Читать книгу The Passion for Life - Hocking Joseph - Страница 7

During the next few days nothing happened, and, if the truth must be told, I am afraid I got very lonely and depressed. Simpson did his best to interest me, but failed. My books, too, seemed dull and colorless. I suppose it was natural. I was passing through a phase in my life which was the inevitable consequence of what had hitherto taken place. The malady from which I was suffering was taking rather an acute form just then, and I had neither the strength nor inclination for exercise. Thus, although the weather was glorious and the air pure and bracing, I found that sitting day after day amid the same surroundings was anything but exhilarating. Moreover, although I cannot explain it, a sense of dread possessed me. I felt sure that something was going to happen, and that I was going to be at the centre of some untoward event.

I expect I felt all the more irritable because my desire to live became stronger and stronger. It appeared to me that I had nothing to live for, and yet I hung on to life, and the hope of life, grimly.

"Simpson," I said one day, "you told me when we came here that an idiot lad, who went by the name of Fever Lurgy, waited on old Father Abraham and did his errands. What has become of him?"

"Don't know, sir."

"Does no one know?"

"Don't know at all, sir."

"It seems strange, doesn't it, that this lad, who was the first to tell of what had happened to the old man, should not have come here when he heard that the house was occupied again?"

"I did hear something of his running away, because he was afraid; but I know nothing."

"Afraid? Afraid of what?"

"You know what these idiot boys are, sir. I suppose he almost worshipped old Father Abraham, and when he knew his master was killed he feared to stay in the same neighborhood."

"Is that your conclusion too, Simpson?" I asked.

"I never thought of it before, sir."

That day I went out for a walk. Somehow the lethargy which had possessed me for a long time was gone, and my body for the time was instinct with a new life. My fancies about Fever Lurgy had laid hold of me, and I began asking myself all sorts of questions. I found my way into the village, and, seeing a group of men standing by the pump, joined them. I found them very willing to talk with me, and while at first they showed no desire to impart any information, they asked me countless questions. This, I have found since, is a characteristic of the Cornish people. They are exceedingly friendly, and are willing to show kindness to a stranger, but they will not take him into their confidence. They are curious to know everything he can tell them, but they will tell him nothing in return. While they believed I was simply a stranger from "up country," their only interest in me was to know who I was, where I came from, and all about my affairs generally. When they got to know that I was of Cornish descent, however, there was an entire change in their demeanor towards me. I was one of them.

In the course of a few minutes we got talking about Father Abraham and of his tragic end.

"It 'ave bin said, sur, that th' ould man's ghost do wander round the plaace, where you d' live, sur. Es et true?"

"I have never seen him, anyhow. Have you?"

"Well, sur, ted'n for we to say. Oal the saame, I heerd curious noises wawn night near your house."

"What kind of noises?" I asked.

"Oh, a kind of moanin' and cryin', like a gull in pain."

"Maybe it was a sea-gull," I suggested.

"No, sur, we d' know what gulls be like. Twad'n that. We be sure there was foul play, sur."

"What about that lad, Fever Lurgy?" I asked. "Does he live in the neighborhood now?"

"Bless you, sur, Fayver Lurgy a'n't bin seen since th' ould man was killed."

"No!" I said. "Isn't that strange?"

"Oa, he was a funny chap, was Fayver Lurgy. Do you know whay he was called Fayver Lurgy, sur?"

"Not the slightest idea," I replied.

"Well, sur, down 'long 'ere wi' we, when a great lousterin' chap wa'ant work, and do ait a lot, we d' say 'ee've got Fayver Lurgy. That es, two stomachs to ait, and noan to work. Tha's 'ow Fayver Lurgy got 'is name. He's as strong as a 'oss, but he wudd'n work. 'Ee wadd'n such a fool as 'ee made out. 'Ee allays was a button short, was Fayver Lurgy, but 'ee wadd'n no idiot, as people d' say."

"So you think he was afraid of being killed?" I suggested.

"Tha's what we d' think, sur."

"Who were his father and mother?" I asked.

"Nobody doan knaw, sur. He comed 'ere years and years ago, sur, weth an ould woman, who said she was 'is grandmother. When th' ould woman died, sur, Fayver Lurgy jist lopped round by hisself. Sometimes he ded a bit of work, and sometimes nothin'; but 'ee scraped up a living some'ow. When ould Father Abraham comed, he kipt with 'im reglar, and direkly 'ee was killed, Fayver Lurgy left the neighbrood, and nobody doan knaw where 'a es."

"Did you ever see old Father Abraham?" I asked.

"Yes, sur, I've seen 'im, but never to spaik to. Curyus ould chap he was. He 'ad long white whiskers and ter'ble bright eyes. Wan man I d' knaw spoke to 'un. Billy Barnycote 't was. Billy did say as 'ow he believed that ould Father Abraham was a furriner."

"I suppose he never went to Church or Chapel?" I asked.

"What! ould Father Abraham? Not 'ee. 'Ee ded'n go nowhere, so to spaik."

"And you," I said. "Do you ever go?"

"Sometimes, maaster, when there is a good praicher; but why shud us go when the praichers doan knaw more'n we do? I a'ain't bin since last Sunday-school anniversary. They 'ad a praicher from up to Plymouth. Clever chap 'ee was, too. Ef we cud allays git praichers like 'ee, we'd go every Sunday, but when a man like Tommy Coad d' git up and craake, we ca'ant stand it."

The day was beautifully fine, and, as I felt more than ordinarily well, I took a long route home. I had not gone far when, passing a stile, I saw Miss Lethbridge leap lightly into the road. I could not help reflecting how handsome she appeared in her light summer attire. When visiting her father's house a few days before she had struck me as being hard and repellent. Even now there was nothing winsome or girlish about her, but that she presented an attractive figure I could not deny. More than ordinarily tall, and finely formed, she carried her well-fitting clothes to perfection. Her features, too, while not exactly beautiful, were striking; and, flushed somewhat as she was by her walk through the fields, she seemed a part of that bright, early summer day.

"I hope you are better, Mr. Erskine," was her greeting.

"Yes," I replied, "I feel well enough to take a fairly long walk. I have been down into the village talking with some of the people there, and trying to discover some of the romance for which Cornwall is famous."

"And have had your labor for your pains," was her reply.

"Not entirely. I feel as though I have happened upon something which will lead to interesting developments."

"Believe me, you will not, Mr. Erskine."

"No? Why?"

"If ever there was a false tradition, it is the tradition that Cornwall is romantic. I have lived here all my life, and there is no more romance in the county than in that mine-heap," and she nodded towards a discarded mine which lay in the distance.

"The Cornish people," she went on, "have no sense of the mysterious, no sense of the romantic. If ever they had it, it has all died. I suppose that years ago, when the people were entirely ignorant, they believed in all sorts of superstitions, but now that they are better educated they have discarded everything but what they can see, and feel with their own hands. I am inclined to think they are right, too."

"I am not so sure," was my answer. And then I told her of the conversation that had taken place a few moments before.

"And do you imagine, Mr. Erskine, that any romance surrounds the old man who built the house you live in, and lived like a hermit away there by the cliff? Do you think that any romance is associated with the idiot lad who ran his errands and did his bidding?"

"Why not?"

"Because none exists."

"Pardon me if I do not agree with you. After all, there is something romantic in the thought of that old man coming there alone and building his hut in a lonely place, and spending years of his life there."

"Yes, it may seem so; but, pardon me, is there anything romantic in your coming there, Mr. Erskine?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"I am afraid not," I replied.

"And I dare say the reason why he came there was just as unromantic. As for Fever Lurgy, every village has its idiot who is a butt for rustic jokes."

"And what about old Father Abraham's mysterious disappearance?" I asked.

"What you call a mysterious disappearance," was her reply, "I regard as a sordid crime. I expect the old man had a little money hoarded up, some tramps heard of it, and, for the sake of that money, murdered him and threw his body over the cliff."

"At any rate," I said, "it is more pleasant to think that some mystery surrounded his life, and that he left the neighborhood from some romantic cause. Do you know, I am inclined to think that he is still alive, that he will turn up some day, and that the whole thing will be the talk of the countryside."

"And yet you are a trained lawyer, and have lived in London!" she laughed.

"Perhaps that is why. Lawyers get weary of hard thinking. Besides, when one comes to think of it, hard thinking is only responsible for a tithe of the discovery of truth. Far more of it is discovered by intuition than by logic."

"Do you know, you are very refreshing, Mr. Erskine. It is delightful to think of a man coming from hard, matter-of-fact London to Cornwall, and believing in the things that we simple rustics have discarded for a generation or more."

"Then you don't find life either romantic or mysterious?"

"I find it the most prosy, uninteresting thing imaginable. There is no mystery and no romance in the world; everything is hard, matter of fact, commonplace."

"Come, come, now, you cannot believe that," I laughed.

"One believes as one finds." And I thought her eyes became hard. "The other day I read what is called a romantic novel. It had gone through numberless editions, and was, I suppose, the rage of reading circles. It told of all sorts of mysterious happenings and romantic adventures. Then I reflected on what had actually happened to myself and to girls with whom I am acquainted. I went to school in France and Germany, as well as in England, and, do you know, I really cannot find one bit of romance that has ever happened to me or to the girls I have known. I can't remember anything mysterious."

"Isn't life one great mystery?"

"Yes, mystery if you like, but simply because of our ignorance. When the mystery is explained, the explanation is as prosy as that cottage." And she looked towards a cottage door, where a woman stood by her wash-tub. "Do you ever find life mysterious, Mr. Erskine?"

"Yes, it is mysterious from end to end. Sometimes, as I sit in my little wooden hut, facing the sea, at night-time, and hear the wind moan its way over the cliffs and across the waste of waters, when the solemn feeling of night broods over everything, I feel that life is one great mystery. What is behind it all? What is the meaning of everything? Is there a Creator? What lies beyond what we call death? Surely, that is mystery enough. You may say, if you like, that this feeling of mystery is because of our ignorance; nevertheless, it is there."

"Yes," she replied. "But the trouble is that, in so far as we have discovered mysteries, they turn out to be of the most prosy and commonplace nature. Things that were once unknown, and appealed to the world as romantic, now that they are known are just as prosy and uninteresting as the commonplace. Directly a thing is known it becomes humdrum. I went to a lecture one night given by a scientist – an astronomer, in fact. He was lecturing on the planet Mars. He said that he himself had examined the planet through a powerful telescope, and he had seen what to him were convincing proofs that there were canals cut through a piece of land which was similar in nature to the Isthmus of Panama. As a consequence the planet Mars was inhabited – inhabited by thinking, sentient beings, who lived in a world millions of miles from this world. It seemed very wonderful at that time, but, when I came to think of it, it was all very prosy. What if it were inhabited? It would simply mean that people somehow exist there, just as they exist here, and think and suffer, and struggle and die. Can anything be more prosy and unromantic than that?"

"Isn't the very mystery of death itself attractive – wonderful?" I asked.

"Do you think so?" And she looked at me curiously.

"Sometimes," I replied, "although I dread the thought of death, I have a kind of feverish curiosity about it, and I would like to die just to know."

"Yet it would be disappointing in the end. When that so-called mystery comes to be explained, there will be nothing but great, blank darkness."

"And that is your creed of life and death?"

"We can only argue from the known to the unknown," was her reply.

"And do you not long for something more?"

"Long!" And there was passion in her voice.

"Then, to you, religion, immortality, have no interest?"

"Yes, interest," was her reply, "but, like everything else, it is because of my ignorance. I know I am very ignorant, Mr. Erskine, and I dare say you will laugh at me for talking in the way I do; but, so far as I have read of the origins of religions, they are simply the result of a fear of the unknown. People are afraid to die, and they have evolved a sort of hope that there is a life other than this. I know it is a cheerless creed, but don't facts bear out what I have said? In different parts of the world are different religions, and each and all of them are characteristic of the people who believe in them. Wasn't Matthew Arnold right when he said that the Greeks manufactured a god with classical features and golden hair, while the negroes created a god with black skin, thick lips, and woolly hair?"

"Do you go far enough back, even then?" I asked. "You are simply dealing with the shape of the god. What is the origin of the idea?"

"I suppose man invented it," was her reply.

"Yes, but how? After all, knowledge is built upon other knowledge. Imagination is the play of the mind around ascertained facts. 'No man hath seen God at any time.' How, then, have people come to believe in Him, except through some deeper and more wonderful faculty, which conveyed it to the mind? For the mind, after all, is only the vehicle, and not the creator, of thought."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"You get beyond me there, Mr. Erskine. When you dabble in metaphysics I am lost. Still, is it not a fact that the more intellectual the race the less religious it becomes? Take France, for example. Paris is the great clearing-house of ideas, and yet the French are an unbelieving people."

"Is that altogether true?" was my reply, for I was led to take up an attitude of the soundness of which I was far from being convinced. "Is not France literally sick and tired of the atheism which surged over the nation at the time of the Revolution? France no longer glories in hard unbelief, and, as far as I know, the French people are simply longing for faith, and, for that matter, are going back to faith. Not, perhaps, the faith which the Revolution destroyed, but to something deeper, diviner."

She seemed thoughtful, and for some time neither of us spoke. Then she burst out laughing merrily.

"Don't things seem reversed?" she said. "Here are you, a scholar of Oxford, and a clever lawyer, upholding tradition, imagination, intuition, superstition, while I, an ignorant girl, am discarding it all."

"Perhaps," I replied, "that is because life is long to you, short to me. When one comes to what seems the end of things, one looks at life differently. There," I went on, for at that moment we had passed a lad with his arm round a girl's waist, "that boy lives in heaven. He is with the girl he loves. Suppose you tried to convince that boy and girl there was no such thing as romance, would they believe you?"

"Perhaps not," she replied; "but I could take you down the village yonder, and show you men and women who, twenty years ago, were just as romantic as those two cooing doves; and to-day the men loaf round the village lanes, smoking, or, perhaps, are in the public-house drinking; while the women are slatternly, discontented, standing at the wash-tub, or scrubbing out cottages. Where now is the romance, or, for that matter, the love?"

"Then you don't believe in love either?"

She was silent, and I watched her face closely, and again I was struck by her appearance. Yes, no doubt, Isabella Lethbridge was more than ordinarily handsome. Her features, without being beautiful, were fine. The flash of her eyes betokened intelligence beyond the ordinary. At that moment, too, there was a look in them which I had not seen before – a kind of longing, a sense of unsatisfaction, something wistful.

"Love?" she repeated. "No, I don't think I believe in it."

"Surely," I said, "that is going a little bit too far."

"Yes, perhaps it is," was her answer. "There is love – the love of a mother for her child. You see it everywhere. A lion will fight for her whelps, a hen will protect her chickens. But I suppose you were meaning the love which man has for a woman, and woman for man?"

"Yes," I replied, "I was. I was thinking of that lover and his lass whom we have just passed."

"I do not know," she replied. "All I know is that I never felt it, and yet I confess to being twenty-four. It is an awful age, isn't it? Fancy a girl of twenty-four never having been in love! Yet, facts are facts. I do not deny that there is such a thing as affinity; but love, as I understand it, is, or ought to be, something spiritual, something divine, something which outlasts youth and all that youth means; something which defies the ravages of time, that laughs at impossibilities. No. I do not believe there is such a thing."

"Then what is the use of living?" I asked.

"I hardly know. We have a kind of clinging to life, at least the great majority of us have, although I suppose in the more highly cultured States suicides are becoming more common. We shudder at what we call death, and so we seek to live. If, like the old Greeks, we surrounded death with beautiful thoughts – "