Читать книгу Gathered In - Catherine Helen Spence - Страница 9

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Kenneth regretted the close of his studies in the good old City of Edinburgh, because he really advanced more in the last year of his course than he had done in the preceding years. The conversation with his father had acted as a spur to him. If he had had it before he would have worked hard, and obtained a degree; but he was young, and though his advisers made him go in he was not successful. It was not a discreditable attempt--it only need another year's study; but George Oswald was unwilling to let him remain any longer over books. Harry Stalker, who was the only divinity student resident at Mrs. Wishart's, and Kenneth's dearest and most appreciating friend, always said Oswald ought to have pulled through, but at the same time congratulated him on his failure as boding for greater ultimate success in life than a brilliant University opening. Besides, of what value would an University degree be in the eyes of the patriarchal George Oswald, steeped in the local conceit of successful and ignorant colonists? "You can please him better by going in for easy honours at their Melbourne affair, and have your name printed in the newspapers that he reads. And you will have less to regret in leaving 'Auld Reekie"'.

"It is very good-natured of you to say so," said Kenneth, who was naturally mortified at his being unsuccessful; "you would have felt it mortifying if you had failed."

"So I should, but it would have been the best thing for me. The hopes of paterfamilias and of that venerable uncle who is waiting for my aid in his Highland parish would not have been so inflated. I might have dropped into business and made a fortune. Don't laugh, Kenneth; I should have liked it above all things, but for that unlucky degree. Whereas I am to be a pillar of the Kirk--a second Norman Macleod! Save the mark!"

"But what you could do could not I have done, with the motives I felt spurring me on?"

"No, not exactly. In the first place, I am years older than you, and that tells. It was a wild hope to get an Edinburgh degree at nineteen with a year's spurt. In the second place, I am a good deal cleverer, so that though I am deficient in concentrativeness as well as you, I can do certain things with less effort. In the third place, it was for my disadvantage to pass, and the demon of perversity, which arranges most mundane affairs, cursed me with success. I don't exactly see what good the degree would do you, Kenneth. In fact, I have been arguing to the contrary but at the back of that argument I am quite sure that it would be of the greatest advantage for you to get it, and also that it is most important that you should spend another year in my society to try again. This is to say, for me. I am not so sure of your being marked out for ill-luck as I am in my own case."

"I do not see your ill-luck, Harry, but it is just the paradoxical nature of your mind that makes you take exceptions to all received notions."

"Your grandmother told me the other day, when we were at your place, that her ambition was to see you in a pulpit. Now, Uncle George, with his contempt for starving divinity students, came in like a providence to protect you from that; and you will go in for pastoral pursuits of another kind. Do you think you could preach as well as I could?"

"Certainly not."

"You would never preach so well as I can do at times, but you would never fall so low as I am sure to do when it comes to be routine work. But the question is not how to preach, but what to preach, and there it is that I'll fail."

"You always assert no man can succeed who does not fail, so that so far I have the advantage of you."

"Ay, Kenneth, so far, and a great deal further. Consider the probable effects of making a minister of me, with all my unsettled opinions, all my Bohemian tastes, and my strong sense of youth and rebellious self-will. And yet I can preach. I feel that if I get wound up I could give sermons that would do everybody good but myself. You see, Kenneth, I have such strong sympathy with what is evil and disreputable in man that I could touch chords among the vicious classes that a middle-aged, respectable minister knows nothing of, and in some irregular way I might open the kingdom of heaven to people who are the despair of the Churches."

"While you yourself?" enquired Kenneth.

"Would stop outside, gathering the sour plums of experience, and scratching myself with the thorns of the flesh. But such a career has its charms; to touch natures no other can move, to enter into feelings which to my worthy father and uncle (ripe and learned divines) are absolutely unknown, should make me think life was given me for something."

"You always maintain that there is a great deal of good in the vicious and criminal classes," said Kenneth.

"Not only a great deal, but potentially if not actually more than among the respectable classes. You see energy counts for so much as a factor in life. You know I hate the respectable classes. They are indescribably tiresome and I believe that if they had the opportunity they would be more wicked than those whom they command to stand off."

"Let us be glad the opportunity is not afforded them," said Kenneth.

"Oh! but many of them make a great deal of the limited opportunities they have got," said his friend. "When you see a middle-aged citizen sitting at the foot of his table, with an ugly wife at the other end and half a dozen children at the sides, who can tell the whole history of that man's youth or even of his maturer age?"

"You are more disposed to trust the respectable classes than the others, Henry, in the same way as you really like the moral books, while you protest there is more truth and profit in the immoral. It is mere love of contradiction that makes you advance so many outrageous statements."

"Not at all, Kenneth, it is the sacred love of truth."

"Truth which you elicit from your opponents?"

"Truth which my opponents elicit from me. I trust the respectable classes in those many cases where their interests coincide with their duty; but I would not trust my life, my purse, or my character with any one whose interests did not protect me, even though he or she sat in the chief seats in the tabernacle, and received testimonials from admiring fellow-citizens for integrity and disinterestedness. And as for the books, more harm is done by the mawkish morality, which exaggerates every little failing into a heinous sin, than by that which treats heinous sins as little failings. I want to have my conscience work naturally, if possible. It will have a hard life of it with me at the best; but if I get oversensitive, I'm done for."

"There I cannot sympathize with you, Harry."

"As for you, Kenneth, I envy your organization. A fine physique, a splendid digestion, and a well-balanced conscience, it will be hard for you to go to the bad; though I warn you, you have some trouble before you when you get out to Australia. This uncle, with his boast and his blow, and his ignorance, and his feeling that you owe everything to him, will be just the sort of man I should like to kick and say good-bye to; but you will do your spiriting more gently, and will have a great deal to put up with before you settle into your rightful place. And if Jim your cousin is a lad of ordinary spirit he will be jealous of all your advantages. It is clear to me at present that no degree is best."

"I wish I could think so," said Kenneth, who had wished his father to see his success.

"And it is also clear that you cannot have another trial here. I'll miss you, Kenneth."

"We must all miss him more or less," said Mrs. Wishart, who now entered the room and joined in the conversation, "and I am sure Kenneth will be sorry to leave his native land and his old friends."

"There must be some natural pangs at parting with both," said Kenneth, "though it is what most Scotchmen take kindly to. I should feel it less than ordinary emigrants, as I am going to a home and relatives."

"And that is the very reason why you feel so dubious," said Stalker. "If the world were really all before you, you might exult in the boundless prospect held out; but you have been trained here in one way, and there you are expected to fill a groove that is made for you, and of which you know no more than a child. And there will be expectations formed about you that are grounded on equal ignorance on the other side. I prophesy that you will be a distinguished failure."

"It is something to be distinguished, at any rate," said Mrs. Wishart.

"Of course it is," said Stalker. "It will be no vulgar success, exactly fitting the place his uncle destines for him, but so deplorably unfitting that he will disappoint himself and everybody else."

"Why should he disappoint any one? I see no necessity for that," said Mrs. Wishart.

"My dear Madam, he must, or he will never satisfy his Maker or himself. Do you think God in making Kenneth Oswald intended him for such a square hole as George Oswald has cut out for him at Tingalpa, or whatever the outlandish name of the place may be. Kenneth is rounded to a perfect sphere, and the corners will slip out of his cognizance altogether. I have not made up my mind as to what he will be driven--to poetry, to politics, to lunacy, or to transcendentalism, which may include all these. But I would stake all I have on earth, even my books, that there are hard lines for him across the water, and that until he gets clear of all his entanglements with relations he will never get to his own proper work."

"Is it not absurd in you to dogmatize about what you know nothing about, Henry?" said Kenneth, who was really discomposed by his friend's confident assertions, which awoke answering echoes in his own heart.

"You may tell us how you are to distinguish yourself when you fail in what your friends expect of you," said Mrs. Wishart, who was disposed to turn the tables on Kenneth's disconcerting friend.

"No doubt about the last part of your surmises, but grave doubts as to the first. I could not tell you at present what will ever make up to the world or to myself for being a 'sticket minister'."

"You can never be that, with your wonderful command of language," said Mrs. Wishart.

"There are other ways of sticking besides want of words. When the thoughts are confused, and the life inconsistent; when the conscience pulls one way and the interests another; when truth, or what to me appears to be truth, holds up a flaming sword to bar me from any paradise here or hereafter, I think I am very likely to stick somewhere. But of course I'll try it. I cannot go through life without my failure. Let us hope one will suffice."

"You are in a dismal humour, Harry," said Kenneth.

"How can I help it, when you are going to put half the world between us on such an uncertain venture, to try to follow out old people's plans. These disappointments are hard on the old folks, however. They forget their own youth and their own failures, and they think we will stand up exactly where they set us, and do exactly as they anticipated, and all the while the living soul within us has its own salvation to work out somehow, not with hope and certainty, but with fear and trembling. Strange that they have no misgiving about the human and fallible nature of the materials they fancy they can command."

"I think you may be partly right about yourself, though even there you take too strong views," said Mrs. Wishart. "You know your own friends' expectations, and your own capabilities or incapabilities; but as for Kenneth, he is far more considerate and yielding than you, and has his faculties better in hand so to speak. I cannot agree to your notion that he will not take kindly to whatever Providence sets him to do."

"Providence being George Oswald, you think?" said Stalker.

"He has been a good Providence to me," said Kenneth, warmly. "He has done for me well and liberally in every way."

"How much love has there been in his liberal doings?" asked Harry Stalker.

The question was like a sting to Kenneth, for this uncle, by his munificent gifts, had closed the avenue through which his father had sought to help him. Kenneth changed colour; but could not trust himself to speak. Harry Stalker saw that he had given pain.

"I am always doing this sort of thing, Kenneth, I'm sorry. Of course he cannot be expected to gush over a boy whom he never saw in his life, and, as Mrs. Wishart says, you are so different from me that you will get on well enough with the great, what d'ye call him? Squatter is it? At least it will not be your fault if you do not, because that rounding off I spoke of takes away all the sharp aggressive corners, and you are not ready either to give offence or to take it. Whereas I--I am an awful example of human perversity. Just because I am at heart sad and sorry to lose my best friend, perhaps for ever, I say things to vex him, and he will go to the antipodes with less heart for his difficult duties, because I had neither good taste, good temper, nor good feeling."