Adrienne Toner. Anne Douglas Sedgwick
but not for the sake of the discipline!”
“Mr. Bodman never denounces. Roger is giving you quite a wrong idea,” said Mrs. Chadwick. She had stood looking from one to the other, distressed and bewildered, and she now prepared to leave them. “And Palgrave is very, very unjust. Of course you must not come, dear. It would make me quite unhappy. But Mr. Bodman is not a duffer. If Palgrave feels like that he must certainly stay away. Perhaps you can teach him to be more charitable. It’s easy to see the mote in our neighbour’s eye.” Mrs. Chadwick’s voice slightly trembled. She had been much moved by her son’s defection.
“Come, Mummy, you’re not going to say I’m a duffer!” Palgrave passed an affectionately bantering arm round her shoulders. “Dufferism isn’t my beam!”
But very sadly Mrs. Chadwick drew away, saying as she turned into the house: “No; that isn’t your beam. But pride may be, Palgrave. Spiritual pride.”
Oldmeadow remained standing in the sunlight with Miss Toner and the two young men. The girls had followed Mrs. Chadwick, Meg casting a laughing glance of appreciation at him as she went. Religious scruples would never keep Meg from church if she had a pretty spring dress to wear.
“After all,” he carried on, mildly, the altercation—if that was what it was between him and Miss Toner—“good Platonists as we may be, we haven’t reached the stage of Divine Contemplation yet and things do happen that are difficult to account for, if sin is nothing more positive than illusion and mistake. All the forms of ôte-toi que je m’y mette. All the forms of jealousy and malice. Deliberate cruelties. History is full of horrors, isn’t it? There’s a jealousy of goodness in the human heart, as well as a love. The betrayal of Christ by Judas is symbolic.”
He had screwed his eyeglass into his eye the better to see Miss Toner and looked very much like a solicitor trying to coax dry facts out of a romantic client. And in the transparent shadow of her hat Miss Toner, with her incomparable composure, gave him all her attention.
“I don’t account. I don’t account for anything. Do you?” she said. “I only feel and know. But even the dreadful things, the things that seem to us so dreadful—isn’t it always ignorance? Ignorance of what is really good and happy—and the illusion of a separate self? When we are all, really, one. All, really, together.” She held out her arms, her little basket hanging from her wrist. “And if we feel that at last, and know it, those dreadful things can’t happen any more.”
“Your ‘if’ is the standing problem of metaphysics and ethics. Why don’t we feel and know it? That’s the question? And since we most of us, for most of the time, don’t feel and know it, don’t we keep closer to the truth if we accept the traditional phraseology and admit that there’s something in the texture of life, something in ourselves, that tempts us, or impedes us, or crushes us, and call it sin—evil?”
He was looking at her, still with his latent irony though kindly enough indeed, and he had, as he looked, an intuition about her. She had never been tempted, she had never been impeded, she had never been crushed. That was her power. She was, in a fashion, sinless. It was as if she had been hypnotized in infancy to be good. And while the fact made her in one sense so savourless, it made her in another so significant. She would go much further than most people in any direction she wanted to go simply because she was not aware of obstacles and had no inhibitions.
“Call it what you like,” said Miss Toner. She still smiled—but more gravely. Barney had ceased to stroll and kick. He had come to a standstill beside them, and, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on his beloved, showed himself as completely reassured. Palgrave still stood on the step above her and seemed to watch the snowy, piled-up clouds that adorned the tranquil sky. “I feel it a mistake to make unreal things seem real by giving them big names. We become afraid of them and fear is what impedes us most of all in life. For so many generations humanity has seen ghosts in the evening mists and taken its indigestion for the promptings of a demon. We’ve got away from all that now, Mr. Oldmeadow. We see that mists are mists and indigestion indigestion, and that there aren’t such things as ghosts and demons. We’ve come out, all together, hand in hand, on the Open Road and we don’t want, ever any more, to be reminded, even, of the Dark Ages.”
Before her fluency, Oldmeadow felt himself grow less kindly. “You grant there have been dark ages, then? I count that a concession. Things may not be evil now, but they were once.”
“Not a concession at all,” said Miss Toner. “Only an explanation of what has happened—an explanation of what you call the mess, Mr. Oldmeadow.”
“So that when we find ourselves misbehaving to one another as we march along the Open Road, we may know it’s only indigestion and take a pill.”
She didn’t like badinage. That, at all events, was evident to him, even in her imperturbability. She took it calmly—not lightly; and if she was not already beginning to dislike him, it was because disliking people was a reality she didn’t recognize. “We don’t misbehave if we are on the Open Road,” she said.
“Oh, but you’re falling back now on good old-fashioned theology,” Oldmeadow retorted. “The sheep, saved and well-behaved, keeping to the road, and the goats—all those who misbehave and stray—classed with the evening mists.”
“No,” said Miss Toner eyeing him, “I don’t class them with the evening mists; I class them with the sick, whom we must be kind to and take care of.”
Mrs. Chadwick was now emerging in her new spring hat, which was not very successful and gave emphasis to her general air of strain. Meg’s hat was very successful, as Meg’s hats always were; and if Nancy’s did not shine beside it, it was, at all events, exceedingly becoming to her. Nancy’s eyes went to Barney. Barney, in the past, had been very appreciative of becoming hats. But he had no eyes for Nancy now. He had drawn Miss Toner aside and Oldmeadow heard their colloquy:
“Would you rather I didn’t go?”
“I’d rather, always, you followed your light, dear friend.”
“I do like going here, you know. It seems to belong with it all—and Mummy can’t bear our not going.”
“It makes your dear mother happy. It all means love to you.”
“Not only that”—Oldmeadow imagined that Barney blushed, and he heard his stammer: “I don’t know what I believe about everything; but the service goes much deeper than anything I could think for myself.” Their voices dropped. All that came further to Oldmeadow was from Miss Toner: “It makes you nearer than if you stayed.”
“Confound her ineffability!” he thought. “It rests with her, then, whether he should go or stay.”
It certainly did. Barney moved away with them all, leaving Palgrave to the more evident form of proximity.
“You know,” Mrs. Chadwick murmured to Oldmeadow as they went, between the primroses, down the little path and through a wicket-gate that led to the village—“you know, Roger, it’s quite possible that they may say their prayers together. It’s like Quakers, isn’t it—or Moravians; or whoever those curious people are who are buried standing up—so dismal and uncomfortable, I always think. But it’s better that Palgrave should say his prayers with some one, and somewhere, isn’t it, than that he shouldn’t say them at all?”
CHAPTER VI
“MOTHER’S got the most poisonous headache,” said Meg. “I don’t think she’ll be able to come down to tea.”
She had joined Oldmeadow on the rickety old bench where he sat reading and smoking in a sunny corner of the garden. A band of golden wallflowers behind them exhaled the deep fragrance that he always associated with spring and Sunday and Coldbrooks, and the old stone wall behind the flowers exhaled a warmth