There & Back

He began to feel his heart drawn at times, in some strange, tenderer fashion, hitherto unknown to him, to the blue of the sky, especially in the first sweetness of a summer morning. His soul would now and then seem to go out of him, in a passion of embrace, to the simplest flower: the flower would be, for a moment, just its self to him. He would spread out his arms to the wind, now when it met him in its strength, now when it but kissed his face. He never consented with himself that it was one force in all the forms that drew him—that perhaps it was the very God, the All in all about him. Neither did he question much with himself as to how the development, rather than change, had begun. Whether God did this, or was this, or it was only the possessing Barbara that cast her light out of his eyes on the things he saw and felt, he scarcely asked; but fully he recognised the fact that Nature was more alive than she ever had been to him who had always loved her.

The thought of Barbara went on growing dear to him. He never pondered anything but the girl herself, cherished no dreams of her becoming more to him, of her ever being nearer than away there; just to know her was now, and henceforward ever would be the gladness of his life. If that life was but for a season; if the very core of life was decay; if life was because nobody could help its being; if it died because no one could keep it from dying; yet were there two facts fit almost to embalm the body of this living death: Barbara, and the world which was the body of Barbara! So life carried the day, if but the day, and the heart of Richard rejoiced in the midst of perishings. Only, the night was coming in which no man can rejoice.

Was he then presuming to be in love with Barbara? I do not care to meet the question. If I knew what the mysterious word, love, meant, I might be able to answer it, but what should I thus gain or give? I know he loved her. I know that a divine power of truth and beauty had laid hold upon him, and was working in him as the powers of God alone can work in man, for they are the same by which he lives and moves and has his being, and to life are more than meat and drink, than sun and air.

Instead of blaming as a matter of course the person who does not believe in a God, we should think first whether his notional God is a God that ought, or a God that ought not to be believed in. Perhaps he only is to be blamed who, by inattention to duty, has become less able to believe in a God than he was once: because he did not obey the true voice, whencesoever it came, God may have to let him taste what it would be to have no God. For aught I know, a man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief, that now, at this moment, he cannot believe; that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a God at all, and cannot care whether there be a God or not; but he can mind what he knows he ought to mind. That will, that alone can clear the moral atmosphere, and make it possible for the true idea of a God to be born into it.

For some time Richard saw little of Barbara.

The heads of the house did not interfere with him. Lady Ann would now and then sail through the room like an iceberg; sir Wilton would come in, give a glance at the shelves and a grin, and walk out again with a more or less gouty gait; so much was about all their contact. Arthur was a little ashamed of having spoken to him as he did, and had again become in a manner friendly. He had seen several decaying masses, among the rest the Golding of their difference, become books in his hands, and again he had grown sufficiently interested in the workman to feel in him something more than the workman. He was on the way to perceive that, in certain insignificant things, such as imagination, reading, insight, and general faculty, not to mention conscience, generosity, and goodness of heart, Richard was out of sight before the ruck of gentlemen. He saw already that in some things, thought a good deal of at his college, Richard was more capable than himself. He found in him too what seemed to him a rare notion of art. In truth Richard’s advance in this region was as yet but small, for he was guided only by his limited efforts in verse; none the less, however, was he far ahead of Arthur, who saw only what was shown him. In literature Arthur had already learned something from Richard, and knew it. He had, indeed, without knowing it, begun to look up to him.

Richard also had discovered good in Arthur—among other things a careful regard to his word, and to his father’s tenantry. There was of course, in a scanty nature like his, a good deal of the lord bountiful mingled with his behaviour to his social inferiors on the property: he posed to himself as a condescending landlord.

The only one in the house who gave Richard trouble, was the child Victoria. The way she always took to show her liking, was to annoy its object. Never was name less fitting than hers: there was no victory in her. She could but fly about like veriest mosquito. Richard let her come and go unheeded, except when her proximity to his work made him anxious. But the little vixen would not consent to be naught any smallest while. She would rather be abused than remain unnoticed. When she found that her standing and staring procured no attention from the bookbinder, she would begin to handle his tools, and ask what this and that was for, giving, like a woman of fashion, no heed to any answer he accorded her. Learning thus, that is, by experiment, how to annoy him, she did not let opportunity lack. When school was over in the morning, and she could go where she pleased, she went often to the library; and as no one willingly asked where she was, the chief pleasure of her acquaintance lying in the assurance that she was nowhere at hand, Richard had to endure many things from her; and things that do not seem worth enduring, are not unfrequently the hardest to endure.

The behaviour of the child grew worse and worse. She would more than touch everything, and that thing the most persistently which Richard was most anxious to have let alone, causing him no little trouble at times to set right what she had injured. Worst of all was her persecution when she found him using gold-leaf. She would come behind him and blow the film away just as he had got it flat on his cushion, or laid on the spot where his tool was about to fix a portion of it. Her mischief was not even irradiated by childish laughter; there was never any sign of frolic on her monkey face, except the steely glitter of her sharp, black bead-eyes, might be supposed to contain some sprinkle of fun in its malice. Expostulation was not of the slightest use, and sometimes it was all Richard could do to keep his hands off her. Now she would look as stolid as if she did not understand a word he said; now pucker up her face into a most unpleasant grin of derision and contemptuous defiance.

One day when he happened to be using the polishing-iron, Vixen, as her brothers called her, came in, and began to play with the paste. Richard turned with the iron in his hand, which he had just taken from the brasier. He was rubbing it bright and clean, and she noted this, but had not seen him take it from the fire: she caught at it, to spoil it with her pasty fingers. As quickly she let it go, but did not cry, though her eyes filled. Richard saw, and his heart gave way. He caught the little hand so swift to do evil, and would have soothed its pain. She pulled it from him, crying, “You nasty man! How dare you!” and ran to the door, where she turned and made a hideous face at him. The same moment, by a neighbouring door that opened from another passage, in came Barbara, and before Vixen was well aware of her presence, had dealt her such a box on the ear that she burst into a storm of wrathful weeping.

“You’re a brute, Bab,” she cried. “I’ll tell mamma!”

“Do, you little wretch!” returned Barbara, whose flushed face looked lovely childlike in its indignation beside the furious phiz of the tormenting imp.

The monkey-creature left the room, sobbing; and Barbara turned and was gone before Richard could thank her.

He heard no more of the matter, and for some time had no farther trouble with Victoria.

Barbara had the kindest of hearts, but there was nothing soft about her She held it a sin to spoil any animal, not to say a child. For she had a strong feeling, initiated possibly by her black nurse, that the animals went on living after death, whence she counted it a shame not to teach them; and held that, if a sharp cut would make child or dog behave properly, the woman was no lover of either who would spare it.

CHAPTER XXIV. RICHARD AND WINGFOLD

Barbara had more than once or twice heard Mr. Wingfold preach, but had not once listened, or oven waked to the fact that she had not listened. Unaccustomed in childhood to any special regard of the Sunday, she had neither pleasant nor unpleasant associations with church-going; but she liked a good many things better, and as she always did as she liked except she saw reason to the contrary, she had hitherto gone to church rather seldom. She might perhaps have sooner learned to go regularly but for her mother’s extraordinary behaviour there: certainly she could not sit in the same pew with her reading her novel. Since Mr. Wingfold had taken the part of the prophet Nathan, and rebuked her, she had indeed ceased to go to church, but Barbara, as I have said, was as yet only now and then drawn thitherward.

Mr. Wingfold was almost as different from the clergyman of Richard’s idea, as was Richard’s imagined God from any believable idea of God. The two men had never yet met, for what should bring a working-man and the clergyman of the next parish together? But one morning—he often went for a walk in the early morning—Richard saw before him, in the middle of a field-path, seated on a stile and stopping his way, the back of a man in a gray suit, evidently enjoying, like himself, the hour before sunrise. He knew somehow that he was not a working-man, but he did not suspect him one of the obnoxious class which lives by fooling itself and others. Wingfold heard Richard’s step, looked round, knew him at once an artisan of some sort, and saw in him signs of purpose and character strong for his years.

“Jolly morning!” he said.

“It is indeed, sir!” answered Richard.

“I like a walk in the morning better than at any other time of the day!” said Wingfold.

“Well, sir, I do so too, though I can’t tell why. I’ve often tried, but I haven’t yet found out what makes the morning so different.”

“Come!” thought the clergyman; “here’s something I haven’t met with too much of!”

Richard remarked to himself that, whoever the gentleman was, he was certainly not stuck-up. They might have parted late the night before, instead of meeting now for the first time!

“Are you a married man?” asked Wingfold.

“No, sir,” answered Richard, surprised that a stranger should put the question.

“If you had been,” Wingfold went on, “I should have been surer of your seeing what I mean when I say, that to be out before sunrise is like looking at your best friend asleep—that is, before her sun, her thought, namely, is up. Watching her face then, you see it come to life, grow radiant with sunrise.”

“But,” rejoined Richard, “I have seen a person asleep whose face made it quite evident that thought was awake! It was shining through!”

“Shining through, certainly,” said Wingfold, “not up. I doubt indeed if during any sleep, thought is quite in abeyance.”

“Not when we are dead asleep, sir?—so dead that when we wake we don’t remember anything?”

“If thought in such a case must be proved, it will have to go for non-existent. Yet, when you reflect that sometimes you discover that you must, a few minutes before, wide awake, have done something which you have no recollection of having done, and which, but for the fact remaining evident to your sight, you would not believe you had done, you must feel doubtful as to the loss of consciousness in sleep.”

“Yes; that must give us pause!”

“Hamlet!” said the clergyman to himself. “That’s good! You may have read from top to bottom of a page, perhaps,” he went on, “without being able to recall a word: would you say no thought had passed through your mind in the process?—that the words had suggested nothing as you read them?”

“No, sir; I should be inclined to say that I forgot as fast as I read; that, as I read, I seemed to know the thing I read, but the process of forgetting kept pace for pace alongside the process of reading.”

“I quite agree with you.—Now I wonder whether you will agree with me in what I am going to suggest next!”

“I can’t tell that, sir,” said Richard—somewhat unnecessarily; but Wingfold was pleased to find him cautious.

“I think,” the parson continued, “that what I want in order to be able afterward to recollect a thing, is to be not merely conscious of the thing when it comes, but at the same moment conscious of myself. To remember, I must be self-conscious as well as thing-conscious.”

“There I cannot quite follow you.”

“When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, ‘I know the word,’ there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it.”

“I think I can follow you so far,” said Richard.

“When, then,” pursued the parson, “I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word—conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word.”

“I understand so far, sir—at least I think I do.”

“Then you will allow that a word with its reflection and mental impact thus operated upon by the mind is not so likely to be forgotten as one understood only in the first immediate way?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Well, then—mind I am only suggesting; I am not proclaiming a fact, still less laying down a law; I am not half sure enough about it for that—so it is with our dreams. We see, or hear, and are conscious that we do, in our dreams; our consciousness shines through our sleeping features to the eyes that love us; but when we wake we have forgotten everything. There was thought there, but not thought that could be remembered. When, however, you have once said to yourself in a dream, ‘I think I am dreaming;’ you always, I venture to suspect, remember that experience when you wake from it!”

“I daresay you do, sir. But there are many dreams we never suspect to be dreams while we are dreaming them, which yet we remember all the same when we come awake!”

“Yes, surely; and many people have such memories as hold every word and every fact presented to them. But I was not meaning to discuss the phenomena of sleep; I only meant to support my simile that to see the world before the sun is up, is like looking on the sleeping face of a friend. There is thought in the sleeping face of your friend, and thought in the twilight face of nature; but the face awake with thought, is the world awake with sunlight.”

“There I cannot go with you, sir,” said Richard, who, for all the impression Barbara had made upon him, had not yet thought of the world as in any sense alive; it was to him but an aggregate of laws and results, the great dissecting-room of creation, the happy hunting ground of the goddess who calls herself Science, though she can claim to understand as yet no single fact.

“Why?” asked Wingfold.

“Because I cannot receive the simile at all. I cannot allow expression of thought where no thought is.”

Here a certain look on the face of the young workman helped the parson toward understanding the position he meant to take, “Ah!” he answered, “I see I mistook you! I understand now! Sleep she or wake she, you will not allow thought on the face of Nature! Am I right?”

“That is what I would say, sir,” answered Richard.

“We must look at that!” returned Wingfold. “That would be scanned!—You would conceive the world as a sort of machine that goes for certain purposes—like a clock, for instance, whose duty it is to tell the time of the day?—Do I represent you truly?”

“So far, sir. Only one machine may have many uses!”

“True! A clock may do more for us than tell the time! It may tell how fast it is going, and wake solemn thought. But if you came upon a machine that constantly waked in you—not thoughts only, but the most delicate and indescribable feelings—what would you say then? Would you allow thought there?”

“Surely not that the machine was thinking!”

“Certainly not. But would you allow thought concerned in it? Would you allow that thought must have preceded and occasioned its existence? Would you allow that thought therefore must yet be interested in its power to produce thought, and might, if it chose, minister to the continuance or enlargement of the power it had originated?”

“Perhaps I should be compelled to allow that much in regard to a clock even!—Are we coming to the Paley-argument, sir?” said Richard.

“I think not,” answered Wingfold. “My argument seems to me one of my own. It is not drawn from design but from operation: where a thing wakes thought and feeling, I say, must not thought and feeling be somewhere concerned in its origin?”

“Might not the thought and feeling come by association, as in the case of the clock suggesting the flight of time?”

“I think our associations can hardly be so multiform, or so delicate, as to have a share in bringing to us half of the thoughts and feelings that nature wakes in us. If they have such a share, they must have reference either to a fore-existence, or to relations hidden in our being, over which we have no control; and equally in such case are the thoughts and feelings waked in us, not by us. I do not want to argue; I am only suggesting that, if the world moves thought and feeling in those that regard it, thought and feeling are somehow concerned in the world. Even to wake old feelings, there must be a likeness to them in what wakes them, else how could it wake them? In a word, feeling must have put itself into the shape that awakes feeling. Then there is feeling in the thing that bears that shape, although itself it does not feel. Therefore I think it may be said that there is more thought, or, rather, more expression of thought, in the face of the world when the sun is up, than when he is not—as there is more thought in a face awake than in a face asleep.—Ah, there is the sun! and there are things that ought never to be talked about in their presence! To talk of some things even behind their backs will keep them away!”

Richard neither understood his last words, nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it.

Up came the child of heaven, conquering in the truth, in the might of essential being. It was no argument, but the presence of God that silenced the racked heart of Job. The men stood lost in the swift changes of his attendant colours—from red to gold, from the human to the divine—as he ran to the horizon from beneath, and came up with a rush, eternally silent. With a moan of delight Richard turned to his gazing companion, when he beheld that on his face which made him turn from him again: he had seen what was not there for human eyes! The radiance of Wingfold’s countenance, the human radiance that met the solar shine, surpassed even that which the moon and the sky and the sleeping earth brought out that night upon the face of Barbara! The one was the waking, the other but the sweetly dreaming world.

Richard refused to let any emotion, primary or reflex, influence his opinions; they must be determined by fact and severe logical outline. Whatever was not to him definite—that is, was not by him formally conceivable, must not be put in the category of things to be believed; but he had not a notion how many things he accepted unquestioning, which were yet of this order; and not being only a thing that thought, but a thing as well that was thought, he could not help being more influenced by such a sight than he would have chosen to be, and the fact that he was so influenced remained. Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us; happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.

Without a word, Richard lifted his hat to the stranger, and walked on, leaving him where he stood, but taking with him a germ of new feeling, which would enlarge and divide and so multiply. When he got to the next stile, he looked back, and saw him seated as at first, but now reading.

CHAPTER XXV. WING FOLD AND HIS WIFE

Thomas Wingfold closed his book, replaced it in his pocket, got down from the stile, turned his face toward home, crossed field after field, and arrived just in time to meet his wife as she came down the stair to breakfast.

“Have you had a nice walk, Thomas?” she asked.

“Indeed I have!” he answered. “Almost from the first I was right out in the open.”—His wife knew what he meant.—“Before the sun came up”, he went on, “I had to go in, and come out at another door; but I was soon very glad of it. I had met a fellow who, I think, will pluck his feet out of the mud before long.”

“Have you asked him to the rectory?”

“No.”

“Shall I write and ask him?”

“No, my wife. For one thing, you can’t: I don’t know his name, and I don’t know what he is, or where he lives. But we shall meet again soon.”

“Then you have made an appointment with him!”

“No, I haven’t. But there’s an undertow bringing us on to each other. It would spoil all if he thought I threw a net for him. I do mean to catch him if I can, but I will not move till the tide brings him into my arms. At least, that is how the thing looks to me at present. I believe enough not to make haste. I don’t want to throw salt on any bird’s tail, but I do want the birds to come hopping about me, that I may tell them what I know!”

As near as he could, Wingfold recounted the conversation he had had with Richard.

“He was a fine-looking fellow,” he said, “—not exactly a gentleman, but not far off it; little would make him one. He looked a man that could do things, but I did not satisfy myself as to what might be his trade. He showed no sign of it, or made any allusion to it. But he was more at home in the workshop of his own mind than is at all usual with fellows of his age.”

“It must,” said Helen, “be old Simon Armour’s grandson! I have heard of him from several quarters; and your description would just fit him. I know somebody that could tell you about him, but I wish I know anybody that could tell us about her—I mean Miss Wylder.”

“I like the look of that girl!” said the parson warmly, “What makes you think she could tell us about my new acquaintance?”

“Only an impertinent speech of that little simian, Vixen Lestrange. I forget what she said, but it left the impression of an acquaintance between Bab, as she called her, and some working fellow the child could not bear.”

“The enmity of that child is praise. I wonder how the Master would have treated her! He could not have taken her between his knees, and said whosoever received her received him! A child-mask with a monkey inside it will only serve a sentimental mother to talk platitudes about!”

“Don’t be too hard on the monkeys, Tom!” said his wife. “You don’t know what they may turn out to be, after all!”

“Surely it is not too hard on the monkeys to call them monkeys!”

“No; but when the monkey has already begun to be a child!”

“There is the whole point! Has the monkey always begun to be a child when he gets the shape of a child?—Miss Wylder is not quite so seldom in church now, I think!”

“I saw her there last Sunday. But I’m afraid she wasn’t thinking much about what you were saying—she sat with such a stony look in her eyes! She did seem to come awake for one moment, though!”

“Tell me.”

“I could hardly take my eyes off her, my heart was so drawn to her. There was a mingling of love and daring, almost defiance, in her look, that seemed to say, ‘If you are worth it—if you are worth it—then through fire and water!’ All at once a flash lighted up her lovely child-face—and what do you think you were at the moment saying?—that the flower of a plant was deeper than the root of it: that was what roused her!”