The Master Craftsman

I gave her new music, some books of songs, some books of poetry, and some novels of a kind that I thought she would like. I filled the windows with flowers, insomuch that Robert groaned; I gave her flowers for the table. In the evening I took her on the river for an hour of the fresh strong air which sweeps up with the flow and down with the ebb; and on Saturday I took her for a little journey into the country.

I wanted real country, not cockney country, though that is not to be despised. Isabel was clad, I well remember, in a summer dress of some soft and light material. Perhaps it was not trimmed exactly as a Bond Street dressmaker would approve. She wore a hat which had been bought in the neighbourhood of Aldgate, yet it was a pretty hat; and with a touch of colour round her neck, and a flower at her throat, she looked a very dainty damsel indeed. And, oh, the blindness, and the coldness, and the stony-heartedness of her fiancé, who would have no kissing, and fondling, and foolishness. In this respect, though we were sprung from the same stock, I am not ashamed to confess that in my principles, not to speak of practice, we were hopelessly at variance.

‘Permit me to observe, Isabel,’ I remarked judicially, ‘that you look very nice, and that your dress becomes you.’

‘Oh!’ She coloured with pleasure; she was so unused to compliments, you see. ‘I am so glad you like it. If you had not made Robert give up all that work I should not have found time to make it.’

‘Well, I thought of taking you by rather a long journey, if you don’t mind that—to Rickmansworth. Then you shall walk through a lovely park that I know of, and then we shall be picked up by a trap and drive to Chenies, there to dine, and go home in the cool of the evening. Will that suit you, Isabel?’

‘Anything suits me that suits you, George; only I am afraid——’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘I am afraid of you. Oh, not that way’—she did not explain what way—‘only you belong to another world almost. I am afraid that I shall be such a stupid companion. I don’t even talk your language; and you always look so happy. I am ashamed to be seen with anyone who looks so happy.’

I laughed. Afraid of me! As if any woman in the world could ever be afraid of me! ‘Why,’ I told her, ‘I go in perpetual awe and adoration of all women. I look happy because you condescend to walk with me. Women are all goddesses. I worship in fear——’ So she smiled, and resigned herself to fate, and we set off.

From Wapping to Rickmansworth is a long journey: it takes an hour and a half. In the underground Isabel began to talk again about Robert.

‘I am ashamed,’ she said, ‘of having told you what I did last Monday; I am ashamed of feeling so—afraid of Robert. You will think me the most unworthy person in the world when I tell you that it is gratitude—the deepest gratitude—that ought to bind us to Robert. Did he ever tell you how we came to his house? No? Well, I will tell you, and then you will understand what I mean. It is five years since we came to him. I was sixteen then. We are his cousins. He could not get on with his mother. She was a very grand lady—I remember her—who dressed in black silk, and wore a large gold chain, and wanted to rule everybody. And Robert was the master, and he intended to be master, in which he was quite right. So they couldn’t agree, and his mother went out to her other sons in Tasmania. Then Robert remembered us. Just then it was, oh, a terrible time with us. I used to lie awake crying and praying for help. And Robert brought the help.’

‘What was the trouble?’

‘Father had a stroke—you see how lame he is—and he couldn’t go to sea any more, and there was no money at all.’

‘Oh, but that was terrible.’

‘Yes. They were trying to get father into the Trinity Almshouse, and I was to go and do something—become a barmaid, perhaps. Then Robert found us out. “Come and live with me,” he said. And so we came. I was to be his secretary, and to keep the books and the house.’

‘And that you have continued ever since. Yes. And you have never been outside Wapping once all that time?’

‘Oh yes; now and then I go as far as Aldgate.’

‘Have you been into any kind of society? Have you had any kind of change?’

‘No; we have no visitors here, and I have been too busy to think of change.’

‘That is just it; you have been too busy. Don’t talk to me of gratitude, Isabel. Robert has taken from you more than he has given. Not that he is to be blamed. Robert, you see, is such a strong sort that he never wants any change, and he thinks that nobody else does. Why, you’ve lost what ought to have been your happiest days. Why, you ought to have been a princess.’

‘Please, George——’ She stopped me, turning red. ‘Remember that, whatever I have lost, I have never heard foolish compliments.’

‘If you call that foolish—— But I refrain. So, little one, you entered upon the boat-building business; and you saw Robert, naturally, every day.’

‘Yes; all day long.’

‘And he—he—I mean you—presently accepted him.’

She blushed again. ‘Yes; he said he must have a wife some time or other, and he would marry me. But he had a great deal to do first, and I must not expect him to—to——’

‘I know. The most singular limitation of an engagement on record.’

‘If I could make him happy, how could I refuse? Besides, I was afraid to refuse. And we owed everything to him. But it won’t have to be for a great while yet—not for years.’

The train arrived at the station. I ordered a conveyance to meet us at Chorley Common, and I took Isabel by a way that I knew through the Park.

There is nothing in the world, I believe, lovelier than an English park in early summer. Wild places—lofty mountains, tall peaks, dark ravines, broad glaciers, black forests, cliffs white, cliffs red, cliffs black—touch another note. The tranquillity, the quiet beauty of the Park, fills the soul with rest and calm. The Alps do not call forth the same kind of emotion as a stately park.

I do not know how long it was since Isabel had been in the country. She looked about her with a kind of stupor. There were tall trees, not in lines, but single; all with their lower branches at the same height above the sward—the height, that is, to which the deer can reach; the foliage was at its best; the turf was green and soft and elastic; a skylark was singing up above; a blackbird was repeating his pretty, tuneful lay close beside us; there was a confused chatter from the bridge; the buttercups covered the low-lying part; beyond us ran the river, the little river Chess, winding among the meadows. The air that fanned the soft cheeks of the girl breathed refreshment. We were quite alone save for the birds and the trees, and afar off a herd of deer.

‘What do you think of it, Isabel?’

She made answer with the simple interjection which is used for everything beyond the power of speech. There is no other word in any language half so useful or half so expressive, because, you see, it expresses every possible form of emotion—love, pain, pleasure, hope, fear, admiration, joy, despair.

‘Come,’ I said; ‘we must not stay too long.’

‘Oh! But not to hurry. It is wonderful; to think that these lovely places are all around us and we never see them! George, to live all the time in that corner and never to see these things! Oh, is it life?’

‘No, Isabel, it is not life: it is prison. But courage, we have broken prison. The doors are open. We shall see lots of things rare and beautiful now. This is only a beginning.’

So we walked on more slowly, because this part of the Park is not very big. In order to show off my country lore, I carried on a little running commentary. ‘That whistle is the blackbird’s; that is the thrush; did you hear the cuckoo? You must run for luck. That is the blackcap; that is the complaint of the willow warbler.’

‘You know them all,’ she said jealously, ‘and I know not a single one. Oh, how ignorant I am of everything—everything!’

‘I will teach you. I am sure you will be an apt scholar. You shall learn the flowers, too—the names of all the flowers; I have got some good by being born in the country. I can teach you the birds, and their song and their flight; and the flowers, and their seasons and their history; and the trees and the leaves. We had a country house once; there was another one near us, with a huge park, where I used to wander with Frances.’

‘Who was Frances?’

‘Lady Frances was the daughter of the Earl of Clovelly, formerly Prime Minister. Her mother was a great political lady who had a salon.’

‘What is a salon?’

‘She received in her house the men of the party; encouraged the deserving, rebuked the lazy, and strengthened those who wobbled. You still do not understand? I will explain further, not now. Briefly this, Frances and I were great friends always, and we learned those things when we were children together.’

‘Are you engaged to Lady Frances?’ she asked sharply.

‘Oh dear no! There is no question of engagement between us. We are like brother and sister. Frances is a young widow; if she were to marry again, it would be to a strong man, full of ambition, who would advance himself and enable her to become what her mother was.’

‘She should marry Robert, if she wants a strong man.’

‘Indeed, she might do worse. Now, Isabel, this is the wildest place anywhere round London; you are quite in the country; there are no houses to be seen, no roads, no railways, nothing but trees, and grass, and sky, and flowing river. Sit down on this trunk and rest, and don’t try to tell me how much you like it.’

We sat down on a fallen tree: the sunshine lay on the rippling waters where the light breeze here and there lifted the surface into a little crest of wave, or where it was broken by the leaping of a fish; there were wild ducks overhead flying in two straight lines that joined at a single duck, to make an angle of thirty degrees—not that Isabel asked what angle they made—and higher up was flying a pair of herons, their long legs stretched out behind them.

No one, I say, was in the Park; nor was there any sign or sound of any human creature: the leaves of spring were at their earliest and their loveliest; the chestnuts were in bloom; and the girl sat with hands folded in her lap, carried away by the spectacle of the abounding joy of spring. Perhaps for the first time in all her cribbed and cabined youth, she felt the full joy of life. It fell upon her in waves; it made her faint; it filled her with a new emotion. Shall we ever become too old to remember the joy of life in adolescence—the yearning after we know not what—the happiness of the sunshine, the air, the water, the green trees, the birds—the fulness and the sweetness and the innocence of it—the consciousness of understanding for the first time what life means—how happy it may be—if the gods permit—how glorious and how abundant are Nature’s gifts to bless the living? We cannot thus clothe the thoughts of the young with words; youth is hardly conscious of them. I am sure that Isabel could not describe the emotions that filled her soul. Words are only possible long after the thing itself is over and done with, and possible no longer. We who are old can never again feel that overwhelming, supreme, passionate joy of life; but we can remember—sometimes. When did it first fall upon you, dear reader? Like the Wesleyans, let us exchange experiences. Were you alone? Was there a companion to share your passions? Was it on some bright day in early summer among woods and streams and the song of birds that this sense of an all-abundant nature and a life capable of feeling all, embracing all, receiving all, fell upon you, and carried you for a brief space—a space all too brief—beyond yourself?

‘I have never seen this place before,’ she murmured, as if the place alone was the cause of this strange and unknown feeling, and as if she could not choose but say something.

‘We will come here again,’ I said.

For her face was flushed, and her eyes were brighter than was their wont, her hands were tightly clutched, and her lips were parted. She was in a highly-nervous condition when we started. Now she looked like one trying to repress some over-mastering emotion.

‘I have never dreamed; I have never thought,’ she continued.

‘You have lived too long in a dull house, Isabel.’

The words came from afar off; she heard nothing.

She sprang to her feet. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘I must run; I cannot sit still.’ She threw out her arms, she was carried away; she was drunk with the new-born joy of life. ‘I must sing.’ She lifted up her voice, her clear, full voice, and sang; and—wonderful to relate!—she sang the words of a hymn:

‘Isabel!’ I cried, ‘you are transformed!’

She was: not the finest actress in the whole world could so change herself in a moment of time; not the greatest Queen of Tragedy could so stand with outstretched arms, with flaming cheek and parted lips—as if to welcome and to drink in all—all—all that Nature had wherewith to bless the living. In that moment I discovered the ideal Isabel, the possible Isabel, the dream of the sculptor—a lovely dream, a divine ideal! For a moment I thought of the old worships—the worship of Nature; the worship of the Sun; the procession of the seasons—the pageant of the year; the votaress who was seized with the celestial rapture and sang words unintelligible and danced unearthly steps, and fell at the feet of the god; what was that old ecstasy but this strange extravagance, suddenly awakened in a girl rendered hysterical by long dulness and stupid work, and confinement and the repression of all that is natural in youth?

It lasted a moment only. Then her arms dropped and the colour went out of her cheek, and I caught her as she fell, and laid her gently on the grass. I ran down to the river and brought back a hat full of water, and touched her forehead with a few drops. She quickly recovered and sat up.

‘Where am I? What has happened?’ she cried. ‘Oh! what has happened?’

‘Nothing serious, Isabel. Keep quite quiet. The heat, or the sun, or the strangeness, was too much for you. Perhaps you had better lie back for a little.’

‘No—no——’ She got up. ‘I must have fainted. Why did I faint? Oh, I am so ashamed of myself! I cannot understand why I fainted.’

‘Well, Isabel, when an ancient Greek met the great god Pan in the forest, he instantly fell dead. So that you ought not to be surprised that you merely fainted when you first saw great Pan’s dominion. Will you rest a little longer?’

‘No; I am quite recovered. Let us go on, for fear I should faint again.’

So we walked on, through the rest of the Park and came out close to the common called Chorley. Here the carriage was waiting for us, and we drove the rest of the way.

Isabel was very silent. She lay back in the carriage, looking into the woods as we drove along the road. She was in a mood when the soul needs silence. Had I known that she would be so deeply moved, I think I should have hesitated to bring her to such a place. The mind of a maiden is too delicate an instrument for the rough hand of man. He cannot touch the strings, without fear of something snapping. But her cheek was touched with colour and her eyes with light.

We arrived at Chenies. There is a church here with tombs of the Russells. Isabel took no interest in them. There is an old manor-house, the most beautiful manor-house in England—a gem of a house, built of red brick, with creepers all over it, and a stately garden; a house to dream of. But Isabel cared nothing at all about the house, and showed no interest or curiosity in the noble House of Russell. There were the ruins of a small Religious House at the back. Isabel took no interest in the monks or nuns who once lived in this House, nor in the ruins, nor in the little reconstructions of the House which I attempted. But beside the ruins at the back there is a wood, and here we walked in the shade, looking out between the trees at the breadths of sunshine beyond, and up into the branches above at the gleaming sunlight, and between the leaves. She wanted nothing more than just the peace of the wood and the glory of the sunshine.

I tore her away at last. For the hour was seven, and there were lamb cutlets at the little Inn. And it was time for Masterful Man to assert himself.

It is a long way back, as it is a long way to come, and all the way back Isabel sat as one in a dream. I could not wake her out of the dream.

I left her at last at her own door.

‘We are home again,’ she said. ‘Thank you, oh! so much. It has come with me all the way home. I hope it will stay with me. Good-night, George.’

What had come with her? I believe she meant the new-born feeling of the beauty and the joy of the world.