No More Learning

Sims! ' She then cried a little, and allowed herself to be consoled by
Mrs. Sherman.

'You talk so intelligently and are so well informed,' she said at
parting. 'I have made a very pleasant call,' and the caddis-worm toiled
upon its way, arriving in time at other cups of tea.


III

The day after Mrs. Leland's call upon his mother, John Sherman,
returning home after his not very lengthy day in the office, saw
Margaret coming towards him. She had a lawn-tennis racket under her
arm, and was walking slowly on the shady side of the road. She was a
pretty girl with quite irregular features, who though not really more
than pretty, had so much manner, so much of an air, that every one
called her a beauty: a trefoil with the fragrance of a rose.

'Mr. Sherman,' she cried, coming smiling to meet him, 'I have been ill,
but could not stand the house any longer. I am going to the Square to
play tennis. Will you come with me? '

'I am a bad player,' he said.

'Of course you are,' she answered; 'but you are the only person under a
hundred to be found this afternoon. How dull life is! ' she continued,
with a sigh. 'You heard how ill I have been? What do you do all day? '

'I sit at a desk, sometimes writing, and sometimes, when I get lazy,
looking up at the flies. There are fourteen on the plaster of the
ceiling over my head. They died two winters ago. I sometimes think to
have them brushed off, but they have been there so long now I hardly
like to. '

'Ah! you like them,' she said, 'because you are accustomed to them. In
most cases there is not much more to be said for our family affections,
I think. '

'In a room close at hand,' he went on, 'there is, you know, Uncle
Michael, who never speaks. '

'Precisely. You have an uncle who never speaks; I have a mother who
never is silent. She went to see Mrs. Sherman the other day. What did
she say to her? '

'Nothing. '

'Really! What a dull thing existence is! '--this with a great sigh.
'When the Fates are weaving our web of life some mischievous goblin
always runs off with the dye-pot. Everything is dull and grey. Am I
looking a little pale? I have been so very ill. '

'A little bit pale, perhaps,' he said, doubtfully.

The Square gate brought them to a stop. It was locked, but she had the
key. The lock was stiff, but turned easily for John Sherman.

'How strong you are,' she said.

It was an iridescent evening of spring. The leaves of the bushes had
still their faint green. As Margaret darted about at the tennis, a red
feather in her cap seemed to rejoice with its wearer. Everything was at
once gay and tranquil. The whole world had that unreal air it assumes
at beautiful moments, as though it might vanish at a touch like an
iridescent soap-bubble.

After a little Margaret said she was tired, and, sitting on a
garden-seat among the bushes, began telling him the plots of novels
lately read by her. Suddenly she cried: 'The novel-writers were all
serious people like you. They are so hard on people like me. They
always make us come to a bad end. They _say_ we are always acting,
acting, acting; and what else do you serious people do? You act before
the world. I think, do you know, _we_ act before ourselves. All the
old foolish kings and queens in history were like us. They laughed and
beckoned and went to the block for no very good purpose. I daresay the
headsmen were like you. '

'We would never cut off so pretty a head. '

'Oh, yes, you would--you would cut off mine to-morrow. ' All this she
said vehemently, piercing him with her bright eyes. 'You would cut off
my head to-morrow,' she repeated, almost fiercely; 'I tell you you
would. '

Her departure was always unexpected, her moods changed with so much
rapidity. 'Look! ' she said, pointing where the clock on St. Peter's
church showed above the bushes. 'Five minutes to five. In five minutes
my mother's tea-hour. It is like growing old. I go to gossip. Good-bye. '

The red feather shone for a moment among the bushes and was gone.


IV

The next day and the day after, Sherman was followed by those bright
eyes. When he opened a letter at his desk they seemed to gaze at him
from the open paper, and to watch him from the flies upon the ceiling.
He was even a worse clerk than usual.

One evening he said to his mother, 'Miss Leland has beautiful eyes. '

'My dear, she puts belladonna in them. '

'What a thing to say! '

'I know she does, though her mother denies it. '

'Well, she is certainly beautiful,' he answered.

'My dear, if she has an attraction for you, I don't want to discourage
it. She is rich as girls go nowadays; and one woman has one fault,
another another: one's untidy, one fights with her servants, one fights
with her friends, another has a crabbed tongue when she talks of them. '

Sherman became again silent, finding no fragment of romance in such a
discourse.

In the next week or two he saw much of Miss Leland. He met her almost
every evening on his return from the office, walking slowly, her racket
under her arm. They played tennis much and talked more. Sherman began
to play tennis in his dreams. Miss Leland told him all about herself,
her friends, her inmost feelings; and yet every day he knew less about
her. It was not merely that saying everything she said nothing, but
that continually there came through her wild words the sound of the
mysterious flutes and viols of that unconscious nature which dwells
so much nearer to woman than to man. How often do we not endow the
beautiful and candid with depth and mystery not their own? We do not
know that we but hear in their voices those flutes and viols playing to
us of the alluring secret of the world.

Sherman had never known in early life what is called first love, and
now, when he had passed thirty, it came to him--that love more of the
imagination than of either the senses or affections: it was mainly the
eyes that followed him.

It is not to be denied that as this love grew serious it grew
mercenary. Now active, now latent, the notion had long been in
Sherman's mind, as we know, that he should marry money. A born
lounger, riches tempted him greatly. When those eyes haunted him from
the fourteen flies on the ceiling, he would say, 'I should be rich;
I should have a house in the country; I should hunt and shoot, and
have a garden and three gardeners; I should leave this abominable
office. ' Then the eyes became even more beautiful. It was a new kind of
belladonna.

He shrank a little, however, from choosing even this pleasant pathway.
He had planned many futures for himself and learnt to love them all. It
was this that had made him linger on at Ballah for so long, and it was
this that now kept him undecided. He would have to give up the universe
for a garden and three gardeners. How sad it was to make substantial
even the best of his dreams. How hard it was to submit to that
decree which compels every step we take in life to be a death in the
imagination. How difficult it was to be so enwrapped in this one new
hope as not to hear the lamentations that were going on in dim corners
of his mind.

One day he resolved to propose. He examined himself in the glass in
the morning; and for the first time in his life smiled to see how
good-looking he was. In the evening before leaving the office he
peered at himself in the mirror over the mantlepiece in the room where
customers were received. The sun was blazing through the window full on
his face. He did not look so well. Immediately all courage left him.

That evening he went out after his mother had gone to bed and walked
far along the towing-path of the Thames. A faint mist half covered
away the houses and factory chimneys on the further side; beside him
a band of osiers swayed softly, the deserted and full river lapping
their stems. He looked on all these things with foreign eyes. He had no
sense of possession. Indeed it seemed to him that everything in London
was owned by too many to be owned by anyone. Another river that he
did seem to possess flowed through his memory with all its familiar
sights--boys riding in the stream to the saddle-girths, fish leaping,
water-flies raising their small ripples, a swan asleep, the wallflowers
growing on the red brick of the margin. He grew very sad. Suddenly
a shooting star, fiery and vagabond, leaped from the darkness. It
brought his mind again in a moment to Margaret Leland. To marry her, he
thought, was to separate himself from the old life he loved so well.

Crossing the river at Putney, he hurried homewards among the
market-gardens. Nearing home, the streets were deserted, the shops
closed. Where King Street joins the Broadway, entirely alone with
itself, in the very centre of the road a little black cat was leaping
after its shadow.

'Ah! ' he thought, 'it would be a good thing to be a little black cat.
To leap about in the moonlight and sleep in the sunlight, and catch
flies, to have no hard tasks to do or hard decisions to come to, to be
simple and full of animal spirits. '

At the corner of Bridge Road was a coffee-stall, the only sign of human
life. He bought some cold meat and flung it to the little black cat.


V

Some more days went by. At last, one day, arriving at the Square
somewhat earlier than usual, and sitting down to wait for Margaret on
the seat among the bushes, he noticed the pieces of a torn-up letter
lying about. Beside him on the seat was a pencil, as though someone had
been writing there and left it behind them. The pencil-lead was worn
very short. The letter had been torn up, perhaps in a fit of impatience.

In a half-mechanical way he glanced over the scraps. On one of them
he read: 'MY DEAR ELIZA,--What an incurable gossip my mother is. You
heard of my misfortune. I nearly died----' Here he had to search among
the scraps; at last he found one that seemed to follow. 'Perhaps you
will hear news from me soon. There is a handsome young man who pays me
attention, and----' Here another piece had to be found. 'I would take
him though he had a face like the man in the moon, and limped like the
devil at the theatre. Perhaps I am a little in love. Oh! friend of
my heart--' Here it broke off again. He was interested, and searched
the grass and the bushes for fragments. Some had been blown to quite
a distance. He got together several sentences now. 'I will not spend
another winter with my mother for anything. All this is, of course, a
secret. I had to tell somebody; secrets are bad for my health. Perhaps
it will all come to nothing. ' Then the letter went off into dress, the
last novel the writer had read, and so forth. A Miss Sims, too, was
mentioned, who had said some unkind thing of the writer.

Sherman was greatly amused. It did not seem to him wrong to read--we do
not mind spying on one of the crowd, any more than on the personages of
literature. It never occurred to him that he, or any friend of his, was
concerned in these pencil scribblings.

Suddenly he saw this sentence: 'Heigho! your poor Margaret is falling
in love again; condole with her, my dear. '

He started. The name 'Margaret,' the mention of Miss Sims, the style
of the whole letter, all made plain the authorship. Very desperately
ashamed of himself, he got up and tore each scrap of paper into still
smaller fragments and scattered them far apart.

That evening he proposed and was accepted.


VI

For several days there was a new heaven and a new earth. Miss Leland
seemed suddenly impressed with the seriousness of life. She was
gentleness itself; and as Sherman sat on Sunday mornings in his
pocket-handkerchief of a garden under the one tree, with its smoky
stem, watching the little circles of sunlight falling from the leaves
like a shower of new sovereigns, he gazed at them with a longer and
keener joy than heretofore--a new heaven and a new earth, surely!

Sherman planted and dug and raked this pocket-handkerchief of a garden
most diligently, rooting out the docks and dandelions and mouse-ear and
the patches of untimely grass. It was the point of contact between his
new life and the old. It was far too small and unfertile and shaded-in
to satisfy his love of gardener's experiments and early vegetables.
Perforce this husbandry was too little complex for his affections to
gather much round plant and bed. His garden in Ballah used to touch him
like the growth of a young family. Now he was content to satisfy his
barbaric sense of colour; right round were planted alternate hollyhock
and sunflower, and behind them scarlet-runners showed their inch-high
cloven shoots.

One Sunday it occurred to him to write to his friends on the matter
of his engagement. He numbered them over. Howard, one or two less
intimate, and Mary Carton. At that name he paused; he would not write
just yet.


VII

One Saturday there was a tennis party. Miss Leland devoted herself all
day to a young Foreign Office clerk. She played tennis with him, talked
with him, drank lemonade with him, had neither thoughts nor words for
anyone else. John Sherman was quite happy. Tennis was always a bore,
and now he was not called upon to play. It had not struck him there was
occasion for jealousy.

As the guests were dispersing, his betrothed came to him. Her manner
seemed strange.

'Does anything ail you, Margaret? ' he asked, as they left the Square.

'Everything,' she answered, looking about her with ostentatious
secrecy. 'You are a most annoying person. You have no feeling; you
have no temperament; you are quite the most stupid creature I was ever
engaged to. '

'What is wrong with you? ' he asked, in bewilderment.

'Don't you see,' she replied, with a broken voice, 'I flirted all day
with that young clerk? You should have nearly killed me with jealousy.
You do not love me a bit! There is no knowing what I might do! '

'Well, you know,' he said, 'it was not right of you. People might say,
"Look at John Sherman; how furious he must be! " To be sure, I wouldn't
be furious a bit; but then they'd go about saying I was. It would not
matter, of course; but you know it is not right of you.
'

'It is no use pretending you have feeling. It is all that miserable
little town you come from, with its sleepy old shops and its sleepy
old society. I would give up loving you this minute,' she added, with
a caressing look, 'if you had not that beautiful bronzed face. I will
improve you. To-morrow evening you must come to the opera. ' Suddenly
she changed the subject. 'Do you see that little fat man coming out of
the Square and staring at me? I was engaged to him once. Look at the
four old ladies behind him, shaking their bonnets at me. Each has some
story about me, and it will be all the same in a hundred years. '

After this he had hardly a moment's peace. She kept him continually
going to theatres, operas, parties. These last were an especial
trouble; for it was her wont to gather about her an admiring circle to
listen to her extravagancies, and he was no longer at the age when we
enjoy audacity for its own sake.


VIII

Gradually those bright eyes of his imagination, watching him from
letters and from among the fourteen flies on the ceiling, had ceased to
be centres of peace. They seemed like two whirlpools, wherein the order
and quiet of his life were absorbed hourly and daily.

He still thought sometimes of the country house of his dreams and of
the garden and the three gardeners, but somehow they had lost half
their charm.

He had written to Howard and some others, and commenced, at last, a
letter to Mary Carton. It lay unfinished on his desk; a thin coating of
dust was gathering upon it.

Mrs. Leland called continually on Mrs. Sherman. She sentimentalized
over the lovers, and even wept over them; each visit supplied the
household with conversation for a week.

Every Sunday morning--his letter-writing time--Sherman looked at his
uncompleted letter. Gradually it became plain to him he could not
finish it. It had never seemed to him he had more than friendship
for Mary Carton, yet somehow it was not possible to tell her of this
love-affair.

The more his betrothed troubled him the more he thought about the
unfinished letter. He was a man standing at the cross roads.

Whenever the wind blew from the south he remembered his friend, for
that is the wind that fills the heart with memory.

One Sunday he removed the dust from the face of the letter almost
reverently, as though it were the dust from the wheels of destiny. But
the letter remained unfinished.


IX

One Wednesday in June Sherman arrived home an hour earlier than
usual from his office, as his wont was the first Wednesday in every
month, on which day his mother was at home to her friends. They had
not many callers. To-day there was no one as yet but a badly-dressed
old lady his mother had picked up he knew not where. She had been
looking at his photograph album, and recalling names and dates
from her own prosperous times. As she went out Miss Leland came in.
She gave the old lady in passing a critical look that made the poor
creature very conscious of a threadbare mantle, and went over to Mrs.
Sherman, holding out both hands. Sherman, who knew all his mother's
peculiarities, noticed on her side a slight coldness; perhaps she did
not altogether like this beautiful dragon-fly.

'I have come,' said Miss Leland, 'to tell John that he must learn to
paint. Music and society are not enough. There is nothing like art to
give refinement. ' Then turning to John Sherman--'My dear, I will make
you quite different. You are a dreadful barbarian, you know. '

'What ails me, Margaret? '

'Just look at that necktie! Nothing shows a man's cultivation like
his necktie! Then your reading! You never read anything but old books
nobody wants to talk about. I will lend you three everyone has read
this month. You really must acquire small talk and change your necktie. '

Presently she noticed the photograph-book lying open on a chair.

'Oh! ' she cried, 'I must have another look at John's beauties. '

It was a habit of his to gather all manner of pretty faces. It came
from incipient old bachelorhood, perhaps.

Margaret criticised each photograph in turn with, 'Ah! she looks as if
she had some life in her! ' or 'I do not like your sleepy eyelids,' or
some such phrase. The mere relations were passed by without a word. One
face occurred several times--a quiet face. As Margaret came on this one
for the third time, Mrs. Sherman, who seemed a little resentful about
something, said: 'That is his friend, Mary Carton. '

'He told me about her. He has a book she gave him. So that is she? How
interesting! I pity these poor country people. It must be hard to keep
from getting stupid. '

'My friend is not at all stupid,' said Sherman.

'Does she speak with a brogue? I remember you told me she was very
good. It must be difficult to keep from talking platitudes when one is
very good. '

'You are quite wrong about her. You would like her very much,' he
replied.

'She is one of those people, I suppose, who can only talk about their
relatives, or their families, or about their friends' children: how
this one has got the whooping-cough, and this one is getting well of
the measles! ' She kept swaying one of the leaves between her finger
and thumb impatiently. 'What a strange way she does her hair; and what
an ugly dress! '

'You must not talk that way about her--she is my great friend. '

'Friend! friend! ' she burst out. 'He thinks I will believe in
friendship between a man and a woman! '

She got up, and said, turning round with an air of changing the
subject, 'Have you written to your friends about our engagement? You
had not done so when I asked you lately. '

'I have. '

'All? '

'Well, not all. '

'Your great friend, Miss ---- what do you call her? '

'Miss Carton. I have not written to her. '

She tapped impatiently with her foot.

'They were really old companions--that is all,' said Mrs. Sherman,
wishing to mend matters. 'They were both readers; that brought them
together. I never much fancied her. Yet she was well enough as a
friend, and helped, maybe, with reading, and the gardening, and
his good bringing-up, to keep him from the idle young men of the
neighbourhood. '

'You must make him write and tell her at once--you must, you must! '
almost sobbed out Miss Leland.

'I promise,' he answered.

Immediately returning to herself, she cried, 'If I were in her place
I know what I would like to do when I got the letter. I know who I
would like to kill! '--this with a laugh as she went over and looked at
herself in the mirror on the mantlepiece.


THIRD PART

JOHN SHERMAN REVISITS BALLAH


I

The others had gone, and Sherman was alone in the drawing-room by
himself, looking through the window. Never had London seemed to him so
like a reef whereon he was cast away. In the Square the bushes were
covered with dust; some sparrows were ruffling their feathers on the
side-walk; people passed, continually disturbing them. The sky was full
of smoke. A terrible feeling of solitude in the midst of a multitude
oppressed him. A portion of his life was ending. He thought that soon
he would be no longer a young man, and now, at the period when the
desire of novelty grows less, was coming the great change of his life.
He felt he was of those whose granaries are in the past. And now this
past would never renew itself. He was going out into the distance as
though with strange sailors in a strange ship.

He longed to see again the town where he had spent his childhood: to
see the narrow roads and mean little shops. And perhaps it would be
easier to tell her who had been the friend of so many years of this
engagement in his own person than by letter. He wondered why it was so
hard to write so simple a thing.

It was his custom to act suddenly on his decisions. He had not made
many in his life. The next day he announced at the office that he would
be absent for three or four days. He told his mother he had business in
the country.

His betrothed met him on the way to the terminus, as he was walking,
bag in hand, and asked where he was going. 'I am going on business to
the country,' he said, and blushed. He was creeping away like a thief.


II

He arrived in the town of Ballah by rail, for he had avoided the slow
cattle-steamer and gone by Dublin.

It was the forenoon, and he made for the Imperial Hotel to wait till
four in the evening, when he would find Mary Carton in the schoolhouse,
for he had timed his journey so as to arrive on Thursday, the day of
the children's practice.

As he went through the streets his heart went out to every familiar
place and sight: the rows of tumble-down thatched cottages; the slated
roofs of the shops; the women selling gooseberries; the river bridge;
the high walls of the garden where it was said the gardener used to see
the ghost of a former owner in the shape of a rabbit; the street corner
no child would pass at nightfall for fear of the headless soldier;
the deserted flour-store; the wharves covered with grass. All these
he watched with Celtic devotion, that devotion carried to the ends of
the world by the Celtic exiles, and since old time surrounding their
journeyings with rumour of plaintive songs.

He sat in the window of the Imperial Hotel, now full of guests. He
did not notice any of them. He sat there meditating, meditating. Grey
clouds covering the town with flying shadows rushed by like the old
and dishevelled eagles that Maeldune saw hurrying towards the waters
of life. Below in the street passed by country people, townspeople,
travellers, women with baskets, boys driving donkeys, old men with
sticks; sometimes he recognized a face or was recognized himself, and
welcomed by some familiar voice.

'You have come home a handsomer gentleman than your father, Misther
John, and he was a neat figure of a man, God bless him! ' said the
waiter, bringing him his lunch; and in truth Sherman had grown
handsomer for these years away. His face and gesture had more of
dignity, for on the centre of his nature life had dropped a pinch of
experience.

At four he left the hotel and waited near the schoolhouse till the
children came running out. One or two of the elder ones he recognized
but turned away.


III

Mary Carton was locking the harmonium as he went in. She came to meet
him with a surprised and joyful air.

'How often I have wished to see you! When did you come? How well you
remembered my habits to know where to find me. My dear John, how glad I
am to see you! '

'You are the same as when I left, and this room is the same, too. '

'Yes,' she answered, 'the same, only I have had some new prints hung
up--prints of fruits and leaves and bird-nests. It was only done last
week. When people choose pictures and poems for children they choose
out such domestic ones. I would not have any of the kind; children are
such undomestic animals. But, John, I am so glad to see you in this
old schoolhouse again. So little has changed with us here. Some have
died and some have been married, and we are all a little older and the
trees a little taller. '

'I have come to tell you I am going to be married. '

She became in a moment perfectly white, and sat down as though attacked
with faintness. Her hand on the edge of the chair trembled.

Sherman looked at her, and went on in a bewildered, mechanical way: 'My
betrothed is a Miss Leland. She has a good deal of money. You know my
mother always wished me to marry some one with money. Her father, when
alive, was an old client of Sherman and Saunders. She is much admired
in society. ' Gradually his voice became a mere murmur. He did not seem
to know that he was speaking. He stopped entirely. He was looking at
Mary Carton.

Everything around him was as it had been some three years before. The
table was covered with cups and the floor with crumbs. Perhaps the
mouse pulling at a crumb under the table was the same mouse as on that
other evening. The only difference was the brooding daylight of summer
and the ceaseless chirruping of the sparrows in the ivy outside. He
had a confused sense of having lost his way. It was just the same
feeling he had known as a child, when one dark night he had taken a
wrong turning, and instead of arriving at his own house, found himself
at a landmark he knew was miles from home.

A moment earlier, however difficult his life, the issues were always
definite; now suddenly had entered the obscurity of another's interest.

Before this it had not occurred to him that Mary Carton had any
stronger feeling for him than warm friendship.

He began again, speaking in the same mechanical way: 'Miss Leland
lives with her mother near us. She is very well educated and very well
connected, though she has lived always among business people. '

Miss Carton, with a great effort, had recovered her composure.

'I congratulate you,' she said. 'I hope you will be always happy. You
came here on some business for your firm, I suppose? I believe they
have some connection with the town still. '

'I only came here to tell you I was going to be married. '

'Do you not think it would have been better to have written? ' she said,
beginning to put away the children's tea-things in a cupboard by the
fireplace.

'It would have been better,' he answered, drooping his head.

Without a word, locking the door behind them, they went out. Without
a word they walked the grey streets. Now and then a woman or a child
curtseyed as they passed. Some wondered, perhaps, to see these old
friends so silent. At the rectory they bade each other good-bye.

'I hope you will be always happy,' she said. 'I will pray for you and
your wife. I am very busy with the children and old people, but I shall
always find a moment to wish you well in. Good-bye now. '

They parted; the gate in the wall closed behind her. He stayed for a
few moments looking up at the tops of the trees and bushes showing over
the wall, and at the house a little way beyond. He stood considering
his problem--her life, his life. His, at any rate, would have incident
and change; hers would be the narrow existence of a woman who, failing
to fulfil the only abiding wish she has ever formed, seeks to lose
herself in routine--mournfulest of things on this old planet.

This had been revealed: he loved Mary Carton, she loved him. He
remembered Margaret Leland, and murmured she did well to be jealous.
Then all her contemptuous words about the town and its inhabitants came
into his mind. Once they made no impression on him, but now the sense
of personal identity having been disturbed by this sudden revelation,
alien as they were to his way of thinking, they began to press in on
him. Mary, too, would have agreed with them, he thought; and might it
be that at some distant time weary monotony in abandonment would have
so weighed down the spirit of Mary Carton that she would be merely one
of the old and sleepy whose dulness filled the place like a cloud?

He went sadly towards the hotel; everything about him, the road, the
sky, the feet wherewith he walked seeming phantasmal and without
meaning.

He told the waiter he would leave by the first train in the morning.