"I am my own master," Martin answered passionately. "I have been my own master for ten years. I've not done anything very fine with my life, I know. I'm just like any one else--but I've found my feet. I can look after myself against anybody and I'm independent--of every one and of everything."
His father drew a little closer to him.
"Of course," he said, "I was not so foolish as to expect that you would come back to us just as you left us. I know that you must have your own life--and be free--so much as any of us are free at all . . ." Then after a little pause. "What are your plans? What are you going to do?"
"Well," answered Martin, hesitating, "I haven't exactly settled, you know. I might take a small share in some business, go into the City. Then at other times I feel I shouldn't like being cooped up in a town after the life I've led. Sometimes, this last month, I've felt I couldn't breathe. It was though, are you, all the chimneys were going to tumble in. When you're out on a field you know where you are, don't you? So I've thought it would be nice to have a little farm somewhere in the South, Devonshire or Glebeshire . . . And then I'd marry of course, a girl who'd like that kind of life and wouldn't find it dull. There'd be plenty of work--a healthy life for children right away from these towns . . . That's my sort of idea, father, but of course one doesn't know . . ."
Martin trailed off into inconsequent words. It was as though his father were waiting for him to commit himself and would then suddenly leap upon him with "There! Now, you've betrayed yourself. I've caught you--" and he had simply nothing to betray, nothing to conceal.
But anything was better than these pauses during which the threats and anticipations piled up and up, making a monstrous figure out of exactly nothing at all.
It was not enough to tell himself that between every father and son there were restraints and hesitations, a division cleft by the remembrance of the time when one had commanded and the other obeyed. There were other elements here--for one the element of an old affection that had once been at the very root of the boy's soul and was now in the strangest way creeping back to him, as an old familiar, but forgotten form might creep out of the dark and sit at his feet and clasp his knees.
"Well," said John Warlock. "That's very pleasant. You must feel very grateful to your aunt Rachel, Martin; she's given you the opportunity of doing what you like with your life. She spoke to me about it before she died."
"She spoke to you about it?"
"Yes. She told me that she did it because she wanted to bring you back to me. She knew of my love for you. We often talked of you together. She was a faithful servant of God. She believed that God meant to bring you, through her, back into His arms."
"I might not have come," Martin said with a sudden anger that surprised himself. "She made no conditions. I might have gone on with my life there abroad. I am free to lead my own life where and how I please."
"Quite free." His father answered gently. "But she knew that you would come. Of course you are your own master, Martin--"
"No, but it must be quite clear," Martin cried, the excitement rising in him as he spoke. He leaned forward almost touching his father's chair. "I'm not bound to any one by this money. It was awfully jolly of Aunt Rachel. I'll never forget her--but I'm free. I haven't got to say that I believe things when I don't, or that I think things that she thought just because she did . . . I don't want to hurt you, father, but you know that it must have seemed to me pretty odd coming back after all these years and finding you, all in the same place, doing the same things, believing in the same things--just like years ago. I've seen the world a bit, I can tell you--Russia, China, Japan, America, North and South, India. You believe as far as you can see. What are you to think when, in every country that you come to, you see people believing in different things? They can't all be right, you know."
His father said nothing.
"But each thinks he's right--and each hates the other. Then, when I came back and saw a fellow like that man Thurston preaching and laying down the law, well, it seemed odd enough that any one could be taken in by it. I hope I don't hurt you, father . . . only that's what you want, isn't it . . . to have it out quite plainly? . . ."
His father, still very gently and hesitating as though he found it difficult to catch the words that he wished (his voice had still the remoteness of some one speaking, who was far from them both), said:
"You'll think it odd, Martin, when you know how often I have to preach and speak in public, that I should find it hard to talk--but I never, with any man alone, could find words easily. I know so little. It is God's punishment for some selfish nervousness and shyness in me, that even now when I am an old man I cannot speak as one man to another. There was once, I remember, a young man who had heard me preach and was moved by my words and begged to see me in private. He came one evening; he was tempted to commit a terrible sin. He depended upon me to save him and I could say nothing. I struggled, I prayed, but it was incredible to me that any man could be tempted to such a thing. I spoke only conventional words that meant nothing. He went away from me, and his lost soul is now upon me and will always be . . . but, Martin, what I would say beyond everything is--do not let us separate. Be free as you must be free, as you should be free--but stay with me--remain with me. I am an old man; I have longed for you as I think no other father can ever have longed for his son. They tell me that I cannot live many more years. God chooses His time. Be with me, Martin, for a little while even though I may seem old to you and foolish. Perhaps things will come back to you that you have long forgotten. You were once pledged and it was a vow that is not easily removed--but it is enough for the present if you will be with me a little, give me some of your time-- give the old days a chance to come back." He laid his hand upon his son's.
The sudden touch of the dry, hot, trembling skin filled Martin's heart with the strangest confusion of affection, embarrassment and some familiar pathos. In just that way ten years before he had felt his father's hand and had thought: "How old he's getting! . . . How I shall miss him! . . . I hope nothing happens to him!" In the very balance of his father's sentences and the deliberate choice of words there had been something old-fashioned and remote from all the life and scramble of Martin's recent years. Now he took his father's hand in his own strong grasp and said gruffly:
"That's all right, father . . . I'm not going while you want me . . . You and I . . . always . . . it's just the same now."
But even as he spoke he felt as though he were giving some pledge that was to involve him in far more than he could see before him. Then, with a happy sense that the sentimental part of the conversation was over, he began to talk about all kinds of things. He let himself go and even, after a while, began to feel the whole thing really jolly and pleasant. His father wanted waking up. He had been here so long, with all these awful frumps, brooding over one idea, never getting away from this Religion.
Martin began to imagine himself very cleverly leading his father into a normal natural life, taking him to see things, making him laugh; it would do his health a world of good.
Then, quite suddenly, the old man said:
"And what do you remember, Martin, of the old days here, the days when you were quite small, when we lived in Mason Street?"
What did Martin remember? He remembered a good deal. He was surprised when he began to think . . . "Did he remember . . ." his father suggested a scene, a day--yes, he remembered that. His father continued, as though it had been for his own pleasure.
The scenes, the hours returned with a vividness and actuality that thronged the room.
He could see Mason Street with its grocer's shop at the corner, its Baths and Public Library, the sudden little black dips into the areas as the houses followed one another, the lamp-post opposite their window that had always excited him because it leaned inwards a little as though it would presently tumble. He remembered the fat short cook with the pink cotton dress who wheezed and blew so when she had to climb the stairs. He remembered the rooms that would seem bare enough to him now, he supposed, but were then filled with exciting possibilities--a little round brown table, his mother's work-box with mother-of-pearl shells upon the cover, a stuffed bird with bright blue feathers under a glass case, a screen with coloured pictures of battles and horses and elephants casted upon it. He remembered the exact sound that the tinkling bell made when it summoned them to meals, he remembered the especial smell of beef and carpet that was the dining-room, he remembered a little door of coloured glass on the first landing, a cupboard that had in it sugar and apples, a room full of old books piled high all about the floor upon the dry and dusty boards . . . a thousand other things came crowding around him.
Then, as his father's voice continued, out from the background there came his own figure, a small, pale, excited boy in short trousers.
He was immensely excited--that was the principal thing. It was evening, the house seemed to swim in candlelight and smoke through which things could be seen only dimly.
Something wonderful was about to happen to him. He was in a state of glory, very close to God, so close that he could almost see Him sitting with His long white beard in the middle of a cloud, watching Martin with interest and affection. He was pleased with Martin and Martin was pleased with himself. At the same time as his pleasure he was aware that the stuff of his new black trousers tickled his knees and that he was hungry.
He saw his small sister Amy for a moment and expressed quite effectively by a smile and nod of the head his immeasurable superiority to her . . .
They, he and his father, drove in a cab to the Chapel. Of what followed then he was now less aware. He remembered that he was in a small room with two men, that they all took off their clothes (he remembered that one man, very stout and red, looked funny without his clothes), that they put on long white night-shirts, that his was too long for him and that he tripped over it, that they all three walked down the centre of the Chapel, which was filled with eyes, mouths and boots, and that he was very conscious of his toe-nails, which had never been exposed in public before, that they came to a round stone place filled with water and into this after the two men he was dipped, that he didn't scream from the coldness, of the water although he wanted to, that he was wrapped in a blanket and finally carried home in an ecstasy of triumph.
What happiness followed! The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of God and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part. God had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ever safe and happy.
It was not only that he was assured that when the moment arrived he would have, in Heaven, a "good time"--it was that he was greatly exalted, so that he gave his twopence a week pocket-money to his school-fellows, never pulled Amy's hair, never teased his mother's canary. He had been aware, young though he was, of another life. He prayed and prayed, he went to an endless succession of services and meetings. There was Mr. Bates, one of the leading brethren then, who loved him and spoilt him . . . above all, through and beyond it all, there was his father, who adored him and whom he adored.
That adoration--of God, of his father, of life itself! Was it possible that a small boy, normal and ordinary enough in other ways, could feel so intensely such passions?
The dark room was crowding him with figures and scenes. A whole world that he had thought dead and withered was beating--urgently, insistently, upon his consciousness.
In another instant he did not know what surrender, what acknowledgement he might have made. It seemed to him that nothing in life was worth while save to receive again, in some fashion, that vitality that he had once known.
The door was flung open; a stream of light struck the dark; the shadows, memories, fled, helter-skelter, like crackling smoke into the air.
Amy stood in the doorway, blinking at him, scowling. He knew, for some undefined reason, that he could not meet his father's eyes. He jumped up and walked to the window.
CHAPTER II
EXPECTATION
Maggie developed marvellously during her first weeks in London. It could not truthfully be said that her aunts gave her great opportunity for development; so far as they were concerned she might as well have been back in the green seclusion of St. Dreots.
It is true that she accompanied her Aunt Elizabeth upon several shopping expeditions, and on one hazardous afternoon they penetrated the tangled undergrowth of Harrods' Stores; on all these occasions Maggie was too deeply occupied with the personal safety and happiness of her aunt to have leisure for many observations.
Aunt Elizabeth always started upon her shopping expeditions with the conviction that something terrible was about to happen, and the expectation of this overwhelming catastrophe paralysed her nerves. Maggie wondered how it could have been with her when she had ventured forth alone. She would stand in the middle of the street hesitating as to the right omnibus for her to take, she was often uncertain of the direction in which she should go. She would wave her umbrella at an omnibus, and then when it began to slacken in answer to her appeal, would discover that it was not the one that she needed, and would wave her umbrella furiously once more. Then when at last she had mounted the vehicle she would flood the conductor with a stream of little questions, darting her eyes angrily at all her neighbours as though they were gathered there together to murder her at the earliest opportunity. She would be desperately confused when asked to pay for her ticket, would be unable to find her purse, and then when she discovered it would scatter its contents upon the ground. In such an agony would she be at the threatened passing of her destination that she would spring up at every pause of the omnibus, striking her nearest neighbour's eye or nose with her umbrella, apologising nervously, and then, because she thought she had been too forward with a stranger, staring fiercely about her and daring any one to speak to her. Upon the day that she visited Harrods' she spent the greater part of her time in the lift because she always wished to be somewhere where she was not, and because it always went up when she wished it to go down and down when she wished it to go up. Maggie, upon this eventful occasion, did her best, but she also was bewildered, and wondered how any of the attendants found their way home at night. Before the end of the afternoon Aunt Elizabeth was not far from tears. "It isn't cutlery we want. I told the man that it was saucepans. They pay us no attention at all. You aren't any help to me, Maggie." They arrived in a room filled with performing gramophones. This was the final blow. Aunt Elizabeth, trembling all over, refused either to advance or retreat. "Will you please," said Maggie very firmly to a beautifully clothed young man with hair like a looking-glass, "show us the way to the street?" He very kindly showed them, and it was not until they were in the homeward omnibus that Aunt Elizabeth discovered that she had bought nothing at all.
