Young Lives. Richard Le Gallienne
or two in which to make his arrangements for departure. James Mesurier was too strong a man to be resentful, and he accepted his son's apology with a gentleness that, as each knew, detracted nothing from the resolution which each had come to.
"My boy," he said, "you will never have such good friends as your father and mother; but it is best that you go out into the world to learn it."
There is something terribly winning and unnerving to the blackest resolution, when the severity of the strong dissolves for a brief moment into tenderness. The rare kind words of the stern, explain it as we will, and unjust as the preference must surely be, one values beyond the frequent forgivenesses of the gentle. Mary Mesurier would have laid down her life in defence of her son's greatest fault, and James Mesurier would as readily have court-martialled him for his smallest, and yet, somehow, a kind word from him brought the tears to his son's eyes.
He had no longer the heart to stimulate the rebellion of Esther, as he felt it his duty to do; and, to her disappointment, he announced that, on the whole, it would perhaps be best for him to go alone.
"It would almost kill poor mother," he said; "and father means well after all," he added.
"I'm afraid it would break father's heart," said Esther.
So these two young people agreed to spare their parents, though--let it not be otherwise imagined--at a great sacrifice. The little paper on which they had carefully worked out their housekeeping, skilfully allotting so much for rent, butcher's meat, milk, coals, and washing, and making "everything" come most optimistically to £59 17s. 9d. a year, would be of no use now, at all events for the present. Their little Charles and Mary Lamb dream must be laid aside--for, of course, they had thought of Charles and Mary Lamb; and indeed, out beyond this history of a few youthful years, their friendship was to prove itself far from unworthy of its famous model.
Yet at this time it was of no great antiquity; for, but a very few years back, Henry had been a miniature tyrant too, and ruled it over his kingdom of six sisters with all the hideous egoism of a pampered "son and heir." Although in the very middle class of society into which Henry Mesurier was born, the dignity of eldest son is one but very contingently connected with tangible inheritance, it is none the less vigorously kept up; and, no doubt, without any consciousness of partiality, Henry Mesurier, from his childhood, had been brought up to regard himself as a sort of young prince, for whom all the privileges of home were, by divine right, reserved. For example, he took his meals with his parents fully five years before any of his sisters were allowed to do so; and for retention of this privilege, when at length the democratic measure of its extension to his two elder sisters was proposed, he fought with the bitterest spirit of caste. Indeed, few oligarchs have been more wildly hated than Henry Mesurier up to the age, say, of fourteen. That was the age of his last thrashing, and it was in the gloomy dusk of that momentous occasion, as he lay alone with smarting back in the twilight of an unusually early bed-time, that a possible new view of woman--as a creature of like passions and privileges--presented itself to him.
His thrashing had been so unjustly severe, that even the granite little hearts of his sisters had been softened; and Esther, managing to secrete a cake that he loved from the tea that was lost to him, stole with it to the top of the house, where he writhed amid lonely echoes and shadows.
She had brought it to him awkwardly, by no means sure of its reception, but sure in her heart that she would hate him for ever, if he missed the meaning of the little solatium. But fortunately his back was far too sore, and his spirit too broken to remember his pride, and he accepted the offering with gratitude and tears.
"Kiss me, Esther," he had said; and a wonderful thrill had gone through the little girl at this strange softness in the mighty, while the dawn of a wonderful pity for the lot of woman had, unconsciously, broken in the soul of the boy.
"Kiss me again, Esther," he had said, and, with the tears that mingled in that kiss, an eternal friendship was baptized.
Henry rose on the morrow a changed being. The grosser pretensions of the male had fallen from him for ever, and there was at first something almost awe-inspiring to his sisters in the gentle solicitude for them and their rights and pleasures which replaced the old despotism. From that time, Esther and he became closer and closer companions, and as they more and more formed an oligarchy of two, a rearrangement of parties in the little parliament of home came about, to be upset again as Dot and Mat qualified for admission into that exclusive little circle.
So soon as Henry had a new dream or a new thought, he shared it with Esther; and freely as he had received from Carlyle, or Emerson, or Thoreau, freely he passed it on to her. For the gloomiest occasion he had some strengthening text, and one of the last things he did before he left home was to make for her a little book which he called "Faith for Cloudy Days," consisting of energising and sustaining phrases from certain great writers,--as it were, a bottle of philosophical phosphates against seasons of spiritual cowardice or debility. There one opened and read: "Sudden the worst turns best to the brave" or Thoreau's "I have yet to hear a single word of wisdom spoken to me by my elders," or again Matthew Arnold's
"Tasks in hours of insight willed May be through hours of gloom fulfilled."
James Mesurier knew nothing of all this; but if he had, he might have understood that after all his children were not so far from the kingdom of heaven.
CHAPTER IV
OF THE PROFESSIONS THAT CHOOSE, AND MIKE LAFLIN
However we may hint at its explanation by theories of inheritance, it still remains curious with what unerring instinct a child of character will from the first, and when it is so evidently ignorant of the field of choice, select, out of all life's occupations and distinctions, one special work it hungers to do, one special distinction that to it seems the most desirable of earthly honours. That Mary Mesurier loved poetry, and James Mesurier sermons, in face of the fact that so many mothers and fathers have done the same with no such result, hardly seems adequate to account for the peculiar glamour which, almost before he could read, there was for Henry Mesurier in any form of print. While books were still being read to him, there had already come into his mind, unaccountably, as by outside suggestion, that there could be nothing so splendid in the world as to write a book for one's self. To be either a soldier, a sailor, an architect, or an engineer, would, doubtless, have its fascinations as well; but to make a real printed book, with your name in gilt letters outside, was real romance.
At that early day, and for a long while after, the boy had no preference for any particular kind of book. It was an entirely abstract passion for print and paper. To have been the author of "The Iliad" or of Beeton's "Book of Household Recipes" would have given him almost the same exaltation of authorship; and the thrill of worship which came over him when, one early day, a man who had actually had an article on the sugar bounties accepted by a commercial magazine was pointed out to him in the street, was one he never forgot; nor in after years did he ever encounter that transfigured contributor without an involuntary recurrence of that old feeling of awe. No subsequent acquaintance with editorial rooms ever led him into materialistic explanations of that enchanted piece of work--a newspaper. The editors might do their best--and succeed surprisingly--in looking like ordinary mortals, you might even know the leader-writers, and, with the very public, gaze through gratings into the subterranean printing-rooms,--the mystery none the less remained. No exposure of editorial staffs or other machinery could destroy the sense of enchantment, as no amount of anatomy or biology can destroy the mystery of the human miracle.
So I suppose Nature first makes us in love with the tools we are to use, long before we have a thought upon what we shall use them. Perhaps the first desire of the born writer is to be a compositor. Out of the love of mere type quickly evolves a love of mere words for their