by F. W. Harvey
Let it suffice that work in a bank gradually but surely led him to a knowledge of his destiny, which was the taking of orders.
The period of doubt and questioning we can also pass over for sake of the story. I will tell you as shortly as possible what he did, so soon as he knew.
After the work of the day was done he sat up every night learning Greek, and he made arrangements for mortgaging his inheritance to an amount necessary to carry him through a necessary university training:– that is, he mortgaged his inheritance to the last penny. That was necessary.
Had he known what his future work would be, or had his masters divined it, the steady effectual industry of his school-days might have obtained him a scholarship to Oxford, and he been saved the later anxiety and labour of presenting himself years after as a commoner. At all events he would have learned Greek.
But he had not at that time discovered his vocation, and of course nobody did it for him: so the fact stands that he must be penalised in order to follow his only happiness:– that is his best use in the world.
The case is not uncommon: – almost I had said it was general! The difference is that few sufficiently ‘believe’ to start again. That is where Eric was different from others. Just so soon as he ‘knew’, he started afresh. And characteristically he did so patiently: a step at a time.
As well as any that could be imagined these two boys illustrated two separate sorts of courage, namely, daring and endurance. It is hard to say which is the more admirable, but there is no doubt as to which it is happier to possess. It is the old argument between a sprinter and a long distance runner. Each will excel in his event. But take life as it is, and it is the difference between the plodding, and the restive horse fastened to a plough. Each will work hard, but the one will fret himself to pieces with his plunging, while the other advances calmly in the furrow.
Both boys in their separate fashions had ‘enlisted under the banner of the Holy Ghost’, but while Eric retained always a patience with his drill sergeant, Willie’s only cry was for ‘bloody war and promotion’.
Both boys worked their hardest to attain proficiency. The difference (to be hereafter illustrated) was that Eric could wait, but Willie could never – at any rate with any peace of mind.
And one other point told also in favour of the younger brother and aided him in that patient persistency of his. He saw clearly the end of his furrow. Willie did not.
To be a clergyman, was, however strange to a family essentially yeoman, at least intelligible as an ideal. To be a poet (was it a poet Willie wanted to be?) was nothing of the sort. The way was wrapped everywhere in dense and drifting fog which showed even in its clearances a road leading nowhere.
Artists have almost invariably come from the middle classes, generally from yeoman stock, but this act of faith has always to be performed on the part of those who dare the calling, and through an even greater effort, by those loving them and concerned with their welfare.
To work oneself to tatters and be thought a waster (at times even by oneself) is the lot of every young artist, and it is not conducive to calm sustained effort. Eric could go to Oxford. There is no university of the arts. There is no encouragement:– only impenetrable mists of doubt and perplexity, bare bleak rocks of disappointment, and the companion mocking of all safe sensible people, whose feet tread not such outlandish and dangerous paths.
Yet one most common and bitter grief Willie at least escaped though only through a sorrow almost as keen. Before that spiritual warfare had resulted in open victory for the forces of apparent folly, his father died. He was so spared (as how many have not been spared!) the horrible pain of having to hurt one whom he loved and respected, and who loved him.’
His mother, both because she was a very remarkable woman, and because she was – his mother, would in time accept the nature of the son she bore.
His father, gentle and kind as he was, would never have done this. He would need to be broken and re-born and bred before he could understand.
It was enough disappointment that both his sons could have been lost to farming. In putting them to two respected professions he had gone to his utmost limit. His love and care he would certainly never have denied them – nor his purse. But to know that one of his sons had gone mooning, scribbling – mad … This knowledge would only have filled him with the pity he gave to lunatics, and such as committed suicide. His poor son! …
What would have happened to their grandfather, it is funny to contemplate. He would probably have burst!
Two good reasons prevented Willie from ever mentioning to his father this strange tendency towards literature and away from law. The first was that he himself was but half converted to it till after his father’s death. The second was a knowledge of the opposition it would provoke, and on top of this a stubborn instinct of chivalry, reverence, tenderness, or – something, which forewarned that we could not use what arguments he had for support of it, not because they would be ineffective as such, but because his ability to make use of them was the gift of a father who had worn himself with work to provide his sons with a good education. They would never intellectually convince him. They would only wound his feelings through his intellect. To do this was, it seemed to Willie, worse than taking a gift, and mocking the giver. He felt bad enough in breaking the news to his mother who could half way to meet him. No, he could not do it.
Keen as was the pang of that parting coming when it did, it was mercifully disposed (since the clash was bound to come) and a sense of this was at long last the most soothing balm to Willie’s sorrow. Another was that the sensitive highly-strung nature of his beloved had been spared any long illness and lingering pain.
It befell one Saturday night. Both boys were home. They had assisted the village team in a football match, and returned elated with victory. Their father, who complained of pain in one of his legs, had gone to bed. His sons went into the bedroom and sat down on the ottoman to chat to him. He found pleasure in listening, and congratulated them on the result of their game.
Less than two hours later (about midnight) their mother woke them. They saw at once that she was frightened.
‘Go, one of you, for the doctor at once’ she said. ‘Father is ill!’ ‘I’m afraid’, she added sobbing, ‘it is too late already.’
She was right. The clot of blood which had formed in a vein causing uneasiness in his leg, was not dislodged by hot fomentation and had been carried into the great heart valve. Already he was choking to death.
Marigold galloped that night as she had not galloped for many a year, and did never again. But her master was dead when the doctor arrived, to utter the single professional word – ‘thrombosis!’
Neither of Mrs. Harvey’s sons had seen death before, and it horrified them. In spite of the last majesty and imperturbable peace of the face after the features had been composed, and the jaw bound up, Willie never forgot a picture which he had glimpsed for a moment before riding away:– which had made him desperate in urging on the game old mare in her mad career.
Eric sat by it for an hour. What he thought, nobody could tell. He just prayed, and comforted his mother. But Willie was filled with a wild and questioning anger against heaven and earth and the God that governed them.
‘Did You see that?’ he shouted to the sky as he galloped. He lashed at the mare with his whip, and she nearly unseated him in her plunge. ‘Did you see that? Did you allow that?’ he cried savagely to God.
‘That’, was later to become a common sight in his eyes. ‘That’, was a manly flesh turned to ashes, brightness of eyes to an idiot stare, beauty to something at once hideous and comic, and this was the sting. Comic …
The devil perhaps was amused. And God, what about Him? ‘Hold up, damn you!’ he shouted to the mare; and realising consecutively that it was his own careless riding that had caused her to stumble, he concentrated once more upon the work in hand:– to bring the doctor.
Severn here wound in a loop of river which the road foll
owed perforce since there was no bridge. Two miles and more would be saved if he could go direct. But how? By swimming only. Willie was in a mood for risks. He pulled round the old mare short and set her at the hedge. She took it like a bird. Two fields off the river gleamed cold in moonlight. Seeing it the old mare cocked her ears thoughtfully, and glanced warningly back at her rider out of the corner of an eye. But he held her straight.
‘That’s all right old lady!’ he cried, tightening his knees, and sitting well back. ‘Do it your own way if you like: but we are going across!’ And, ‘I’m sorry I hit you’ – he added.
Arrived at the bank there was a slight hesitation but no hint of refusal. Marigold wanted a good take off. That’s all: but there wasn’t one, so after scrambling down a little way, splash they went, falling almost headlong. Willie slipping off her back swam accompanying his mount, and after being carried a little up stream (for the flow was tidal) they reached the bank together. It was he who first accomplished the landing by means of an overhanging willow. Then he helped the mare out. She was – poor thing – nearly spent. But a dripping messenger arrived quarter of an hour before a dry one could possibly have, and though it was all in vain Willie felt satisfied that he had done his best. Besides that the physical effort calmed the horror in his brain, and he jogged slowly home, after swallowing some brandy at the doctor’s, with a mind that was once more normal.
His wild mood faded in the days that followed, but never entirely evaporated out of memory. Time, and especially the need to help others, heals all sorrows, though the scars remain.
But Time and the love of kind – these things also are of God’s creation, and if the first impression never left him, it certainly mellowed, and obtained a fresh significance in his mind. Nor in the fullness of time did it lack that atmosphere of beauty which pity and thought bestow upon all human destiny.
In that new mood Willie, when the funeral flowers had withered, and the horses which his father had loved so well were taken away; with everything save the home, reserved for his mother, gone: wrote those lines which stand at the commencement of the previous chapter.
CHAPTER III
Soon after this, it was decreed by a doctor that a holiday should be taken by the two boys. Their father’s death, and other things, had brought each within appreciable distance of a breakdown. Mrs. Harvey in her wonderful strength remained at home. She had doubtless felt the parting more keenly than either, but there are natures whose reserve of power seems never exhausted, and her’s was one. People marvelled at her equanimity. She was apparently unchanged in body or soul by this new sorrow. She was not a stoic, and had never heard of Marcus Aurelius, but he would have loved her.
So in October the boys set off. They might have gone to France or Italy which was what the doctor advised, but he agreed that the best place for them to go was where they wanted.
‘I would feel well on top of those hills’, said Willie, pointing to the high smoky line of the Dean Forest. Eric didn’t care where he went. So it was decided that for a fortnight, or longer if they wished, the brothers should walk over Gloucestershire hills amid the falling leaves.
The mind, which wounds the body, may heal it. The body which houses and feeds the mind may change it for better or worse. At the end of a fortnight they returned cured.
Whether it was the new air which entered their lungs, or whether it was the new decisions they took into their souls, which worked the magic, who can say? But as students of the latter rather than the former, it is with their talks rather than their travels that we are concerned though it must be admitted that the former as often as not arose out of the latter.
It is not necessary to make a guide-book itinerary of their walk but rather a hotch-pot of such memories as resulted. Nor was it always the same things which impressed them.
To Willie, a great event was their meeting with the garrulous Rabelaisian old shepherd at Newnham-on-Severn. Shepherd he called himself, and undoubtedly a number of his eighty-odd years had been spent tending sheep on the Cotswold hills where he was born, – ‘nigh Ciciter’. But save a mere knowledge of flocks and their ailments makes the profession (as laymen might argue) and not rather an almost superstitious devotion to them (as experts maintain) the man was no shepherd. He was no man of the hills. He was a man of the world – spiritually, belike, a lesser thing; yet a much more entertaining one. He could talk, could this old one-toothed mortal! But his talk like Peter’s, bewrayed him. For it was not of sheep, but (with a wicked twinkling) of woman shepherdesses ‘under a barrow with the sun agin ‘im’; of pheasants poached with sulphur burned under a roosting tree, or taken with raisins saturated in brandy: and the brandy (‘come to that’) was smuggled off boats at Newnham.
They sat all three in a barn. It was raining.
‘There is no more pleasant sound in the world than rain drumming on thatch; – with you under it,’ said Willie, as they watched grey sheets of water trailed shaking in the wind across the doorway. ‘And no snugger spot nor a barn, whether fer sleepin’ in or courtin’ in’ replied the ancient man. He looked like some disreputable old monk suddenly resurrected, where he sat cowled with a sack, in the semi-darkness.
‘Ah, and you’ve tried both, I warrant.’ said Willie.
Darkness chuckled. ‘Seventy or sixty year ago’, when labourers worked for 9d. a day, there’d be no lodging but barns for the extra haymakers and harvesters. Men and women, they all turned in together, making their beds in the straw ‘snug enough’. But ‘nowdays a chap ud be ashamed to say as a wer begot under barn-thatch, let alone borned there, as I’ve knowed ’em’…
‘Those were bad old times’ said Eric.
‘Bad an’ good as you mid zay. Zo all times be.’
Willie laughed.
‘But surely’, argued his brother, ‘surely people are happier now, in better conditions, than they were then, living like beasts of the field.’
‘They be aal on ’em flocking away into gurt black smokey towns nowdays.’
‘But even so’, interjected Eric, ‘the conditions –’
‘Beaasts in a pen’, concluded the old countryman.
‘And beaasts in a field be better off than beaasts in a pen’, put in Willie. ‘I agree. But did you ever work in the towns?’ he asked.
‘Did ’ee ever walk along the Thames embankment in Lonnon?’ rejoined the ancient.
Wondering what was coming, the boys answered that on one occasion they had.
‘Well, I helped put un wer a be, then’, asserted this astonishing old fellow, and paused for the words to sink in.
‘You helped build the embankment!’ exclaimed the brothers, in voices which showed that they were sufficiently impressed.
‘I helped put un wer a be’.
‘And you didn’t like the work?’ enquired Eric.
The old man gave a chuckle. ‘The work, ess I wer lucky in that. Ater dree days I dug up a gold piece. Tur’s like a suverin only thinner; and twern’t English. I took un to a shop, and a jew paid me dirty shillings down for’t. Then me and my two mates got drunk wi the dirty shilling, and we was turned off.’
‘So you were lucky’ commented Willie smiling.
‘Yes, I wer lucky. I come away from Lonnon, and I stayed away.’ The old man deftly speared an onion with his single shaky tooth, and offered one onion each to the boys. Fumbling in his pockets for the bread and cheese he disclosed a dead rabbit which they affected not to see. ‘Not many o’ they in Lonnon’, observed this merry old poacher.
The boys then asked him if he would walk as far as the village inn where they intended to get a meal, but the old man having both food and drink with him preferred to remain where he sat. He would see them there in the evening, and take a pint.
The boys looked at one another. They were not staying the night at Newnham. The rain had ceased. By evening they should be at least ten miles off. But this man (thought Willie) was a character – too good to lose. And here (thought Eric) was a man who had lived 80 years
and was soon to go before his Maker. They exchanged glances, and each knew that the other was ready to sacrifice a meal.
Willie bit his onion. ‘Then’, said he, ‘we’ll bide here a bit if you will talk to us, for we’re not staying out the evening.’ The ancient nodded. ‘I’ve a wonderful remembery’, he said, ‘and youngsters be glad to hear the things as did come about afore they was born; – not as yow be special young’, he added courteously, as though youth were a sin to be ashamed of.
‘You are an old man now’, said Eric, ‘what do you think of death?’
“Tis in the natur o’ things’ answered the poacher.
‘How do you bite your food, now all your teeth but one are gone?’ asked Willie.
‘My gums be as rocky as tith, and I can chew with ’em as well as when tith was there, a’most. This un be a hindrance more nor a help’, he added.
His wives were dead – ‘two on ’em’, and all his old friends; but he spoke as a man who had enjoyed living, and who still enjoyed it. there was no bitterness in his talk. His present master was a good ’un, but inclined to hurry. He never hurried, and no good varmer didn’t. There was a time for everything, and then one should do it. He liked work and he liked sport – not football and such like games. They wasted a man’s time, and didn’t bring them in nothing either.
He talked of his ferrets which were in great demand during ‘rabbutting time’. Conventional honesty was hardly a strong point with him, for he related with an infinite relish of the jest (even when it turned against himself) how when one of his ‘verruts’ had died, he having provided the ferret’s body with shot marks, took it out on three successive ‘shoots’, and was paid its value twice over by sportsmen who believed that they had killed it in firing at a rabbit. He might, he added, have been paid on a third occasion but that ‘the verrut had begun to stink, and maaster smelt un.’