Trimblerigg

HE woke from his dream to conditions favourable to peace of mind; a rippling sea, a sunny shore, and a day that promised to be cloudless. They breakfasted in a verandah looking seawards, the children seemed to miss something but said nothing; and Caroline’s manner showed an improved change. Reserve and deference mingled with tenderness when she spoke to him. When she suggested plans for the day she was shy and a little nervous: for now her conscience was troubled: she had Davidina on her mind, and was expecting the reply-telegram. She had sent off the message without consulting him, under what she now felt to be a misapprehension. If Davidina wired that she was coming she would have to break it to him; and fearing that the news would not please him, she put off the evil moment as long as possible. Her immediate anxiety was to get him out of the house before the arrival of the telegram.

This she managed to do: and all day nursed her guilty secret that Davidina would arrive by a late train to know what was the matter. And as a consequence, as much as possible she avoided him.

Meanwhile Mr. Trimblerigg was thinking. Immediate conditions were conducive to a quiet examination of the problem; but though temporarily at ease, he was not getting more reconciled to the prospect. He had been long accustomed to hear and speak of people being overtaken in sin; but it had never entered his mind that, by a similar involuntary capitulation to a stronger power, they could also be overtaken in goodness—still less in goodness of so conspicuous a character, attaching itself like a disease, independent of the will.

‘The white flower of a blameless life’ was a poetic phrase which, like that other about sin, had passed into the currency of the language: and mentally he had always been able to wear it, and feel the better for the consciousness that it was there. But it was a different matter when becoming visible and almost concrete, it turned into an evening primrose, catching him by the hair of his head, and refusing to let go.

Martin’s question, ‘Is Father a holy man?’ was a child’s way of putting it; but substantially it was so much his own point of view about the visitation now afflicting him, that he began to wonder whether he might not get rid of it by ceasing to be holy. If he went into the kitchen and kissed the charwoman, if he made himself drunk, if he went down to the marine parade and extracted cigarettes from the automatic slot-machine by inserting metal discs instead of pennies, or if—to make the matter worse—he were to add sacrilege to dishonesty, go into the church and rob the poor box—if he did those or other similar things, would this outward expression of his sanctity take itself off—go away and leave him?

But while entertaining the fancy that it might do so, he more than doubted it; for he felt that in his own heart he would not be doing any of those things; that it would not really be him; internally his good qualities and motives would remain unaffected. On such lines it would be useless, therefore, to experiment.

But mentally was there nothing which, if sedulously entertained, might bring him back to a more mundane and normal condition? Here, as he sat on the shore, with his children building sand-castles near by, and his wife making domestic sounds in the bungalow behind him, could he not definitely will away the manifestation by a slight deflection from his high ideals towards what is called temptation?

He began to think of Isabel Sparling; and to think of her pleasurably; she was still attractive to him; and that he had once again held her in his arms counted for something, gave to youthful memories a livelier flavour—a bouquet which hitherto they had lacked. He and Isabel Sparling had become enemies—or rather she had become his, and had all the more remained so because he had successfully evaded and got the better of her. But he had always liked her, her pluck, her perseverance, her capacity, and the spark of zealous fire for a cause which had burned in her for years, and which nothing could quench. Provocative, annoying, unscrupulous and vindictive though she might be, she was never dull. He knew that with her he would have had a more uneasy time than with Caroline—yet now he wished—or told himself he wished—that he had taken the risk, adopted her crusade as his own, and married her. It would have been harder, more uphill work—but looking back complacently on his successful career, due entirely to his own powers and intuitions—he believed he could have done it. And had he adopted that course, life, otherwise so interesting, would not have had at its centre that dull, that very dull spot which was Caroline.

So Mr. Trimblerigg sat and thought, indulging himself with the imagined sweetness of forbidden fruit. But as he was not in the very least ashamed or put out of countenance by the entertainment of these wayward fancies they had of course no effect upon him. His internal unity of purpose not consciously weakened, he continued to feel complacent and good, in the sense that he had always been—good to himself. It was not as if anybody had found him out; then it would have been different. The only person who ever found him out was Davidina; and as to her, since their last encounter, his mind was at peace.

The evening post brought letters forwarded from town; and Caroline, having to confess what she had done, made them the occasion for breaking into the solitude in which all day she had left him. An added reason was that one of the bunch was in the handwriting of Davidina. It was futile any longer to postpone the news that Davidina was on her way to see him.

Caroline handed him the letters, and as after sorting them through he seemed in no hurry to open them—Davidina’s she noticed, he put aside from the rest—she opened, on her own account, the matter wherewith she was charged.

The Presence had begun to manifest itself again, though not as powerfully yet, as at the moment which had brought her to her knees and to conversion. She was moved, feeling very humble towards him; and her eyes grew full of tears.

‘I am sorry, Jonathan, I have misjudged you,’ she said.

The announcement, though it surprised, rather pleased him; for he saw plainly by her look that misjudgment was over.

‘How have you misjudged me, my dear?’ he asked.

‘I—I didn’t think you were always quite straight,’ she said.

‘Straight’: the word had a certain sting. It stirred faintly the slumbers of that small sleeping dog—his conscience, which he was so accustomed to let lie. Then his sure instinct for defence brought him gaily to the attack.

‘Oh, yes, I know, my dear child, sometimes you’ve been jealous.’

‘No, no, never really,’ she said, ‘only I know I’m stupid—so, of course, sometimes—’

At that she left it and returned to her point—the point she had been wondrously cogitating all day in her slow mind. ‘No, I mean straight in quite little things. You see, Jonathan, I know now Martin was right. I haven’t understood you—not properly. And when I say ‘not straight,’ I mean in such little, little things, that never seemed to matter till now.’

This was a new experience altogether. Caroline was thoroughly surprising him. ‘How didn’t you think I was straight?’ he asked.

‘Well, for one thing,’ she replied, ‘I know now that you do take your cold bath. I thought you didn’t.’

Had Heaven thundered and shaken off the roof, leaving nothing above but bare sky, Mr. Trimblerigg could not have been more startled than at those words. To poor honest Caroline, the acceptance of the spiritual interpretation of what had happened to him meant, meant necessarily that he had always not merely been good in his own sense of the term, but done the straight thing—taken his baths, and in all quite small things told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

And then, on the top of that, while the shock of it still reverberated through his soul, Caroline let go the thing she had come to tell him.

‘Davidina is coming,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, Jonathan, I didn’t understand then. And when you refused to see a doctor I telegraphed for her.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘Only that you’d got something the matter with your head. She’s coming by the late train. It’s nearly due.’

He sat so still that she grew frightened. She reached out a hand and touched him.

‘Go away,’ he said, ‘let me alone!’

And weeping she got up and left him.

For a long while he sat on, motionless, unable to move. Doubt leapt in on him, engulfed him: blackness—such as he had never known before—was upon his soul. Not Davidina—no, not Davidina herself, whom he had now to expect by the late train—had ever dealt him so devastating a blow. ‘Now I know you take your cold bath: I thought you didn’t.’

O pellucid Eve: O rib of Adam, how naked hast thou made the man for whom thou wast formed! And this without in the least intending it, or knowing what she had done.

It was true that, even now, she had not found him out; but she had revealed to him with fatal clearness the fact that the shirking of a cold bath and the wearing of a yellow halo were incompatible. And this was the worst thing she had against him, this trivial doubt; but it was enough. Down came his castle. A horrid blush went over him—down even into his clothes; it went farther, had he only known.

‘Thou, Lord, seest me!’ he said to himself, got up, and went swiftly out into the starlit dusk carrying a red light.

And then the thought of Davidina, coming on the top of this, struck him cold. He remembered that he had upon him a letter from her which he had not yet read; opening it, he drew out the contents. There was no need to go indoors to get a light; that which he had was sufficient. The letter was very brief and to the point. ‘Found you out! but no matter: you did the honest thing with your eyes open—for once.’ Enclosed was an old envelope, cut open across the top, still bearing its seal, addressed to Davidina in Uncle Phineas’s handwriting. Minutely examining the seal, he found—what Davidina also had found—traces of his own handiwork, a scar showing where it had been removed and put on again.

‘Idiot!’ he said to himself—why hadn’t he covered up the breakage with a larger seal? Or why, again, after all those years had he troubled to tell a lie about it? But the reason for that he knew; it was so that he might stand well—better than he had ever stood before—in Davidina’s eyes. Just that once, so simply, so easily, by so slight a departure from the truth—he had got the better of her; and now her clutch was upon him again. She was coming through the dark night; he must meet her face to face, and hear her asking in hard matter-of-fact tone: ‘Well, what’s the matter now?’

Through the house he heard a knock at the front door; the thought that it might possibly be Davidina, come earlier than she was expected, drove him down the garden in flight and out by the back way. He was suffering badly. The double buffet—Caroline’s, followed by Davidina’s, had left him dazed; he had no spirit left. If there had ever been doubt of him in his wife’s easy-going and utterly domesticated mind, how could he meet the all-seeing eye of Davidina, in the expectation that his shining certificate of virtue would, even for a moment, divert her from common sense? All the haloes in the world would not convince Davidina that he really took his bath of a cold morning: it would convince her of nothing of which he would like her to be convinced, but only of other things that he would rather she did not know.

And yet the thought stuck to him, ‘I am good, sometimes.’ To that anchor he clung like a drowning man who happens also to be a little drunk. If he could only have let the anchor go it would have given him a better chance. But no—a sense of his sometimes exceeding goodness still clung to him. Out into the night he went, and his blush went with him—extending farther than he knew.

All the mercury of his composition had gone down into his boots; and though he still believed in himself he was very, very miserable. The fact that he attracted moths, added to his depression. It was merely one more indication of the futility of the moral emblem which had fastened in on him. Coming to a stile leading into fields, he made it his prie-Dieu, and kneeling on the foot-rest bowed his head and prayed: ‘O Lord, take away my life; thou hast laid on me a burden too heavy for me to bear!’ So, characteristically—I had often heard him do it before—still shifting the blame from himself to others.

One did for him what one could—stirred memories he had striven to make dormant, suggested to him interpretations of his action in the past which at other times he would have denied vehemently. All I could do I did to make him shake off for good that halo of self-worship with which he had surrounded himself. But, as always when he took to his knees, he left me with a peculiar sense of helplessness. His tendency to defend himself in prayer not only from the imputations the world made against him, but from the imputations of his own conscience, was just as much in evidence as ever; and familiarity with the Scriptures continued to make sincerity of speech difficult. Quotations from the Old Testament kept coming into his head to be hurled at mine, as though, from such a source, they must needs be true statements of fact.

‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God,’ he cried; and then having chosen his prophet, started upon variations. ‘The priests of Baal I have slain; I have broken down their altars; and I, only I, am left, desolate.’ He was not arguing, he was telling me.

With his persistencies and his prevarications he made me really angry at last; for he would not leave off. As Jonah once had a great fish prepared for him, so I prepared and drove a cow up to the stile where he was kneeling. It touched him with its nose. In the darkness he mistook it for a passer-by, waiting to get over. Apologizing he got up and stood aside; and when he discovered his mistake it made him feel very foolish.

He ceased praying, and rambling quickly across the field, found himself presently at a level-crossing. Away on the other side he heard mixed music, shouting, laughter, and the crack of toy fire-arms, where the heath had temporarily become a fair-ground. From farther away in the distance came the mumble of an approaching train.

As he trod the metals, he wondered—his sense of direction being defective—which was the up and which the down line. He stood still on the track. Suddenly into his quick divided mind the thought flashed—suppose there were an accident! He had heard of people standing to watch trains becoming fascinated by them, hypnotized, unable to move. Hypnotism would, he supposed, provide a comparatively happy death: it would also make the recipient irresponsible for his actions. Well, an express train might do it; but of local or luggage trains he was doubtful; they had not sufficient thunder or speed.

And so, between two rails, and still of two minds as usual, he halted and waited. The idea began to fascinate him, as always where so much hung upon chance. Was he standing on the right track? Would it be an express, or would it be a local. And then the thought—if it were an express, and with track coinciding, would he after death display to a remorseful world that sign of divine approbation which as a living man now so encumbered him?

It was a wonderful and an inspiring thought; and as it came forthwith it blazed into a certainty; he became exalted and uplifted in spirit. Yes, posterity would see him in his true light, as he had always felt himself to be in those blessed moments when it was borne in on him that his whole life was a mission, and he himself the great modern evangelist making goodness a thing simple to the understanding. What a beautiful end! he thought. Even Davidina would be sorry then for her past misreadings of his character.

The train leapt into view. It did not leave him long in doubt; it was an express and a fast one at that. He watched it, and became fascinated. Power of control left him: his mind soared in a vague hopeful ecstasy toward the stars. He saw Sirius winking at him—Sirius, which had always been his special star, his affinity. He winked back at it: tears rushed to his eyes, he became blind.

Absolutely irresponsible for his actions now, he stood unable to move, his whole body possessed by the mighty rushing sound which filled his ears; the world around, the heaven above, the earth beneath grew full of the thunder of it. Upon those monstrous vibrations his soul mounted to bliss; he had become superior to his own body at last, did not mind, was not afraid. Heaven had been gracious to him after all.

Suddenly the engine, opening its throttle, gave a ghastly scream. With a blast of its nostrils, a rattling of chains, a grinding of brakes, and a screeching of wheels, which sent shuddering discords to the night, it came to a precipitate standstill, less than a dozen yards from where Mr. Trimblerigg stood with sapling feet waiting to be uprooted for another and a better world.

Those horrible noises, and the abrupt abatement of its speed snatched Mr. Trimblerigg from his trance. With loosened knees and presence of mind mercifully restored, now only apprehensive of detection and capture, he sped swiftly away; high-hedged night received him into its obliterating embrace; the track was clear.

A stoker, descending hastily from the arrested train, searched the line ahead. His voice swung back angrily out of the darkness:

‘Red light? I don’t see no red light. It’s some damned fool’s been having a blooming game with us—that was all.’

And so, with a rich accompaniment of expletives from stoker and driver, the express proceeded upon its way.

Mr. Trimblerigg, in a much more shaken state, did the same.