Читать книгу The Vision Splendid (D. K. Broster) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - D. K. Broster - Страница 9

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One of Tristram Hungerford's earliest recollections was of the smell of sealskin, of its delicious softness, and of its singular utility, when rubbed the wrong way, as a medium for tracing the journeys of the children of Israel during Mr. Venn's long sermons in Clapham parish church. His Mamma, as he sat snuggled up against her, never reproved him for this ingenious use of her attire, and the stern, sad, greyhaired man, on the other side of her, could not see his small son's occupation, and would not have realised its significance if he had. For if at any given moment John Hungerford was not attending to Mr. Venn, he was thinking of the cause to which he had given his whole life and the greater part of his substance – the abolition of the slave-trade – thinking too, perhaps, of his English childhood, of his youth and young manhood spent in Barbados as manager to that very rich planter, his uncle, of his return to England a convinced champion of the freedom of the negro, his untiring labours to that end, in Parliament and out of it, his friendship with the like-minded group that held Wilberforce and Stephen, the Thorntons, Lord Teignmouth and Hannah More, and finally the meeting with Selina Heathcote, who now sat by his side, and the healing of that fierce loneliness which had cut the lines in his face that made people somewhat afraid of him.

Tristram, however, was not one of these persons, though he had early realised that Papa was not quite the same on Sundays as on other days, connecting the fact with his known study of prophecy and with the puzzling distinction that was drawn between walking across the Common to church (which was permissible) and walking on the same portion of the earth's surface after church (which was not).

But, after all, Sunday (with its sealskin alleviations in winter) was soon over, and thereafter Tristram was free, with his special friends Robert Wilberforce, little John Venn, and Tom Macaulay, to play by the Mount Pond and to explore the mysteries of the Common, or, if it was wet, reinforced by other Wilberforces and Venns, to engage in endless games of hide and seek up and down the big house, with its spreading lawns and aged elms, to which, three years before the old century had run out, John Hungerford had brought his bride. Mrs. Hungerford's chief characteristic was a charity that knew no bounds, so that it was in her drawing-room that Mr. Venn propounded his novel scheme of district visiting, and in her spare bedrooms that the unfortunate African lads, who were being educated as an experiment at Mr. Graves's school on the Common, were nursed back to life after having nearly died of pneumonia. And on a day in May, 1800, Tristram had made his own appearance under its roof, and now he himself, clad in a blue coat with white collar and ruffles, attended that academy with his small friends.

Yet those earliest pictures of Evangelical Clapham, of his father pacing up and down the lawn under the elms in earnest talk with Mr. Wilberforce, of his mother smiling at her guests assembled round the great mahogany dining table (to meet, perhaps, Mrs. Hannah More or Mr. Gisborne of Yoxall, the famous preacher), were soon overlaid with others. In 1808 John Hungerford's health, shaken by his exertions for the General Abolition Act of the previous year, began to cause anxiety. The doctors recommended change of scene, and air more bracing than that of Clapham village, suggesting a temporary retirement to the neighbourhood of the Sussex or the Berkshire Downs. Mrs. Hungerford having a distant relative in the latter county – the young wife of the Rector of Compton Regis – and a suitable house at Compton Parva, the next village, falling vacant, this house was bought, the Hungerfords intending to divide their time between Clapham and Berkshire. But John Hungerford, worn out with his labours in the cause to which he had sacrificed everything, died a few months later, and Mrs. Hungerford, with her son, was left in circumstances considerably reduced. The large West Indian income reverted, on her husband's death, to other hands, and so the mansion at Clapham had to be sold, and the newly-acquired house at Compton became their permanent home. But at Compton, too, death had been busy, for the Rector was now a widower, almost inseparable from his baby girl. At Mrs. Hungerford's request he undertook to prepare Tristram for Eton. Herein he was carrying out her own wishes against those of her friends of the Common, who were inclined to regard public schools as nurseries of vice and Cambridge as the only tolerable University. Already Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Venn had urged tutors at home in preference to this scheme, and Mr. Zachary Macaulay had suggested that Tristram should accompany Tom to his private school in preparation for Cambridge. But all the Heathcotes from time immemorial had gone to Eton and Oxford, and Mrs. Hungerford, praying always against the spirit of worldliness, intended Tristram to follow the tradition.

And so for three years Tristram rode his pony to the Rectory, and learnt to write Latin verse, while Mrs. Hungerford did her best to counteract the Rector's educational plans for his little daughter. Disappointed in his hopes of a son, Mr. Grenville said that there was no reason why Horatia should not be as good a scholar as any boy, and to this end she was to begin Latin at five and Greek at six, and meanwhile he gave her everything she wanted. But before Horatia had mastered Mensa, a table, the white pony had ceased its visits to the Rectory, for its rider was in his first term at school.

Save for one thing, Eton did not bulk very large in Tristram's experience. He took with him there a questioning mind and a strong body. The first he soon learnt to disguise; the second brought him the thing that counted, his friend. Fond of all games, he gave himself assiduously to rowing, a sport then rather winked at than formally recognised by the authorities, and towards the end of his fourth year had attained the position of a captain. When selecting a crew for the Boats of the Fourth of June, he happened to cast his eye on a delicate-looking boy of his own age, above him in class, whose brilliant but rather uncertain oarsmanship he had once or twice observed, and, though he rather doubted his staying power, resolved to include him. Nor, when he asked him to take an oar in the Defiance, and Dormer, flushing with pleasure, had accepted, stoutly denying the imputation that he was not strong, had Tristram any idea that he himself had just performed the most pregnant action, perhaps, of his life.

The Fourth of June came, and Tristram's recruit did not belie his promise, nor did he fail in the severer test of Election Saturday, when, amid fireworks and bell-ringing, the Defiance chased theMars round and round Windsor Eyot and finally bumped her. It was not, indeed, until they had landed that Tristram's well-earned triumph was somewhat dashed by the news that Number Four had fainted, and that they could not bring him to. He ran back to find that not all the Thames water which was being ladled over his unconscious comrade was having any effect, and, conscience-stricken, he picked him up and went off with him in search of more skilled assistance, divided between alarm, admiration for his pluck, and a certain protective sensation quite new to him. To the end of his life he was always to entertain for Charles Dormer somewhat similar feelings.

The result of it all was a verdict that the boy had slightly strained his heart and must pass a week in bed. The remorseful Tristram visited him daily, and thus, in talks more intimate than they could probably have compassed by other means, their friendship had its birth. Later, Tristram took Dormer home with him for the holidays, and the compassionate soul of Selina Hungerford was able to spend itself on the boy, who, she felt secretly sure, had never had a real mother.

The time came at last for Tristram to go up to Oxford. In the selection of a college Mrs. Hungerford accepted the choice of Mr. Grenville, who voted unhesitatingly for Oriel. Copleston, the Provost, he had known and admired since undergraduate days, and he had followed the ascent of Oriel, under Provost Eveleigh, towards her present pre-eminence. He had seen her choose her Fellows for their intellectual promise rather than for their social qualities, and he had seen her force upon a University content hitherto with a farce, a system of real examination for the B.A. degree. He had also seen (though without quite realising its import) the gradual formation of that group of Fellows called the Noetics, who were products of the French Revolution though they were ignorant of the philosophy of the Continent, who, asking the why and the wherefore, pulled everything to pieces, and who had the temerity to apply even to religion itself the unfettered discussion meted out in Common Room to all subjects alike. Into this atmosphere of liberal thought the Rector was responsible for plunging the son of John Hungerford, born in the sacred village of Clapham, and destined by his parents for the ministry.

The son of John Hungerford, however, was the last to complain of his immersion, especially as his friend, too, was entered at Oriel. That questioning spirit, which he had learnt to disguise at Eton, now found a suitable soil and blossomed accordingly. Tristram had, moreover, the fortune to fall for instruction to the great Whately himself, the Noetic of the Noetics, the "White Bear," who treated his pupils rather like the host of dogs which he took with him on his walks round Christ Church meadows, throwing stones for them into the Cherwell. With his boisterous humanity, his disturbing habit of launching Socratic questions, his almost equally disturbing habit of imparting information lying full length on a sofa, he kept the minds of his disciples in a continual ferment, and when, as in Tristram's case, the critical faculty was already highly developed, the result was so stimulating that an apt pupil might very well pass even beyond the ideas of his master. Above all things, Whately hated shams; he repudiated all authority, whether of the Church or of tradition, and held that there was nothing which should not be submitted to reason. Yet, in an Erastian age, he upheld the freedom of the Church from the State, though he denounced the priesthood as an invasion of Christian equality. He reduced dogma to a residuum, yet, for his able defence of that residuum, he might rank as a Christian apologist.

His views at first appealed very strongly to Tristram, who thought that he was going to be able to reconcile reason, religion, learning, and the general scheme of things. But after a while he discovered that this process was not so easy, and Dormer, the High Churchman, was responsible for making it harder still. And at the end of his time at Oxford he found his opinions in such a state of flux that he determined to postpone taking Orders. Mrs. Hungerford, rather to the surprise of the conscience-stricken Rector, put no pressure on her son, and a noble lord writing at this juncture in search of a tutor for his heir, Tristram was glad to accept the post.

Three years later, on his homeward way from the Continental tour which rounded off his time with his pupil, when choosing, at Brussels, a piece of lace for Horatia's approaching birthday (on which he had always given her a present), Tristram realised with a curious dismay that it was the eighteenth recurrence of this anniversary, that he had, of course, always intended to marry her, that applications for her hand might already have been made from other quarters – and accepted – and that he must get back at once. His charge was perhaps equally dismayed at the speed with which, next day, they resumed their homeward course.

They need not have hastened. If the disappointed lover had not been obliged to consider his mother's suddenly threatened health, it would have gone even harder with him than it did. She who had always tended now needed tending, and had her illness been voluntary her unrivalled instinct for consolation could not have hit upon a means more healing. Tristram took her away to Hastings, and there, after eight months, she died.

Doubly as the place was now painful to him, Tristram returned to Compton. His loss, however, had this effect, that it made intercourse with the Rectory more easy of resumption. Having sufficient means and no definite object for his energies he was thrown back upon himself. He had neither the money nor the inclination to stand for Parliament. His father's passion for the interests of the negro had not descended to him, but more and more the crying need of the English poor was forcing itself upon his attention. He would have liked to be able to take Orders and to immerse himself in activities in some growing town. As it was he found a shadow of consolation in studying the problem of Poor Law reform. He even wrote a pamphlet, "A remedy for the present distress," and, as a justice of the peace, he was active in the emigration schemes then so popular as a means of remedying the mischief caused by the insane administration of the Poor Law. But every day seemed emptier than the last. He saw Horatia frequently, but, disguise it as he might, this privilege was not entirely pleasurable. He had lost the mother to whom he was devoted, and now the Gospel according to Whately was beginning to fail him. Slowly and bitterly it came to him that the "manly, reasonable, moderate, not too other-worldly faith and practice" which had once satisfied him had done so only because he was young, and because things were going well with him. When he went in to Oxford to see Dormer, now in Orders and Fellow of Oriel, he came across Whately more than once, and felt the chill that one feels in meeting a person the glamour of whose influence has departed.

But more and more he found himself a constant visitor at Oriel, until, as a privileged person, he came to be almost included in the circle of Dormer's friends there. These, without, exception, belonged to the new Oriel school, who were in reaction from speculation to authority, and, like John Keble, their guide, boldly placed character above intellect. Dormer never argued with him now, yet, imperceptibly, the leaven worked.... In the end it was Tristram's own need and his feeling for the needs of others which made him able to cut himself away from all "liberal" trammels and to rank himself under the same banner with the friend who had waited long and patiently for such a change of mind. During the summer term of 1830 he told Dormer that there was now no reason why he should not be ordained.

He had told Dormer something else too – the something which he had been discussing this very evening with Mr. Grenville, the something which was engrossing his whole thoughts as he rode homewards under the infant moon – his intention of again asking Horatia to marry him. There had never been any other woman for him. He knew her very well; he was no stranger even to her faults – little flecks making more beautiful a beautiful flower, they seemed to him, for he had a profound belief in her, a sort of intuitive faith in the real, secret Horatia whom sometimes she seemed to delight in hiding up – the woman with a capacity for great things. And the more he knew her the more he desired her. The thought that, when the time seemed favourable, he was going to stake his happiness on another throw, shook him. It haunted his sleep that night in a harassing dream, relic of their conversation at supper, wherein he was feverishly trying to build up a dyke against a flood of water that poured and pushed upon it, and Horatia, dressed in the robes of the Provost of Oriel, was laughing at him and telling him not to be absurd, for the water had to come. Then, with her garden trowel, she had herself made a little breach in the bank, and at that a smooth wave had slipped over and carried her away, still laughing; and he woke, in a horror for which he could scarcely account, and lay wakeful till dawn.