Old Lawrie rattled the dice and turned up a six and three. He grunted:
“Can’t do it. H’m. H’m. Can’t borrow again. No more credit. Will you join me, sir?”
“Gladly,” said Francis, and they began to play. They played for an hour in silence, and Francis won three times to his opponent’s twice.
“You’ll be a college man, sir?” asked old Lawrie.
“Dublin,” said Francis, and helped himself to tobacco from the greasy old pouch that lay on the table.
“I’ve a great reverence for college men, having missed it myself. I had two or three friends in Edinburgh, but I was never there except in their letters. I’ve never been anywhere except in books, and wherever I go, and whatever I do, and whatever I be, I think there’s always the printed page between me and myself. . . . Do you understand that?”
“I don’t think so.”
[Pg 147]
“It’s like this. There’s such a thing as a habit of loneliness, and if it really fastens on a man there’s nothing can break through it, not love, not misery, not great joy, nor a wife and bairns, nothing. Living like that, a man gets a clear brain like a searchlight so that he can see all his comings out and his goings in and the play of his thoughts, honest and dishonest, and he prowls about and about his own self like a caged beast. Do you know that?”
“Something like it.”
“Nine-tenths of us are condemned to it. My father was a minister up in Galloway. A real hell-fire man he was, but he died of a consumption, hell-fire being nothing against the mists of the place he lived in. Several men from our glen, my uncles among them, had gone to England and made money. They said it was easy, so I came down the first. I had a head stuffed full of poetry and the Bible and Scots righteousness—you need to be a Scot to know what that means—and for years I was desperately lonely. Two of my brothers followed me. They did well, as they call it. They made money and saved and saved, and made more money. They both married rich women. I got lonelier and lonelier, and more and more caught up in the trick of watching myself. I lived with my mother for years. I married to get away from her, and it was an awful day for the woman that married me. I could not let her in to me. . . . Can you make anything of that? You’re a younger man than I am. Can you make anything of that? I’m an old white-bearded sinner, and if all my life was to be written they’d say it was an awful tragedy. But it isn’t that. It’s a fool’s comedy. There’s no tragedy save in a strong man who can put up a fight against his own weakness. Men like me, and that’s most of us, waste our lives in fighting against our own strength. Oh! I tell you there’s many a thing a man thinks of in his loneliness, but it’s all thought, thought, thought; it never grows into action. One thing a man realises pretty quickly, and that is that there is nothing wrong with the world except the monstrous egoism of men [Pg 148]and women. It is easy to realise but almost impossible to fight against. All along the line we refuse to accept the laws and principles that govern the universe because they are so little flattering to our precious vanity. We make laws against nature, organise ourselves into churches or states and nations against her, invent trumpery codes of morality in the blind hope of cheating her. From generation to generation it is one long wasteful and pitifully vain struggle against nature. . . . Look at the result. Look at the places we live in. Look at what we call society. Why we haven’t even devised any method of insuring that every man and every woman shall have the bare necessaries of life; in thousands of years we haven’t learned to contrive that civilisation shall give the majority of men greater comfort and happiness than they can find in barbarism. We’ve tried this game of civilisation over and over again, but we have never got beyond the most stupid materialism. You can almost count the really civilised men—men who have been masters of life and lived it at all points and enriched it for all those with whom they came in contact—on two hands. The rest of us are caught up by the habit of loneliness, and we are prisoners all our lives. I know. I don’t give a brass farthing for material success or failure. I know the bitterness of spiritual failure. You want to talk to me about my son. I know nothing of him. He knows nothing of me. That is my fault, not his. Now, what have you to say?”
“This is all very interesting,” replied Francis, rather at a loss where to begin. “My eldest son would discuss the merits and demerits of civilisation with you better than I, and certainly with more warmth than I can bring to bear on the subject.”
He had an uncomfortable feeling that he entirely agreed with old Lawrie, and an equally uncomfortable sense that he would agree also with the opposite side if it were presented, and suddenly candour made him say so. Lawrie chuckled and rode off on his crotchet of loneliness again:
“That is so. That is so. Because of the habit of [Pg 149]loneliness there cannot be unity among men. What men think is of no importance, because it has so little relation to what they do or what they are. The opinion of any body of men, even the most intelligent, is generally only the lowest common multiple of their prejudices. Theories are quite useless, so are opinions. When a man is in possession of the truth he acts. When he is not he theorises, or cowers behind his prejudicies, which amounts to the same thing. Look at the people in this town. How many of them are capable of action, how many are there whose days are not spent in superficial employments, first to get bread, and second to escape boredom when their work is done. They muddl............