The Whirlpool Part 61

CHAPTER 2

Mrs. Morton felt a lively interest in Mrs. Rolfe's musical enterprise, and would have liked to talk about it, but she suspected that the topic was not very agreeable to her guest. In writing to Morton, Harvey had just mentioned the matter, and that was all. On the second day of his visit, when he felt much better, and saw things in a less troubled light, he wished to remove the impression that he regarded Alma's proceedings with sullen disapproval; so he took the opportunity of being alone with his hostess, and talked to her of the great venture with all the good humour he could command. Mrs. Morton had seen two notices of Alma's debut; both were so favourable that she imagined them the augury of a brilliant career.

'I doubt that,' said Harvey; 'and I'm not sure that it's desirable. She has made herself miserably ill, you see. Excitement is the worst possible thing for her. And then there's the whole question of whether professional life is right and good for a married woman. How do you think about it?'

The lady instanced cases that naturally presented themselves. She seemed to have no prejudice. Mrs. Rolfe appeared to her a person of artistic temper; but health was of the first importance; and then----

Harvey waited; but only a thoughtful smile completed the remark.

'What other consideration had you in mind?'

'Only a commonplace--that a married woman would, of course, be guided by her husband's wish.'

'You think that equivalent to reason and the will of G.o.d?' said Harvey jocosely.

'If we need appeal to solemn sanction.'

Rolfe was reminded, not unpleasantly, that he spoke with a woman to whom 'the will of G.o.d' was something more than a facetious phrase.

'I beg your pardon; let us say reason alone. But is it reasonable for the artist to sacrifice herself because she happens to have married an everyday man?'

Mrs. Morton shook her head and laughed.

'If only one know what is meant by the everyday man! My private view of him is rather flattering, perhaps. I'm inclined to think him, on the whole, not inferior to the everyday woman; and _she_--she isn't a bad sort of creature, if fairly treated. I don't think the everyday man will go very far wrong, as a rule, in the treatment of his wife.'

'You really believe that?' asked Harvey, with a serious smile.

'Why, is it such a heresy?'

'I should rather have thought so. One is so accustomed to hear the other view I mean, it's in the air. Don't think I'm asking your sympathy. I have always wished Alma to act on her own judgment; she has been left quite free to do so. But if the results seem worse than doubtful, then comes the difficulty.'

'To be settled, surely, like all other difficulties between sensible people.'

Mrs. Morton's faith was of enviable simplicity. She knew, as a matter of fact, that husbands and wives often found their difficulties insuperable; but why this should be so, seemed to her one of the dark and mournful enigmas of life. It implied such a lack not only of good sense, but of right feeling. In her own experience she had met with no doubt, no worry, which did not yield to tact, or generous endeavour, or, at worst, to the creed by which she lived. One solicitude, and one only, continued to affect her as wife and mother; that it could not overcome her happy temper was due to the hope perpetually inspired by her husband's love--a hope inseparable from her profoundest convictions. She and Morton differed in religious views, and there had come a grave moment when she asked whether it would be possible to educate her children in her own belief without putting a distance between them and their father. The doubt had disappeared, thanks to Morton's breadth of view, or facility of conscience; there remained the trouble in which it had originated, but she solaced herself with the fond a.s.surance that this also would vanish as time went on. In the same mood of kindly serenity she regarded the lives of her friends, always hoping for the best, and finding it hard to understand that anyone could deliberately act with unkindness, unreasonableness, or any other quality opposed to the common good.

Rolfe had no desire of talking further about his private affairs. He had made up his mind on the points at issue, and needed no counsel, but the spirit of Mrs. Morton's conversation helped him to think tranquilly. The great danger was that he might make things worse by his way of regarding them. Most unluckily, Alma's illness had become connected in his imagination with the tragedy of the Carnabys; he could not keep the things apart. Hugh Carnaby's miserable doom, and the dark surmises attaching to his wife, doubtless had their part in bringing about a nervous crisis; why could he not recognise this as perfectly natural, and dismiss the matter? In spite of all reasoning, Alma's image ever and again appeared to him shadowed by the gloom which involved her friend--or the woman who _was_ her friend. He knew it (or believed it) to be the merest illusion of his perturbed mind; for no fact, how trivial soever, had suggested to him that Alma knew more of the circ.u.mstances of Redgrave's death than she seemed to know. On the one hand, he was glad that Alma and Sibyl no longer cared to meet; on the other, he could not understand what had caused this cessation of their friends.h.i.+p, and he puzzled over it. But these idle fancies would pa.s.s away; they were already less troublesome. A long country walk with Morton, during which they conversed only of things intellectual, did him much good. Not long ago Morton had had a visit from an old Cambridge friend, a man who had devoted himself to the study of a certain short period of English history, and hoped, some ten years hence, to produce an authoritative work on the subject.

'There's a man I envy!' cried Rolfe, when he had listened to Basil's humorous description of the enthusiast. 'It's exactly what I should like to do myself.'

'What prevents you?'

'Idleness--irresolution--the feeling that the best of my life is over.

I have never been seriously a student, and it's too late to begin now.

But if I were ten years younger, I would make myself master of something. What's the use of reading only to forget? In my time I have gone through no small library of historical books--and it's all a mist on the mind's horizon. That comes of reading without method, without a purpose. The time I have given to it would have made me a pundit, if I had gone to work reasonably.'

'Isn't my case the same?' exclaimed Morton. 'What do I care! I enjoyed my reading and my knowledge at the time, and that's all I ever expected.'

'Very well--though you misrepresent yourself. But for me it isn't enough. I want to know something as well as it can be known. Purely for my own satisfaction; the thought of "doing something" doesn't come in at all. I was looking at your county histories this morning, and I felt a huge longing to give the rest of my life to some little bit of England, a county, or even a town, and exhaust the possibilities of knowledge within those limits. Why, Greystone here--it has an interesting history, even in relation to England at large; and what a delight there would be in following it out, doggedly, invincibly--making it one's single subject--grubbing after it in muniment-rooms and libraries--learning by heart every stone of the old town--dying at last with the consolation that n.o.body could teach one anything more about it!'

'I know the mood,' said Morton, laughing.

'I'm narrowing down,' pursued Harvey. 'Once I had tremendous visions--dreamt of holding half a dozen civilisations in the hollow of my hand. I came back from the East in a fury to learn the Oriental languages--made a start, you know, with Arabic. I dropped one nation after another, always drawing nearer home. The Latin races were to suffice me. Then early France, especially in its relations with England;--Normandy, Anjou. Then early England, especially in its relations with France. The end will be a county, or a town--nay, possibly a building. Why not devote one's self to the history of a market-cross? It would be respectable, I tell you. Thoroughness is all.'

When they were alone in the library at night, Morton spoke of his eldest boy, expressing some anxiety about him.

'The rascal will have to earn his living--and how? There's time, I suppose, but it begins to fidget me. He won't handle corn--I'm clear as to that. At his age, of course, all lads talk about voyages and so on, but Harry seems cut out for a larger sphere than Greystone. I shan't balk him. I'd rather he hadn't anything to do with fighting--still, that's a weakness.'

'We think of sending Wager's lad into the navy,' said Rolfe, when he had mused awhile. 'Of course, he'll have to make his own way.'

'Best thing you can do, no doubt. And what about his little sister?'

'That's more troublesome. It's awkward that she's a relative of Mrs Abbott. Otherwise, I should have proposed to train her for a cook.'

'Do you mean it?'

'Why not? She isn't a girl of any promise. What better thing for her, and for the community, than to make her a good cook? They're rare enough, Heaven knows. What's the use of letting her grow up with ideas of gentility, which in her case would mean nothing but uselessness? She must support herself, sooner or later, and it won't be with her brains.

I've seriously thought of making that suggestion to Mrs. Abbott. Ten years hence, a sensible woman cook will demand her own price, and be a good deal more respected than a dressmaker or a she-clerk. The stomach is very powerful in bringing people to common-sense. When all the bricklayers' daughters are giving piano lessons, and it's next to impossible to get any servant except a lady's-maid, we shall see women of leisure develop a surprising interest in the boiling of potatoes.'

Morton admitted the force of these arguments.

'What would you wish your own boy to be?' he asked presently.

'Anything old-fas.h.i.+oned, unadventurous, happily obscure; a country parson, perhaps, best of all.'

'I understand. I've had the same thoughts. But one Ii to get over that kind of thing. It won't do to be afraid of life--nor of death either.'

'And there's the difficulty of education,' said Rolfe. 'If I followed my instincts, I should make the boy unfit for anything but the quietest, obscurest life. I should make him hate a street, and love the fields. I should teach him to despise every form of ambition; to shrink from every kind of pleasure, but the simplest and purest; to think of life as a long day's ramble, and death as the quiet sleep that comes at the end of it. I should like him not to marry--never to feel the need of it; or if marry he must, to have no children. That's my real wish; and if I tried to carry it out, the chances are that I should do him an intolerable wrong. For fear of it, I must give him into the hands of other people; I must see him grow into habits and thoughts which will cause me perpetual uneasiness; I must watch him drift further and further away from my own ideal of life, till at length, perhaps, there is scarce a possibility of sympathy between us.'

'Morbid--all morbid,' remarked the listener.

'I don't know. It may only mean that one sees too clearly the root facts of existence. I have another mood (less frequent) in which I try to persuade myself that I don't care much about the child; that his future doesn't really concern me at all. Why should it? He's just one of the millions of human beings who come and go. A hundred years hence--what of him and of me? What can it matter how he lived and how he died? The best kind of education would be that which hardened his skin and blunted his sympathies. What right have I to make him sensitive? The thing is, to get through life with as little suffering as possible. What monstrous folly to teach him to wince and cry out at the sufferings of other people! Won't he have enough of his own before he has done? Yet that's what we shall aim at--to cultivate his sympathetic emotions, so that the death of a bird shall make him sad, and the sight of human distress wring his heart. Real kindness would try to make of him a healthy ruffian, with just enough conscience to keep him from crime.'

'Theory for theory, I prefer this,' said Morton. 'To a certain extent I try to act upon it.'

'You do?'

'Just because I know that my own tendency is to over-softness. I have sometimes surprised my wife by bidding Harry disregard things that appealed to his pity. You remember what old Hobbes says: "_h.o.m.o malus, puer robustus_"? There was more truth in it in his day than in ours.

It's natural for a boy to be a good deal of a savage, but our civilisation is doing its best to change that. Why, not long ago the lad asked me whether fis.h.i.+ng wasn't cruel. He evidently felt that it was, and so do I; but I couldn't say so. I laughed it off, and told him that a fish diet was excellent for the brains!'

'I hope I may have as much courage,' said Harvey.

'Life is a compromise, my dear fellow. If the world at large would suddenly come round to a cultivation of the amiable virtues--well and good. But there's no hope of it. As it is, our little crabs must grow their hard sh.e.l.l, or they've no chance.'

'What about progress? In educating children, we are making the new world.'