Chapter XXIII

A human spirit cast ashore after a storm of grief takes a long time to recover full consciousness. It lies in a ‘no-man’s-land’ out of reach of the waves, but incapable of movement.

For six months after Arthur’s death Jim’s world was submerged in disaster. Flickering thoughts came to him of going to the bad. Evil had no particular attraction for him, but there seemed nowhere else to go. The results of wrong-doing seemed as formidable as the results of doing right, and they required less effort.

It was not grief alone that had unseated his will, but the crueller sense of having lost an object of worship. Jim had made an idol of Mrs. Bligh and worshipped her. God is a jealous God, who, for the sake of the worshipper, destroys idols; and when an idol falls, all that it stands for falls with it. The sense of the invisible had receded from Jim; he craved for the hardness of the material world.

He hated beauty now; he wanted brutal things that he could fight. He did not want to be guided by Arthur’s memory; if Arthur had left him a single condition with his inheritance, Jim would have refused it.

But Arthur had left no conditions; he had simply left all he had in Jim’s strong, young hands, as if it was certain Jim would know what to do with it. His trust was like a hand laid on Jim’s shoulder. Jim couldn’t shake it off, because he loved it.

After a few disconsolate, desultory weeks, he went to Cambridge, because Arthur had always said he wanted Jim to go to Cambridge.

There was none of the sharpness of life to be found within its old gray walls, but it was restful there.

The unharassing, ancient customs, the kind, wise, old scholars, with their accessible knowledge, soothed and stimulated Jim.

They were as impersonal as stones, but intellectually they kindled fires.

Scholars are an unobtrusive, kindly race. They will not come out of their shells unless attacked by intelligence; but they never fail to respond to intelligence when it attacks them.

Jim’s questions roused his professor’s interest, and he gave him the best he had—an effortless patience with detail, an inescapable obedience to fact and rather more reliance on reason than Jim had yet discovered in human beings. The professor cared about truth, and this lonely, surly, brooding boy cared also for truth. Jim did not want friendship. He was afraid of being helped or hurt, or moved any more. There was a weight upon his heart as heavy as time. He shrank from the laughter and youthfulness of his fellows, and refused to respond to the tentative advances which were made to him.

He settled down to work in a room which looked out upon a narrow street, enclosed by two high old walls. At the end of the street was the river. Jim could not see it from his windows, but he knew that, in a moment, he could be standing on a gray bridge and looking into vistas of hanging trees and over flat green fields, with here and there a solid stone building which had placidly held the youth and history of England for centuries.

It was easier for Jim to feel part of the place than part of the life within it. He felt akin to all the ancient landmarks. He was content, as they were, to brood unobtrusively over the stream of laughing youth which passed between those walls without check or trace. They were not personally involved in short adventures; they, like Jim, were out upon a quest for finality.

Jim took a purely practical view of education; he wanted to find out if one or two things were true, and then change his life to meet them. Christianity, for instance—did it shrink away from fact with the light scorn of a good woman from a sin she did not understand? Or was it a consoling dream fit for delicate and irresponsible beings who couldn’t stand life without the padding of dreams? He asked several of the Cambridge scholars for evidences of Christianity, and they gave him all they had, both for and against. Even the theological professor, who was one of the greatest scholars of his age, and wanted Christianity to be true, handled its difficulties with an unfettered reverence for fact. He never asked Jim to accept anything on authority. But it was different when Jim wanted to apply religion to modern life. All the delicate, deliberate researches of Cambridge seemed to fail at this further demand upon them. Nobody wanted to deal with a fact once they had proved it. The sense of the long, slow, chain of history blinded their eyes to the urgency of life. They could lay their fingers admirably upon the causes of modern evils, but they took them away again afterwards.

Jim could not take his fingers away. He had the instinct of the reformer. He wanted to cry aloud like Peter, ‘Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head.’

He could not wait to find out any more before he acted upon it. The professor advised him, a little vaguely, to find out what social work the church was doing in Cambridge, but the church did not help Jim very much; its social efforts were dignified and ineffectual. Trying to find life in it was like putting your ear to a shell and listening to the far-off murmur of the sea. It is not the real voice of the sea which carried the delusive sound, but only the reverberation from within the drum of the ear.

There were good men to be found m the church, and very good women, but there was no ardour to turn the world upside down, and without ardour nothing turns upside down, not even a thimble.

Jim felt he couldn’t bear to go on behaving as if the origins of Christianity and the upkeep of church services ought to take up all your time, when the world was breaking itself to pieces for lack of the practice of Christian principles. He found himself more in tune with a set of young and violent sceptics, who cared passionately to change life, but didn’t believe in Christianity.

They wanted to free the world, and would have died to do it. They did run certain risks and gave up the minor conveniences of life.

Jim was secretly amused at the value they attached to giving up comforts he had never had, but he admired their spirit. It was their choice of weapons for carrying on their warfare which struck him as unsatisfactory.

He thought their creed brittle and unthrifty. Jim knew life at first hand, and he had been brought up surrounded by evil.

He did not believe that even justice could cure vice. Nothing ever really sets human nature free but self-control. Easier conditions were the simpler half of the problem, but even if that were solved, what you were to do with the human heart still remained.

The men who thought they could legislate evil off the map didn’t really know what evil was; they only knew the defects of incomplete goodness. In the hour of disaster their childish improvements would slip into nothingness, like sand swallowed up by the sea. They wouldn’t look at Christianity because they thought it was old, and all the good sucked out of it by tyrants; but Jim wanted them to look at it, because he believed that nobody had sucked the good out of it, and that these particular violent young men, full of free love and blasphemy, were the stuff out of which Christians can be made. Jim had been dumb for two years, but one evening he found himself addressing the debating society in a queer flurry of opportunity and inspiration. Nobody knew who he was before this occasion, but after his first speech he became a name in Cambridge. Jim had a knowledge which was a new angle of vision to those who had always seen life through books, and a burning conviction which amazed spirits whose enthusiasms were light as thistledown.

At first Jim was conscious of perpetual pitfalls, clumsiness, and inexperience, and an odd innocence of other people’s views forced him into dire mistakes, but he developed a curious grip upon his audience which kept them spellbound till he stopped speaking. He was never fettered to his own ideas—he wanted to convince himself, and no one who heard him ever went away with any sense of unfairness or glibness. When Jim came up to a difficulty, he tackled it like a football, as an object to batter through a goal after a hard struggle, taking his field with him. He never gave any sense of a man who knew things on authority, or who stood above the crowd. Jim’s professor took a mild interest in his efforts, though he warned him that few scholars ever shone in debate.

‘They tell me you are on the side of violence,’ he observed one day. ‘That is a pity. Temper is always a confession of fear. Uncertainty of faith is the explanation of all the persecutions.

‘It would be as well for you to remember that your opponent is never dangerous, only facts are dangerous. If your facts are safe it is an act of cowardice to lose your temper, and if your facts are not safe the sooner you find out and change them the better.’

‘But if my opponent twists my facts?’ Jim objected.

‘Learn to put your facts,’ said the Professor, with a gleam in his mild eyes, ‘so that they can’t be twisted. You must try to be as agile as if you were unfair, but you must never be unfair.’

Into this safe world of intellectual research and experiment life broke like a careless blunder and reset Jim’s mind.

It was on one of the last days of term when Jim’s landlady told him that there was a lady to see him, a lady who wouldn’t give her name.

A wild hope caught at Jim’s heart. He thought he had put relentlessly behind him the image of Mrs. Bligh, but there is no finality to visions, and what he saw now was a vision of Mrs. Bligh, repentant, kindly, ready once more to set his life to music. The very thought of her unloosed his spirit as if he had been tied to a stake.

He ran into his dusty, book-filled, little room, with his heart on a wave of ecstasy, but the figure which rose to meet him was not Mrs. Bligh.

Eliza looked precisely as she had done when she left him last in Trafalgar Square. She took the protective colour of her surroundings upon her so that she never seemed out of place. But though her appearance was unaltered, her behaviour was more cordial.

She turned her rather hard pink cheek for a fraternal kiss.

‘Well,’ she said with sisterly ease, ‘this does seem a piece of all right, doesn’t it? I’ve just heard of your legacy and I was wondering what you’d do with it. I’m glad you’ve taken my advice. There’s nothing like education when you can afford it, and what I say is, you can always have one kind or another if you put your mind to it. My word! What a queer place Cambridge is, isn’t it? How much did old Mr. Atkinson leave you?’

Eliza asked this question without reproachfulness, but there was a shade in her manner which implied that she had more than a right to know.

After all, if she hadn’t so conveniently left the field to Jim, their parts might have been reversed. He owed her something for her considerate flight.

Jim hesitated a moment before he said, ‘Three hundred a year.’ He said it a little dryly, for he saw it was all Eliza had come for. Then he asked her why she had never made him a sign for all these years? Eliza waived the question. She didn’t say that, when she’d seen him last, he hadn’t been worth it. She only looked around her at the simplicity of horsehair sofas and antimacassars which still surrounded Jim’s undiscerning path. Her eyes wandered over the pale blue vases on the mantelpiece, flanked by brown, undogmatic china animals before she said, ‘That’s all right for a single man, for a beginning. If you’ll use sense you’ll soon be in the way of earning more. I do better than this without an education.’

Jim hung his head. The memory of what Eliza did was always with him. He dreamed about it by night, and by day it entered into him and crushed him, so that he hesitated on the brink of his enthusiasms. Eliza’s profession was the sharpest of his spiritual handicaps.

He was always asking himself if he hadn’t, by his own violence, contributed to it.

If he hadn’t broken up their home would Eliza have ever gone beyond her dreams of feather boas, into her admirable extractions?

He looked up from under his heavy brows and measured himself against Eliza.

Her eyes, shining and impenetrable, were set flatly in her head; they never changed their impersonal but friendly watchfulness. She knew that he wanted to change her life, but as long as the struggle between them was not physical, she knew, as she had known long ago in her swiftly developing girlhood, that she had nothing to fear.

Jim had only brute strength, which he was too soft to use; he was, as far as Eliza was concerned, negligible as a danger.

She smiled at the gravity of his challenging eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked lightly ‘Are you too grand for me now?’

He put off the struggle with a sense of shame in his cowardice.

‘I don’t suppose I’m grand enough,’ he said. ‘What would you like to do? Take a look round Cambridge, now you’re here—go on the river——?’

‘The river’ll do nicely,’ said Eliza with decision. ‘I saw quite enough of the place coming up from the station. Poky, that’s what these old buildings are. I don’t say one couldn’t do something with all the flighty boys running about loose—but it’s not in my line, of course. Besides, I shouldn’t dream of interfering with you. I quite see we must stand or fall together.’

Jim held the door open for her. ‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ he observed a little grimly. ‘It’s what I’ve been thinking of myself, but we’ll wait to talk over what we mean by it till we get to a more private place.’

Eliza nodded in a friendly way. She tripped between the historic walks with unseeing eyes. She, too, had a point to make. Occasionally she shot a glance at the man beside her. He still wasn’t as smart as he might have been. His clothes were badly cut, he walked like a man who has done manual work. But he had improved greatly. He wasn’t so different from the other bareheaded youths who passed them, not without glances of admiration for Jim’s companion, which Eliza returned with her discreet, furtive eyes narrowed a little, but full of wavering light.

Eliza was young, and she enjoyed her youth. She calculated what it brought her in, with the least possible expenditure of power.

She was a woman, and that too was an asset. But she did nothing to obtrude her sex upon her companion. She knew better than that with Jim. She merely hoodwinked him with ease until they reached the river.

The willows, gold and thin, leaned low on the banks. They had nothing behind them but the sky—deep into the water their reflections flung back at them an answering life.

The flat, low lands which had crouched and clenched themselves away under the breath of the long winter winds lay relaxed and green now, with buttercups in a flood of golden bronze spread above them.

Far away across the plain the cliff of Ely rose with its cathedral like a gray tethered cloud, launched into the sky. It was an autumn day with no movement in it but the infrequent fall of leaves and the swift, short flights of robins, shaking out their sweet and fitful songs.

Jim found a boat and pulled out silently on to the stream.

Eliza leaned back against the cushions with a curious movement of relaxation.

‘Eliza,’ Jim said at last, ‘I’m glad you’ve come here. I’m glad you said you wanted us to act together. It’s been on my mind like all these years. I have an idea. I daresay it sounds nonsense to you, but I can’t work it out without you. I want to stand for people like we were—without a chance. You know how it was. Girls like you with no education, and fathers like ours. Well, it was bound to tell on us—it did me, in one way, and you another. But we can get out again. I won’t say much about religion; it hasn’t come your way, perhaps, but it’s what made me feel there was a way out. There’s people, too, who think they haven’t got any religion, and have enough to try to help others. That’s what I’m after. Education shows one how to do things, and how to make other men do them. I’ll get all I can.

‘When I’m finished will you give up your way of life and help me?’

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a row-boat before,’ Eliza remarked reflectively, ‘except once on the Serpentine of a summer evening. There were some people about then. It’s a bit too quiet for my taste on this river.’

‘You and I,’ Jim persisted, ‘ought to be pals. I haven’t had a pal—not for a long time. Have you?’

Eliza answered this question. ‘I don’t know that I have,’ she said, ‘except as you might say, professionally, and these I trust just as far as I can see them.’

‘Do you trust me?’ Jim asked urgently.

‘I don’t suppose I should be sitting here if I didn’t,’ said Eliza cautiously. ‘I know you’ll not give me away.’

‘No, I suppose I shan’t do that,’ Jim agreed reluctantly. ‘But I don’t like your way of life, Eliza, I don’t like it at all. You’re clever enough to get on and yet play square—why don’t you do it?’

‘That’s where you’re mistaken,’ said Eliza equably. ‘I hadn’t any capital except my wits. Work wouldn’t have kept me in gloves. It doesn’t. What about you—and you’re a man? You were working when I saw you last, weren’t you? Well, your hands weren’t even clean.’

Jim flinched before Eliza’s recollection. He didn’t want to make a personal protest—personal protests weaken argument, but he wished to explain to her why his hands hadn’t been clean.

‘Still,’ he said at last, ‘I’d rather work on anyhow and keep straight. It pays in the long run.’

Eliza shook her head. ‘There’s straight people in the work-house now,’ she observed. ‘I don’t say there aren’t crooked ones too, but anyhow they’ve had their good times.’

‘I don’t believe you have such a good time,’ said Jim firmly. ‘You look like a chased cat. Anyhow, don’t you believe in right and wrong, Eliza?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by believe in it,’ said Eliza defensively. ‘I know I’ll go to prison if I’m caught out, if that’s what you mean.

‘It’s quite true it’s an exhausting life; now and again I do get tired, but you’d have to make it worth my while to drop it.’

Jim was silent; something in his flesh and blood was as wounded by Eliza as if he had been personally attacked. Virtue had gone out of him, but it was not transferred. Eliza had started some spiritual leak in his soul, which left him weakened and bereft of words.

‘What would be worth your while?’ he said at last without looking up at her.

‘Five hundred a year,’ said Eliza promptly, ‘with what I’ve managed to save, would be worth my while, not less.’

‘I haven’t got it,’ said Jim desperately, ‘and if I had I wouldn’t give it to you. What’s the use of bribing you to keep straight?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know if you don’t,’ said Eliza serenely.

‘I’d like to get out of being ashamed, that’s all,’ Jim muttered, ‘and I don’t want to see you nabbed, and one of these days you will be nabbed—you know that as well as I do. But it isn’t prison that matters most; it’s the thing, the dirty thing, that puts you there.’

Jim spat into the river.

He could not express his loathing of dishonesty; it rose up and overwhelmed him, like the knowledge of some horrible physical disease.

‘I don’t say I don’t like being honest myself,’ said Eliza calmly, after a short pause. ‘All I say is, I can’t afford it. You can’t either, it seems. Well, then, it’s no use making a fuss about what you can’t help, is it? I’ve had a nice quiet afternoon anyway, and now I’d like my tea. Do you think it would go too much against your principles to lend me a tenner? I’ve got to get to Glasgow to-morrow, and my pal’s left me uncommonly short.’

‘I thought you said,’ Jim grumbled, ‘that you’d got capital put away?’

‘So I have,’ said Eliza, ‘but not in the way you mean. It’s stones, and they have to go on to the market carefully. Just now wouldn’t suit me to sell at all.’

Jim continued to grumble, but before they had got back he produced the ten-pound note. Eliza fingered it thoughtfully. It had just been worth her while to come down to Cambridge.

Jim gave her a very handsome tea in a tea-shop full of innocent, admiring young men.

Jim’s mouth had a good-natured twist, and his eyes met Eliza’s in a friendly twinkle when he heard one of these deluded boys referring to her in an undertone as an angel. Eliza looked reflective; she came to the conclusion that she had better, some day, come back to Cambridge by herself.

Jim saw her to the station, and on to the train with a curious sinking at his heart.

He had asked for real life, and now even before his work upon books was over, real life had broken through and granted his request. It was a hard and heavy substance, and Jim was conscious that he hadn’t done very much with it. In some curious but perfectly final way it was he himself who yielded to this experience. He found, as he walked back to his lodgings, that he had decided not to stay up and try for a fellowship. He had singularly failed in his effort to convert Eliza, but he could not accept a life which had nothing to do with Eliza’s.