The Master Craftsman

Thence I proceeded straight to Robert. Man, I discovered, is in these matters more difficult than woman. Pride, to begin with—you shall see how horrid an obstacle was pride. Never before had I understood the ecclesiastical hatred of pride. I went about my business in the grand or diplomatic style. That is, I concealed the real object, and worked round to it. I believe that it is always easy to deceive a strong mind. That is to say, it is a part of strength to proclaim a purpose and to march straight towards it. It is your weak, knock-kneed persons who, having always to crawl and wriggle for themselves, see through the wrigglings of some and divine the intentions of others.

Robert was at work, of course. Nobody ever found him doing nothing. He looked up, welcomed his visitor, and carefully covered his papers. He never liked anyone to know what he was forging and contriving.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘let us talk for half an hour. Then we will go and get some dinner; after that we will stroll about. What are you going to do this evening?’

‘I thought of going to Lady Frances’s.’

‘Good. You see her pretty often, don’t you?’

‘Very often. It is quite impossible to see her too often.’

‘Quite impossible,’ I replied mechanically, watching his face. He was nervous when he spoke; he took up things and put them down. I had never seen him nervous before.

‘I wonder if there are many other women like her,’ he said slowly.

‘There is no other woman like her in the whole world, my cousin.’

‘She understands—that is the extraordinary thing—she understands everything; an argument; a position; a combination: one hasn’t to explain or to talk about it—she understands. If she were in the House, she would lead it. She suggests a policy; she confers with Ministers; she catches the drift of the public mind; she knows how far they can go, and what they should attempt. George, I declare that I never before imagined it possible that such a woman could be found!’

All these things he had said before. Robert was not accustomed so to repeat himself.

‘And now you have found her, Robert, and she is your fast friend. Of course, I’ve known her all my life; she has become a kind of sister, you know, by long habit; but my admiration of her is quite equal to yours. And have you nothing to say about her beauty?’

‘She is the most perfect woman I have ever seen,’ said Robert, his voice dropping, because when a man feels strongly on such a subject he doesn’t like to talk loudly about it. ‘Tall and queenly: she looks born to command’—the quality which he most desired for himself he must needs admire in a woman.

‘But her beauty, Robert? Her eyes—her face—her features.’

‘Yes. I think less of them—that is, of course, they belong to her—they make up the greatness and the splendour of her. If it were not for her beauty, she would not be half so queenly.’

‘She advises you in your public work; does she talk to you ever of your more private affairs?’

‘She knows my history, such as it is, of course. I was not going to her under false pretences. Besides, there is nothing to be ashamed of. I told her at the outset that I am but a Craftsman—a Master Craftsman.’

‘Have you told her that you once—a good long time ago—promised to marry Isabel?’

Robert changed colour. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘There was no need to tell her that.’

‘I think, if I were you, Robert, I should tell her.’

‘Why? What is the use of telling her such an insignificant fact?’

‘Insignificant? Your marriage an insignificant fact to your best friend? Why, Robert, it is the most significant fact in the world. All your future depends upon your marriage.’

‘It will not come off for years; I must make my position first. You must know I cannot take upon me for ever so long the burden of a wife—and a wife who would only pull me down instead of helping me up.’

‘I know that very well. You want a wife who would help you up.’

‘What does Isabel understand about these things? Nothing. What does she care? Nothing.’ His voice showed the bitterness within him. ‘Has she shown the least interest in my ambitions? Why, from the very first she has been content to be my clerk when she might have been my companion.’

‘Come—come—you have never given her any encouragement. You never suffered her to think of being a companion. She has always been afraid of you. She is afraid of you still. Robert, I shouldn’t like to marry a woman who was afraid of me.’

So it began all over again; but this time with results.

‘There is no question of like or dislike, unfortunately.’

‘I would let her go before the wedding-bells began to ring.’

‘You forget, George. I have promised to marry her. I will keep my promise—some day.’

‘All very well. But there is her side of the question. Is it fair or right to keep this girl waiting for you year after year—living almost alone in that corner of the earth, wasting her youth, wasting her beauty, longing for love, every year widening the distance between you, while you chafe at the chain you drag and she droops and languishes in bondage?’

‘I must keep my word,’ he repeated obstinately. ‘And, besides, Isabel promised to wait for me as long as I choose. She knows she has got to wait. As for my marrying now, she knows, and you know, that it is impossible. What have I got to live upon? The money which you paid for your share, and about two hundred pounds a year for my share. Do you suppose that I can marry and live among my new friends on two or three hundred pounds a year?’

‘Then let Isabel go,’ I repeated, as obstinate as my cousin for once.

‘If I do, who is to protect the child? Am I to turn her, penniless, into the street? No, George, I am bound to her; and I must make the best of it. Otherwise——’ His head fell.

I became more hopeful. When a man—any man, the most obstinate of men—talks about making the best of it, he would certainly like to get rid of it.

‘A man like you, Robert,’ I went on after a bit, saying the thing which was in his mind at the time (there’s a diplomatic move for you; always, if you can, make use of the other man’s own mind), ‘wants above all things a wife who will stand by him, and think for him, and advance him by her influence and her personality. The wife for you, or for any man with such ambitions as yours, should supplement your qualities; she should be well-born, well-mannered, influential; well-considered, beautiful, and rich.’

‘Should be—yes, should be. But there is only one such woman that I know of——’

‘Yes. There is only one that I know of. Her name is Lady Frances.’

He sprang to his feet and began to walk about.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘I believe you’ve got something or other up your sleeve. Out with it, man. Don’t let us have any fencing here.’

‘I mean that with such a wife as Lady Frances to back you up, and with your own abilities to help you on, you would be quite certain to step into your place in the front before very long—far sooner, Robert, than you can hope to do by your unaided efforts. That is all I mean.’

‘It is impossible. There is, first—Isabel in the way. You are a good fellow to think about me—I don’t believe any other man in the world would do so much for me. But no——’

‘Never mind Isabel for the moment. Let us talk only about yourself. Do you—do you——’ I remembered the stipulation in the other engagement about the foolishness of kisses: did the man, when he made that stipulation, understand, the least in the world, the meaning of love? Had he ever felt any kind of love at all for poor Isabel? and I put a leading question: ‘Have you the—the kind of regard for Lady Frances which you ought to have for the woman you would marry? I don’t mean the kind of regard which you have for Isabel, because she is not the woman you would marry.’

‘Man!’ he cried passionately; ‘you don’t know—I haven’t told you. Nobody would think it possible that I should have the presumption.’

One has seen the passion of love represented on the stage, with exaggeration, as we think everything on the stage must be exaggerated. One has read of the passion of love in the older poets, with their hot flames, and darts, and swoons, and fierce consuming fires, and ecstatics, and raptures—exaggeration, we say. One reads of love in modern novels, and sometimes we ask how these writers can set down the exaggeration of passion with which they do sometimes regale their readers. Henceforth I declare that I shall never witness a love scene on the stage, never read an Elizabethan love poem, never read a burning page in a novel, and be able to call it exaggeration. Because the confession, the scene, the monologue, the unfolding of a heart, which now I witnessed, proved to me that there can be no exaggeration in poet and dramatist. Imagination cannot cross the bounds of possibility in love. They spoke of flames and fires, because there are no words with which to speak of the strength of the passion which may sometimes seize and hold the heart.

Yet only in the nobler natures, in the strongest men, and in the men who have never known before the smarting of love, nor wasted the passion that is in them on objects unworthy.

This man, hitherto so cold to love, so contemptuous of women, now raged about the room like a caged wild beast. It seems a breach of confidence only to hint at his broken voice, his distorted face, his features aflame, half shamed, while he confessed the passion which possessed him.

‘George!’ he cried, ‘I worship her. Yes, for every quality that she possesses—for her quickness, for her sympathy, for her insight, for her beauty, for all, for all, I worship her.’

‘You do well,’ I said weakly.

But he regarded not what I said.

‘Good heavens!’ he went on; ‘I count the hours between my visits. I make a thousand excuses to go there. When I reach the door, I remember that I was there only yesterday, and I creep away again. I lie awake at nights thinking of her. The only time when I am not thinking of her is when I am at work, for then I am doing what I know she would approve.’

I murmured something, I know not what.

‘I confess to you, George, I want no other music than her voice. I think I could gaze upon her face and in her eyes for ever, and never grow tired. Only to pass other women in the street makes me angry to think that they look so small and common.’

‘They are small and common, perhaps, because they are meant for small and common lovers.’

‘If you come to think about her beauty, why, I hardly ever think of it except that it is a part of her, always a part of her; and she is always in my mind.’

‘Poor Robert! Yet perhaps there may be hope; no woman is so far above you as to be impossible.’

‘Hope? How can there be hope? Don’t talk nonsense!’

‘I should think—but, then, I am not a woman—that love like this, so real, so full of worship, does not come often in the way of a woman. I can tell you, if the fact afford you any hope, that Frances has refused men by scores. She will never marry any man—I am quite sure; she has told me as much—unless he is a strong and able man. Why should such a woman give herself away to a man of the lower nature?’

‘What hope can that bring me? George——’ And here he broke out into a torrent of passionate cries and ejaculations. For my own part, I kept myself in hand. I let him bring it all out. Every ejaculation, every word of the confession, strengthened my position.

‘Always in my mind,’ he concluded, throwing himself into a chair, ‘always in my mind, day and night. There! now you know!’

‘Yes, now I know. I have guessed as much a long time. Of course it was inevitable. You were bound to fall in love with her, from the beginning. That was certain.’

‘I might ask why you took me, then, if it was certain. But I don’t ask. For I would rather go on hopelessly all my life, than never meet and speak with her at all. Yes, I have had to thank you for many things, George, but for nothing so much as this.’

‘Thank you, Robert,’ I said. ‘Well, you are in love at last. That is the cardinal fact. Poor Isabel! You never thought of her like this.’

‘Never. Poor child! Don’t imagine that I ever thought of Isabel in this way at all. I was only sorry for her. I thought that her father was dying—and she was a very good clerk—so I said I would marry her, partly to keep her on as a clerk, and partly to protect her from poverty. It didn’t seem to me that it would make any difference to my future. But as for love! How could one love a girl and despise her for her intellect?’

‘You have no cause to despise Isabel,’ I replied, with some wrath. ‘Let me tell you that. You never took the trouble to consider her intellect at all. Well, the long and the short of it is that, whatever else happens, you must let her go.’

‘No, she must release herself. I will never go back from my word.’

‘Well then, Robert, here is a bargain. If I bring you her release—by her own wish, written in her own hand; if I show you that she will not suffer but rather gain in the long-run for her release; if I can assure you that she will be happier for the present by being released—will you accept that letter of hers and let her go?’

Anybody else would have understood at once what I meant. Robert did not. He had not yet acquired the habit of thinking about other people and their motives and minds. That would come by contact with a sympathetic woman. He told me afterwards that it seemed to him the very last thing possible, for me to fall in love with Isabel—whom he himself could not love—and to desire to marry a girl without any knowledge of society. Perhaps, being new to the thing, he thought at this moment too much about society. Perhaps I knew a great deal more about society, and therefore thought too little of its advantages. Besides, I was now a boat-builder, quite disconnected from society, and I really never asked whether Isabel was a woman who might be relied upon to shine at her own receptions, and to receive at her dinner-table the most distinguished people in political circles.

‘You make three conditions,’ he said. ‘Every one of these seems to me impossible. Yet you have a way of your own. I do not believe that Isabel will send me a release; after these five years she has grown accustomed to consider me as her future husband. She moves in a groove; she considers me as her guardian, and her father as my dependent. No; Isabel will never release me—she cannot.’

‘But,’ I insisted, ‘supposing these conditions to be fulfilled?’

‘Oh, if they are fulfilled, of course I am the last man in the world to keep a woman against her wish. If she would rather marry a foreman of works——’

There was the least touch of coldness; perhaps no man, not even my cousin Robert, likes to be dismissed by any woman.

‘That is settled, then. And now to return to Lady Frances.’

He shook his head. ‘Oh, that is hopeless.’

‘I am not so sure. Consider the thing from a political point of view. You offer yourself, with your career; she brings herself, with all that it means—an immense contribution. Perhaps she may think in her modesty that your side of the balance lifts up her side.’

Robert shook his head again, but with less firmness. The shaking of a man’s head is a most expressive gesture, because there are so many shades in it.

‘Next, we will consider the situation from a personal point of view. Frances is in every way admirable and delightful, it is true.’

‘Yes,’ he sighed—‘admirable and delightful.’

‘But you, my cousin, are not a bad specimen of a man—well set up, and well looking, and well mannered. And you are a masterful kind of creature, and women admire masterfulness in a man. And you have already shown cleverness, and women admire cleverness.’

‘Yes. It is all very well, but——’

‘And then the lady is a young widow, her own mistress; free to please herself, and she has shown herself difficult to please. She is wealthy, and——’

Here he jumped up again. He was very jumpy this afternoon. ‘Yes,’ he cried; ‘she is wealthy, and there—there you have the whole difficulty. We will suppose that she might possibly get over the differences of birth and rank, and all that, because they mean nothing.’ You perceive that Robert was as yet imperfectly acquainted with the true inwardness of things—birth and rank to mean nothing? Dear me! And to hear these words from my own pupil! ‘They mean nothing,’ he repeated. ‘She is the daughter of an Earl, and I am a boat-builder. What do I care about that, eh?’ He turned upon me quite fiercely. ‘As if that could be any real obstacle! I am a man, I say’—he snorted in his wrath—‘I say, a man in whom a woman may take pride. I know that very well. I believe that even Lady Frances—though she is all that she is—might take a pride in me. Lesser women,’ he added, with his usual arrogance, ‘would. Of course they would.’

‘Well, what bee have you got in your bonnet now?’

‘Can’t you understand? You say she is rich. I know she is rich. And that’s the real obstacle. As for the rest, I have thought over all that you said by myself. Only I liked to hear it from you as well. It’s the money, George.’

‘What about the money? Now, don’t go raising foolish ghosts about Frances’s money. What if she is rich? What does that matter?’

‘I have tried to get over it, and I can’t. One must keep some self-respect. George, how would you like to live in your wife’s palace—your wife’s, not your own?’

‘Her country house isn’t a palace.’ But it is, as Robert knew.

‘How would you like to be every day sitting at your wife’s table, not your own; drinking your wife’s wine, not your own; waited on by your wife’s servants, not your own; spending the money that your wife—your wife—chose to give you? No, I could not—I could not—say no more about it. I would rather remain as I am, and go on thinking about her without hope all my life, than marry her for her money—for her money! Pah!’

‘If you come to that, you might just as well say to another woman, “How would you like, all your life, going about enjoying honour—not your own, but your husband’s; a name not your own, but your husband’s?”’

‘Nonsense!’ said Robert; ‘the things are not parallel. Of course a woman may take all that a man has to give.’

‘And a man all that a woman has to give.’

What was it my solicitor had told me? ‘Marry money—marry money.’ And I despised that advice, and now I was trying to make Robert do just exactly that very same thing. Well, it was quite certain that this proud, independent person would never become a dependent on his wife. Fortunately I had a card up my sleeve.

‘You are perhaps right,’ I said, with assumed thoughtfulness. ‘You could never become that unhappy creature—the man who lives upon his wife’s money. You have got some hundreds a year, however.’

‘And she has how many thousands a year? My whole income would not pay my share of the servants.’

‘Then, again, a man and wife are not obliged to have equal fortunes. If one is a little richer than the other——’

‘A little—oh, he says a little!’

‘Go on; you will give me a chance presently.’

‘Let her give away all but two hundred pounds a year; then we should start on equal terms.’

‘No, because you would have still before you your ambition, with its solid side, and she would have nothing left. In ten years’ time you might be drawing five thousand pounds a year official salary, and she have nothing more than her three hundred. No, Robert; the equitable way would be to reckon your future prospects and your future position as an asset worth ten thousand pounds a year, or anything you please a year.’

Robert shook his head. ‘An asset is something that can be realized. No one would advance a farthing on the security of my prospects. As a business man, George, you really ought to know by this time what an asset means.’

‘You are not going to a pawnbroker or a bank. You have an asset, I say, that in a certain lady’s eyes would outweigh all her own advantages.’

‘All the same, George,’ he replied doggedly, ‘I shall not stoop to live upon my wife.’

‘You are nothing but a perverse, obstinate, and pig-headed bourgeois. You had better come back to Wapping. Come, then; I will meet you on your own ground. You admit that a few thousands more or less matter nothing.’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. All I do know is, that I’ve got about two hundred pounds a year, and that Lady Frances has got twenty thousand pounds a year, and that the thing is impossible on that ground alone.’

‘It isn’t impossible on that ground, if you could rise to the situation. You have done very well, Robert, so far; but you ought to throw off the last vestige of the shop.’

‘What the devil has the shop got to do with Lady Frances and her money?’

‘Why, you are not going into partnership! Her money would be simply a means of keeping you in a set of people and style of life necessary for your ambitions. It is a detail. You feel that you belong to that kind of life. You don’t want to use her money for gambling, or for horse-racing, or anything at all. The roof, which would perhaps be hers, and the food, and the wine, and the rest of it, would be nothing—nothing at all—in comparison with the solid advantages of society and influence. You ought to rise above such considerations, really. I am ashamed that you are tied down by such unworthy considerations. They belong to Wapping-in-the-Ouse, believe me, not to Piccadilly.’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘I cannot live upon my wife,’ he said doggedly. ‘Wapping or Piccadilly, I care not where I live, so that I do not live upon my wife.’

‘Well, then——’

‘Say no more about it, George; she is as far from me now as if I were at Wapping. I am sorry I told you. Yet, I don’t know; it’s a relief to tell somebody, and you are the only man to whom I ever told anything. Meantime, there’s an end. She doesn’t suspect, at any rate.’

I was for the moment diplomatically doubtful. I might tell him at once of the wonderful find that would clear away one obstacle at least. But, then, I knew so well beforehand the lofty scorn with which Frances would sweep away such an obstacle; how she would make him understand the paltry nature of her own wealth compared with the riches and abundance of his own abilities; how she would make him ashamed of his own weakness in not perceiving this fact for himself, and how he could become converted and resigned and submissive, this strong, proud man. Knowing all this, I would not tell him—yet.

‘There are,’ I summed up, ‘three obstacles in the way. There is Isabel. Very good; you shall be released. Oh, I am not guessing. I tell you plainly that she does not care for you, except as a generous benefactor. You can’t marry a girl who is only grateful. You have never made love to her.’

‘Of course not; I had no time.’

‘And therefore you cannot expect her to be in love with you. Moreover, my dear cousin, I have reason to believe that, if she were free to-day, she would be engaged to-morrow.’

‘Oh! To some little clerk in the docks, I suppose. Isabel has no greater ambition than that.’

‘Perhaps.’ He had no suspicion at all, yet he knew that I had been wandering about with this girl all the summer evenings. ‘Girls,’ I said, ‘are sometimes singularly free from ambition. Some of them want nothing but love and a tranquil home; they are easily contented.’

‘I suppose that is so,’ he said with pity. ‘And so Isabel really wants to be released. That is the meaning of your mysterious offer, is it?’

‘At least, she has always been afraid of you, as well as grateful. She would never want to be released unless she knew that you wished it. I shall fill her heart with happiness to-night when I tell her what you really want.’

‘Then let her be happy—with her dock clerk.’ His face cleared immediately, and he laughed. ‘Poor child!’ he said. ‘She was a good clerk and a good accountant. How should her mind soar any higher?’

‘As for the other obstacle, Robert, that objection, I tell you again, on the score of wealth—it is unworthy of you; it is also unpractical. You ought to be quite above such considerations.’

‘All the same, George,’ he repeated, ‘to live upon my wife would choke me.’

‘You shall not be choked, my dear Robert. This obstacle, too, shall be removed. Trust me—believe me—when I tell you, on my word of honour, that it shall be removed.’

I had, I say, the greatest confidence in Lady Frances and in the arguments which I knew she would employ to break down this heart of stone; but there was also the additional comfort of feeling that the bag of precious jewels was in that seaman’s chest. How beautiful is the working out of the Doctrine of Chances! When one takes up a hand at cards there are millions to one against the particular hand that turns up; yet it does turn up—it always turns up—in the face of those overwhelming odds. So with that bag of diamonds. Everybody in the Wapping branch of the Burnikel family had examined that chest—turned it upside down, taken everything out—yet had never found that hiding-place. If it had been found at any time it would have changed the fortune and altered the future of the whole family. Robert would have been impossible. Had Robert been born, brought up and trained otherwise, he would have been quite another Robert. He would have understood, for instance—which he has never yet perfectly succeeded in understanding—the audacity of his ambition, and, as it would seem to those who know the world—but not to himself—its impossibility. Why do young men of obscure birth and poverty succeed so often and so greatly? Because they do not understand the audacity of their own ambition. ‘I will win scholarships; I will go to Cambridge; I will be Senior Wrangler; I will be Master of my college; I will be Vice-Chancellor of the University,’ says the lad of parts, low down in the world. The lad of parts higher up understands that the very flower of the English-speaking youth are his rivals; that he must beat the best; that he must actually be the best; and he is discouraged. For climbing—for nerve and hand and eye—the poor boy has a far better chance than the rich. All our boys, before they are born, ought to pray for poverty—with brains and courage.

All these fine reflections passed through my head between my last speech and Robert’s reply. He held out his hand. ‘Trust you, George?’ he said. ‘Isn’t it rather late in the day to ask that question? But how—how can that obstacle be removed?’

‘I shall not tell you. Now go on without any misgiving, and conquer—if you can. Only, Robert, pray remember, this is not quite the same thing as the other venture, you know. Then you had to do with a schoolgirl—a child; now you have an equal. You cannot understand; you must stoop to woo, even you, O Samson.’

‘Only an equal? An equal? Don’t speak like a fool, George—you who know her!’

‘You think that way at last. You have found someone to whom you are not equal. So much the better. But—I say, how about the foolishness of fondling and kisses?’

‘Oh!’ There rose upon his cheek the roseate hues of early dawn, yet he was six-and-twenty. ‘Of course this is different—quite different. Isabel was only a schoolgirl, as you say. That kind of thing would only unsettle her at that age. This is quite different.’