Kitabı oku: «The Elect Lady», sayfa 8

CHAPTER XIX. ANDREW AND ALEXA

Andrew had occasion to call on the laird to pay his father’s rent, and Alexa, who had not seen him for some time, thought him improved both in carriage and speech, and wondered. She did not take into account his intercourse with God, as with highest human minds, and his constant wakefulness to carry into action what things he learned. Thus trained in noblest fashions of freedom, it was small wonder that his bearing and manners, the natural outcome and expression of his habits of being, should grow in liberty. There was in them the change only of development. By the side of such education as this, dealing with reality and inborn dignity, what mattered any amount of ignorance as to social custom! Society may judge its own; this man was not of it, and as much surpassed its most accomplished pupils in all the essentials of breeding, as the apostle Paul was a better gentleman than Mr. Nash or Mr. Brummel. The training may be slow, but it is perfect. To him who has yielded self, all things are possible. Andrew was aware of no difference. He seemed to himself the same as when a boy.

Alexa had not again alluded to his brother’s letter concerning George Crawford, fearing he might say what she would find unpleasant. But now she wanted to get a definite opinion from him in regard to certain modes of money-making, which had naturally of late occupied a good deal of her thought.

“What is your notion concerning money-lending—I mean at interest, Mr. Ingram?” she said. “I hear it is objected to nowadays by some that set up for teachers!”

“It is by no means the first time in the world’s history,” answered Andrew.

“I want to know what you think of it, Mr. Ingram?”

“I know little,” replied Andrew, “of any matter with which I have not had to deal practically.”

“But ought not one to have his ideas ready for the time when we will have to deal practically?” said Alexa.

“Mine would be pretty sure to be wrong,” answered Andrew; “and there is no time to spend in gathering wrong ideas and then changing them!”

“On the contrary, they would be less warped by personal interest.”

“Could circumstances arise in which it would not be my first interest to be honest?” said Andrew. “Would not my judgment be quickened by the compulsion and the danger? In no danger myself, might I not judge too leniently of things from which I should myself recoil? Selfishly smoother with regard to others, because less anxious about their honesty than my own, might I not yield them what, were I in the case, I should see at once I dared not allow to myself? I can perceive no use in making up my mind how to act in circumstances in which I am not—probably will never be. I have enough to occupy me where I find myself, and should certainly be oftener in doubt how to act, if I had bothered my brains how to think in circumstances foreign to me. In such thinking, duty is of necessity a comparatively feeble factor, being only duty imagined, not live duty, and the result is the more questionable. The Lord instructed His apostles not to be anxious what they should say when they were brought before rulers and kings: I will leave the question of duty alone until action is demanded of me. In the meantime I will do the duty now required of me, which is the only preparation for the duty that is to come.”

Although Alexa had not begun to understand Andrew, she had sense enough and righteousness enough to feel that he was somehow ahead of her, and that it was not likely he and George Crawford would be of one mind in the matter that occupied her, so different were their ways of looking at things—so different indeed the things themselves they thought worth looking at.

She was silent for a moment, then said:

“You can at least tell me what you think of gambling!”

“I think it is the meanest mode of gaining or losing money a man could find.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because he desires only to gain, and can gain only by his neighbor’s loss. One of the two must be the worse for his transaction with the other. Each must wish ill to his neighbor!”

“But the risk was agreed upon between them.”

“True—but in what hope? Was it not, on the part of each, that he would be the gainer and the other the loser? There is no common cause, nothing but pure opposition of interest.”

“Are there not many things in which one must gain and the other lose?”

“There are many things in which one gains and the other loses; but if it is essential to any transaction that only one side shall gain, the thing is not of God.”

“What do you think of trading in stocks?”

“I do not know enough about it to have a right to speak.”

“You can give your impression!”

“I will not give what I do not value.”

“Suppose, then, you heard of a man who had made his money so, how would you behave to him?”

“I would not seek his acquaintance.”

“If he sought yours?”

“It would be time to ask how he had made his money. Then it would be my business.”

“What would make it your business?”

“That he sought my acquaintance. It would then be necessary to know something about him, and the readiest question would be—how he had made his money!”

Alexa was silent for some time.

“Do you think God cares about everything?” she said at length.

“Everything,” answered Andrew, and she said no more.

Andrew avoided the discussion of moral questions. He regarded the thing as vermiculate, and ready to corrupt the obedience. “When you have a thing to do,” he would say, “you will do it right in proportion to your love of right. But do the right, and you will love the right; for by doing it you will see it in a measure as it is, and no one can see the truth as it is without loving it. The more you talk about what is right, or even about the doing of it, the more you are in danger of exemplifying how loosely theory may be allied to practice. Talk without action saps the very will. Something you have to do is waiting undone all the time, and getting more and more undone. The only refuge is to do.” To know the thing he ought to do was a matter of import, to do the thing he knew he ought to do was a matter of life and death to Andrew. He never allowed even a cognate question to force itself upon him until he had attended to the thing that demanded doing: it was merest common sense!

Alexa had in a manner got over her uneasiness at the report of how George was making his money, and their correspondence was not interrupted. But something, perhaps a movement from the world of spirit coming like the wind, had given her one of those motions to betterment, which, however occasioned, are the throb of the divine pulse in our life, the call of the Father, the pull of home, and the guide thither to such as will obey them. She had in consequence again become doubtful about Crawford, and as to whether she was right in corresponding with him. This led to her talk with Andrew, which, while it made her think less of his intellect, influenced her in a way she neither understood nor even recognized. There are two ways in which one nature may influence another for betterment—the one by strengthening the will, the other by heightening the ideal. Andrew, without even her suspicion of the fact, wrought in the latter way upon Alexa. She grew more uneasy. George was coming home: how was she to receive him? Nowise bound, they were on terms of intimacy: was she to encourage the procession of that intimacy, or to ward attempt at nearer approach?

CHAPTER XX. GEORGE AND ANDREW

George returned, and made an early appearance at Potlurg. Dawtie met him in the court. She did not know him, but involuntarily shrunk from him. He frowned. There was a natural repugnance between them; the one was simple, the other double; the one was pure, the other selfish; the one loved her neighbor, the other preyed upon his.

George was a little louder, and his manners were more studied. Alexa felt him overblown. He was floridly at his ease. What little “atmosphere” there had been about him was gone, and its place taken by a colored fog. His dress was unobjectionable, and yet attracted notice; perhaps it was only too considered. Alexa was disappointed, and a little relieved. He looked older, yet not more manly—and rather fat. He had more of the confidence women dislike to see a man without, than was quite pleasant even to the confident Alexa. His speech was not a little infected with the nasality—as easy to catch as hard to get rid of—which I presume the Puritans carried from England to America. On the whole, George was less interesting than Alexa had expected.

He came to her as if he would embrace her, but an instinctive movement on her part sufficed to check him. She threw an additional heartiness into her welcome, and kept him at arm’s-length. She felt as if she had lost an old friend, and not gained a new one. He made himself very agreeable, but that he made himself so, made him less so.

There was more than these changes at work in her; there was still the underlying doubt concerning him. Although not yet a live soul, she had strong if vague ideas about right and wrong; and although she sought many things a good deal more than righteousness, I do not see what temptation would at once have turned her from its known paths. At the same time I do not see what she had yet, more than hundreds of thousands of well-meaning women, to secure her from slow decay and final ruin.

They laughed and talked together very like the way they used, but “every like is not the same,” and they knew there was a difference. George was stung by the sense of it—too much to show that he was vexed. He laid himself out to be the more pleasing, as if determined to make her feel what he was worth—as the man, namely, whom he imagined himself, and valued himself on being.

It is an argument for God, to see what fools those make of themselves who, believing there is a God, do not believe in Him—children who do not know the Father. Such make up the mass of church and chapel goers. Let an earthquake or the small-pox break loose among them, and they will show what sort their religion is. George had got rid of the folly of believing in the existence of a God, either interested in human affairs or careless of them, and naturally found himself more comfortable in consequence; for he never had believed in God, and it is awkward to believe and not believe at the same moment. What he had called his beliefs were as worthy of the name as those of most people, but whether he was better or worse without them hardly interests me, and my philanthropy will scarce serve to make me glad that he was more comfortable.

As they talked, old times came up, and they drew a little nearer, until at last a gentle spring of rose-colored interest began a feeble flow in Alexa’s mind. When George took his leave, which he did soon, with the wisdom of one who feared to bore, she went with him to the court, where the gardener was holding his horse. Beside them stood Andrew, talking to the old man, and admiring the beautiful animal in his charge.

“The life of the Creator has run free through every channel up to this creature!” he was saying as they came near.

“What rot!” said George to himself, but to Alexa he said: “Here’s my old friend, the farmer, I declare!” then to Andrew: “How do you do, Mr. Ingram?”

George never forgot a man’s name, and went in consequence for a better fellow than he was. One may remember for reasons that have little to do with good-fellowship. He spoke as if they were old friends. “You seem to like the look of the beast!” he said: “you ought to know what’s what in horses!”

“He is one of the finest horses I ever saw,” answered Andrew. “The man who owns him is fortunate.”

“He ought to be a good one!” said George. “I gave a hundred and fifty guineas for him yesterday.”

Andrew could not help vaguely reflecting what kind of money had bought him, if Sandy was right.

Alexa was pleased to see Andrew. He made her feel more comfortable. His presence seemed to protect her a little.

“May I ask you, Mr. Ingram,” she said, “to repeat what you were saying about the horse as we came up?”

“I was saying,” answered Andrew, “that, to any one who understands a horse it is clear that the power of God must have flowed unobstructed through many generations to fashion such a perfection.”

“Oh! you indorse the development theory—do you?” said George. “I should hardly have expected that of you.”

“I do not think it has anything to do with what I said; no one disputes that this horse comes of many generations of horses. The development theory, if I understand aright, concerns itself with how his first ancestor in his own kind came to be a horse.”

“And about that there can be no doubt in the mind of any one who believes in the Bible!” said George.

“God makes beautiful horses,” returned Andrew; “whether He takes the one way or the other to make them, I am sure He takes the right way.”

“You imply it is of little consequence what you believe about it.”

“If I had to make them it would be of consequence. But what I think of consequence to us is—that He makes them, not out of nothing, but out of Himself. Why should my poor notion of God’s how be of importance, so long as, when I see a horse like yours, Mr. Crawford, I say, God be praised? It is of eternal importance to love the animal, and see in him the beauty of the Lord; it is of none to fancy I know which way God took to make him. Not having in me the power or the stuff to make a horse, I can not know how God made the horse; I can know him to be beautiful.”

“But,” said George, “the first horse was a very common-looking domestic animal, which they kept to eat—nothing like this one.”

“Then you think God made the first horse, and after that the horses made themselves,” said Andrew.

Alexa laughed; George said nothing; Andrew went on.

“But,” he said, “if we have come up from the lower animals, through a million of kinds, perhaps—against which theory I have nothing to urge—then I am more than prepared to believe that the man who does not do the part of a man will have to go down again, through all the stages of his being, to a position beyond the lowest forms of the powers he has misused, and there begin to rise once more, haunted perhaps with dim hints of the world of humanity left so far above him.”

“Bah! What’s the use of bothering! Rubbish!” cried George, with rude jollity. “You know as well as I do, Mr. Ingram, it’s all bosh! Things will go on as they’re doing, and as they have been doing, till now from all eternity—so far as we know, and that’s enough for us.”

“They will not go on so for long in our sight, Mr. Crawford. The worms will have a word to say with us.”

Alexa turned away.

“You’ve not given up preaching and taken to the practical yet, Mr. Ingram, I see,” said George.

Andrew laughed.

“I flatter myself I have not ceased to be practical, Mr. Crawford. You are busy with what you see, and I am busy as well with what I don’t see; but all the time I believe my farm is in as good a state as your books.”

George gave a start, and stole a look at the young farmer, but was satisfied he “meant nothing.” The self-seeker will walk into the very abyss protesting himself a practical man, and counting him unpractical who will not with him “jump the life to come.” Himself, he neither measures the width nor questions his muscle.

CHAPTER XXI. WHAT IS IT WORTH?

Andrew, with all his hard work, harder since Sandy went, continued able to write, for he neither sought company nor drank strong drink, and was the sport of no passion. From threatened inroad he appealed to Him who created to lift His child above the torrent, and make impulse the slave of conscience and manhood. There were no demons riding the whirlwinds of his soul. It is not wonderful then that he should be able to write a book, or that the book should be of genuine and original worth. It had the fortune to be “favorably” reviewed, scarce one of those who reviewed it understanding it, while all of them seemed to themselves to understand it perfectly. I mention the thing because, had the book not been thus reviewed, Alexa would not have bought a copy, or been able to admire it.

The review she read was in a paper whose editor would not have admitted it had he suspected the drift which the reviewer had failed to see; and the passages quoted appealed to Alexa in virtue, partly, of her not seeing half they involved, or anything whatever of the said drift. But because he had got a book published, and because she approved of certain lines, phrases and passages in it; but chiefly because it had been praised by more than one influential paper, Andrew rose immensely in Alexa’s opinion. Although he was the son of a tenant, was even a laborer on his farm, and had covered a birth no higher than that of Jesus Christ with the gown of no university, she began, against her own sense of what was fit, to look up to the plow-man. The plow-man was not aware of this, and would have been careless had he been. He respected his landlord’s daughter, not ever questioned her superiority as a lady where he made no claim to being a gentleman, but he recognized in her no power either to help or to hurt.

When they next met, Alexa was no longer indifferent to his presence, and even made a movement in the direction of being agreeable to him. She dropped in a measure, without knowing she had ever used it, her patronizing carriage, but had the assurance to compliment him not merely on the poem he had written, but on the way it had been received; she could not have credited, had he told her, that he was as indifferent to the praise or blame of what is called the public, as if that public were indeed—what it is most like—a boy just learning to read. Yet it is the consent of such a public that makes the very essence of what is called fame. How should a man care for it who knows that he is on his way to join his peers, to be a child with the great ones of the earth, the lovers of the truth, the Doers of the Will. What to him will be the wind of the world he has left behind, a wind that can not arouse the dead, that can only blow about the grave-clothes of the dead as they bury their dead.

“Live, Dawtie,” said Andrew to the girl, “and ane day ye’ll hae yer hert’s desire; for ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.’”

Andrew was neither annoyed nor gratified with the compliments Alexa paid him, for she did not know the informing power of the book—what he cared for in it—the thing that made him write it. But her gentleness and kindness did please him; he was glad to feel a little at home with her, glad to draw a little nearer to one who had never been other than good to him. And then was she not more than kind, even loving to Dawtie?

“So, Andrew, you are a poet at last,” she said, holding out her hand to him, which Andrew received in a palm that wrote the better verse that it was horny. “Please to remember I was the first that found you out!” she added.

“I think it was my mother,” answered Andrew.

“And I would have helped you if you would have let me.”

“It is not well, ma’am, to push the bird off because he can’t sit safe on the edge of the nest.”

“Perhaps you are right A failure then would have stood in the way of your coming fame.”

“Oh, for that, ma’am, believe me, I do not care a short straw.”

“What do you not care for?”

“For fame.”

“That is wrong, Andrew. We ought to care what our neighbors think of us.”

“My neighbors did not set me to do the work, and I did not seek their praise in doing it. Their friendship I prize dearly—more than tongue can tell.”

“You can not surely be so conceited, Andrew, as to think nobody capable of judging your work.”

“Far from it, ma’am. But you were speaking of fame, and that does not come from any wise judgment.”

“Then what do you write for, if you care nothing for fame? I thought that was what all poets wrote for.”

“So the world thinks; and those that do sometimes have their reward.”

“Tell me then what you write for?”

“I write because I want to tell something that makes me glad and strong. I want to say it, and so try to say it. Things come to me in gleams and flashes, sometimes in words themselves, and I want to weave them into a melodious, harmonious whole. I was once at an oratorio, and that taught me the shape of a poem. In a pause of the music, I seemed all at once to see Handel’s heavy countenance looking out of his great wig, as he sat putting together his notes, ordering about in his mind, and fixing in their places with his pen, his drums, and pipes, and fiddles, and roaring bass, and flageolets, and hautboys—all to open the door for the thing that was plaguing him with the confusion of its beauty. For I suppose even Handel did not hear it all clear and plain at first, but had to build his orchestra into a mental organ for his mind to let itself out by, through the many music holes, lest it should burst with its repressed harmonic delights. He must have felt an agonized need to set the haunting angels of sound in obedient order and range, responsive to the soul of the thing, its one ruling idea! I saw him with his white rapt face, looking like a prophet of the living God sent to speak out of the heart of the mystery of truth! I saw him as he sat staring at the paper before him, scratched all over as with the fury of a holy anger at his own impotence, and his soul communed with heavenliest harmonies! Ma’am, will any man persuade me that Handel at such a moment was athirst for fame? or that the desire to please a house full or world full of such as heard his oratorios, gave him the power to write his music? No, ma’am! he was filled, not with the longing for sympathy, and not even with the good desire to give delight, but with the music itself. It was crying in him to get out, and he heard it crying, and could not rest till he had let it out; and every note that dropped from his pen was a chip struck from the granite wall between the song-birds in their prison-nest, and the air of their liberty. Creation is God’s self-wrought freedom. No, ma’am, I do not despise my fellows, but neither do I prize the judgment of more than a few of them. I prize and love themselves, but not their opinion.”

Alexa was silent, and Andrew took his leave. She sat still for awhile thinking. If she did not understand, at least she remembered Andrew’s face as he talked: could presumption make his face shine so? could presumption make him so forget himself?