Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Nor was compassion withheld. The mourners behind him are standing with lips set firm and with bowed heads. They are not his relatives: for the Reverend Cleveland Hutton had a knack of becoming estranged from his kin. He had at times met occasion to borrow from them, or coercion to allow them to borrow from him, and had not met the rarer experience of averting regrettable results. The only member of his family present was his elder brother, the Reverend James Hutton; who, never holding business dealings with relatives on principle, did not find himself disqualified for conducting the burial service. They are all of the district’s familiar dwellers; and they will serve, if patience can be held through seeming wandering, as an example of the power of this passage of the ordinary human lot upon the ordinary human heart.

  If you had entered this straggling village, at the time—somewhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century—when its parsonage was the home of the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, you would have thought it well provided in the matter of its spiritual needs. It contained, besides its church of passable antiquity and interest, a Wesleyan chapel without such qualities, and a wooden building in a field; which from having been the barn of a now obsolete farmhouse, had come to be a sort of meeting-place at general disposal for religious ends. But it does not follow, because a place is well provided in the matter of religion, that it is equally furnished in such matters as charity and tolerance. It might rather seem that Providence felt good equipment under both these heads an extravagant moral dower for a single spot, and was at some pains to avoid it. Bearing this in mind; and summoning thither our experience of ordinary human nature as wrought upon by minor religious disagreements, and of districts with a church with traditions in favour of a high ritual, an old-fashioned Wesleyan chapel, and such a peopling that every working man is an accounted unit in each congregation; let us turn our eyes on the figure behind the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. It is a figure similar in height and garb, but with a subtle suggestion of difference.

  That is the minister of the Wesleyan Chapel.

  Look next at the mourner behind the Wesleyan minister—that broad-shouldered man with the air of the prosperous country gentleman. That is Mr Blackwood; who for some time has been a prominent figure of the neighbourhood; having found in it some years ago a roomy house at a reduced rent, and within easy distance of facilities for Wesleyan worship—adaptable conditions to his large family, straitened income, and the branch of dissent in which both he and his wife had received their nurture. Of his appearance there is little to be told beyond what is said. Mrs Blackwood was of the opinion that he looked like a member of parliament; and he could himself testify that on several occasions in the train he had been taken for one. The senatorial suggestion about him had the excuse that this had once been his destiny. Family losses following his early marriage had cancelled the prospect; and Mr Blackwood, who had seconded with much compliance his parents’ assumption of his insight into national conditions, recognised in a similar spirit that misfortune had averted the career for which he was moulded; and surrendered himself with what was felt a rather fine suppression of repining to the obscure but untaxing career of a country gentleman. This life was diversified by experience of more arduous nature. Mrs Blackwood was unable to be reconciled to the anomaly of public qualities withdrawn from the general advantage; and having strong feelings upon temperance and the deplorable significance of the spread of Roman Catholicism, was wont to urge him to the use of his accepted rhetorical gifts, upon which her views had an unwonted concurrence with those of relatives-inlaw. Further losses in substance having lessened facilities for country pleasures, he had greater resource to declamatory interests. Habit begot inclination; and brought into outline opinions in which he had acquiesced, in the same manner as in his own deliberative fitness; and the addressing of “meetings,” political, religious, and temperance, came to be the main interest of his leisure—in other words, of his life. Temperance and religion encroached upon politics, as being less exacting mentally, and better adapted to the rather emotional and fervid discourse in which he felt his talents to lie; and at the time when this story opens he was recognised in Millfield as an amateur gentleman-evangelist, prepared to exercise his oratorical powers for the intangible advantage of his kind; in the chapel, the open air, or the building in the field; and whether at the request of the Wesleyan minister or in response to his own heart’s prompting. This course of experience, involving the mingling with people of a lower social and mental level on a footing at once of pre-eminence and genial assumption of equality, had not been without effect upon him; and in many respects he was altered from the days when he was designed for a member of parliament. His manner had developed in the direction of freedom rather than polish, and the air of the open-handed country squire was lessening. His greeting to cottagers had grown from his former “Good day,” to a “Well, friend, how goes the world with you and yours?” or “Well, Rogers, I shall expect to see you at the meeting on Tuesday next.” He was rather over-prone to enter into talk, with a view to turning it to temperance or religion, with strangers in the train; and his arguments to prove to the Reverend Cleveland Hutton that a high ritual really involved idolatry, were marked by more sincerity and emphasis than delicacy. But there was much that was gentle and genial about Mr Blackwood. Any labouring man of the district, even if he was a churchman, and could not but regard the Reverend Cleveland Hutton as the standing example of what human nature might attain, would have told you that he was “a real gentleman.” If he confounded the enjoyment of platform prominence with zeal for the souls of his fellows, and the emotions inspired by the sound of his own voice with the enthusiasm of inspiration, the confounding was innocent and honest: and to-day he forgot to view the Reverend Cleveland Hutton through the darkling haze cast by his high ritual, and stood simply with bowed head, and a heart that was full for his brother.

  Let us next observe the mourner behind Mr Blackwood, who is also broad-shouldered, and also one of the familiar figures of the neighbourhood’s gentry. That is Dr Cassell, the physician of the village and the district. On casting on him the first comprehensive glance of a stranger, you would hardly take him for a doctor. The indefinable air of the physician was wanting. His close-cropped hair and beard, his rubicund cheeks, and the general trend of his outward personality suggest the man of business. But he had as great a right to meet you on a physician’s standing as the most professional-looking of his brethren; for he was a physician not merely by virtue of choice and training, but by nature. As a boy of sixteen he had set a bone under the guidance of his instinct; and in the period to which he referred as “my commercial life”—in which, to divulge a fact which tended to escape himself, his influence on trade had been wielded indirectly through the faculties called into use by errands and accounts—his kindly amateur skill had won him some lasting gratitude. On his transition from commercial life to his present estate of prosperous country practitioner, though a part of his career as much as any other to his credit, he was not accustomed to dwell. His degrees were American; and his following of the text-books of an English medical course was marked by no pedantic devotion to the letter. His practical healing, it may be said, was not greatly less, that it was achieved under the direction of nature rather than of text-books.

  But he was not a man to be carried away by modern tendency to narrowness; and medicine was not the only subject in which he felt interest. He delighted in gathering knowledge under any head; preferring it in promiscuous fragments complete in themselves, and adapted for retailing—a process in which his delight was keener. His ideas of knowledge, and the traits which marked his imbibing it, though it can hardly be claimed for him that they were peculiar to himself, were not those common amongst gentlemen with degrees. If he wished to connect some ideas with a well-known name, which to him was merely a name—and there were a good many well-known names standing to him in this which he naturally felt a somewhat bald relation—he would commit to memory some anecdotes of the owner’s history, i
n preference to perusing any part of his works. He never alluded to the fact that he did not read imaginative literature, perhaps hardly realised he did not read it; but he avoided it by instinct, as barren of material suited for transmission in pithy fragments, and hence in all senses barren. He was, in a word, a “self-educated man” in the fullest sense of that subtle term. He was regarded in Millfield as a person of infinitely broad information, capable of pouring forth erudition upon any subject at a moment’s notice—a view accepted without question by Mr Blackwood, but not accepted at all by the Reverend Cleveland Hutton; who had himself obtained a second-class in classics at Oxford, and who had once, in talking with his wife, gone so far as to observe that Cassell was an illiterate, canting fool.

  The reason of the first of the epithets selected by Mr Hutton we have perhaps learnt enough of Dr Cassell to gather. The second leads us to consider him under a final head. He was a man whose personality had many sides; and in addition to his medical and encyclopaedic preeminence, he was the third of the trio of local religious leaders, of which the Reverend Cleveland Hutton and Mr Blackwood were the first and second. In the religious accommodation of the district he was not so fortunate as his colleagues; for he was neither a member of the Establishment nor of the Wesleyan body. What he was, it is a less simple matter to make clear; and resort must be had to his own account of his abstract experience. He was accustomed to begin from the point where, at the age of twenty - seven, he had been converted, and to pass to a stage at which he had become a Plymouth Brother. From this body, for some scruple of conscience upon which he was vague, he had later seceded, though he always retained a tenderness for it, referring to its members collectively as “the brethren”; and at the time when this story opens, he had reached, at the age of thirty - nine, the emancipated stage of holding worship with his wife in his dining-room. His religious attitude was simpler, and may be given with more exactness, than might be presumed from the trouble of meeting its needs. The teachings of the Bible, interpreted according to the letter and without the commentator’s aid,—he thought the tendency to put the word of man before that of divine revelation one of the gravest signs of the times,—formed the larger part; and the remainder consisted of an antipathy to Roman Catholicism. The doctor’s horror of Roman Catholicism is entitled to a word. It was not an everyday, easy horror. It had a subtlety and force of its own. Mohammedans, Buddhists, and worshippers of wood and stone were in his eyes simply mistaken races; obstinately mistaken perhaps, and inexplicably ungracious in their reception of evangelising offices; but nevertheless brother-men, unfortunate in knowledge and environment, and very fit objects for missionary effort. To members of the Romish Church his attitude was one of utter condemnation; which never faltered to the extent of weakly admitting reason in the place of dogmatism; and which extended to any truckling or pandering in the shape of over-broad views upon religious tolerance, or high ritual on the part of clergymen; and even caused him to look askance at the little gold cross which dangled on the waistcoat of the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. That his intercourse with Mr Hutton was confined to his medical capacity it is hardly needful to state; but there had been an occasion on which he felt urged to transcend the professional boundary, and send the latter an anonymous postcard—we must remember in judging him that his early experience had not been that which is usual to professional gentle men,—asking him what justification he had, even granted that he felt entire indifference on his own ultimate and infinite prospects, for extending this callousness to those of others.

  Dr Cassell’s claim to be held a religious leader rested on his willingness—more exactly, perhaps, eagerness—to “speak” on religious subjects in the building in the field, whenever occasion demanded, or, with further concession to exactitude, permitted; to as large an audience as previous notices on its walls, and hints offered in person on professional rounds could gather. This leaning was a natural strain on his amity with Mr Blackwood; and might have put an end to it, had it rested on foundations whose undermining was possible. Happily it did not. Mr Blackwood and Dr Cassell stood in an indissoluble relation. Each was the other’s chief repository for his recurring effluence of thought and opinion. Each had the same views upon Roman Catholicism—though Mr Blackwood could not but regard his friend as somewhat lacking in the gift of charity in his attitude to definite persons of this persuasion;—and the same fondness for repeating them, and resignation in hearing them repeated. Moreover, Mr Blackwood found a revelling-ground for his controversial talents in the winning of Dr Cassell to enthusiasm for Temperance; for which the latter’s tolerant sympathy was prevented from taking a fervid form by the relation of wine to his personal habits. He also combated his tendency to be what he considered somewhat narrow and over-literal, and regardless of the bearing of the context in his interpretation of isolated texts—not that Mr Blackwood had leanings to the over-broad in such matters, or ever faltered in his position as regards the higher criticism. Dr Cassell on his part found his neighbour a faithful believer in himself as a qualified retailer of tit-bits of knowledge; appreciative of their interest, and never acquainted with them beforehand, and, if not an eager, a resigned and considerately responsive auditor of anecdotes.

  The other local families of not ungentle blood were chiefly members of the church; holding the relation of friendship only to Mr Hutton, merely of patients to Dr Cassell, and hardly any relation to Mr Blackwood; to whose mind in their turn they had a negligible bearing on things in their practical aspect, since such was the extent of their connection with the meeting-house and the chapel. Mr Hutton was held by most of them in strong esteem; Mr Blackwood in half contemptuous disregard; and Dr Cassell in views so various, that the best to be done is to quote two typical comments uttered one morning within an hour of each other,—a gentleman observing, that any skill Cassell might have in physic was balanced by his unprofessional trick of obtruding his grandmother’s notions; and a lady, that “the doctor” was such a dear friend and counsellor—really as good as a physician and a clergyman put together.

  Now the moment may be meet for a word of warning given in kindness, lest there occur any waste of superior sentiment. Upon Mr Blackwood and Dr Cassell would be wasted both the disdain of philosophy and the indulgence of charity. They would have been as proof against the one as oblivious of the other. Let us think of them, simply, that they are of a race which has lived straightly and is dying hard; and whose death, if it marks a progressive step in our vulgar dogmatics, must rob our kind—if not of its most beneficent—of its most ingenuous and blithe. For it were idle to try and bring home with what exquisite innocent experience they would mount the extemporised platform in the building in the field—the subtle delectation involved in the staying of the cravings of the inward self, in its rarest and happiest union, with a sense of suppressing, and being known to suppress that self in disinterested effort; or to scan the present or past for men of gentler domestic living, and doings more cleanly and kind. Let us follow them down the country road as far as their ways are the same: for the burial service has come to its close; its rustic attendants are dispersing in gossiping groups; and the Reverend Cleveland Hutton and the Reverend James Hutton are walking up the path that leads from the churchyard to the parsonage.

  “Poor Hutton!” said Mr Blackwood, in the loud emphatic voice which he employed when he felt he was giving the gist of a matter—“poor Hutton! This has been about as great a blow to him as any he could have had. We shall see him altered, I expect—I expect we shall see him altered.”

  “Yes,” said Dr Cassell, who did not excel in conversational parts, unless they were employed in an amiably didactic direction—“yes, yes, that is so. That can hardly be otherwise.”

  “Well,” continued Mr Blackwood in the same tone, “a funeral is a solemn thing—a solemn thing. Whatever our religion is, and whatever opinions we have on other subjects, that is the same for us all. A funeral is a universally solemn thing.”

  “Curiously enough,” said Dr
Cassell, coming to a pause in the road, as was his wont when in the grip of the didactic spirit; and employing his didactic tone, which was marked by pauses tending to occur at unnatural junctures, and had a peculiar, neutral sound as if he had withdrawn his own personality from it; “curiously enough; it is not universally solemn. Among some early races—I do not recollect at this moment exactly to what nations they belonged—it is, or rather it was, the custom to rejoice over death and to mourn at birth. It would seem rather—dissentient with our notions, would it not?”

  “Ah,” said Mr Blackwood, walking on, “there is a great deal of truth underlying that notion—a great deal of truth, I daresay. Those old ancients could have taught us a great deal—there’s no doubt of that. When we mourn at death, we mourn for ourselves—there is no getting out of that. But still a funeral is a solemn thing in every way—at any rate for those who are left behind to see it; there is no getting out of that either.”