VIII.—BED CLOTHES
EGERTON walked into my private room on Saturday morning and flung a bundle of MS. on my table.
"Read that," he said.
I was irritated. Egerton is my junior partner—between us we constitute the publishing firm of Burdett Egerton—but I object to his breaking in on me when I am busy.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It's a story," he said; "a story which has been submitted to me for the magazine."
The Tower Magazine is one of our ventures, and it is understood between us that Egerton is responsible for it. I resented his trying to make me do his work.
"Who's it by?" I asked.
"I don't know. It's sent to me without name or address attached to it."
"Then for goodness' sake put it in the waste-paper basket and don't bother me."
"It's good," said Egerton. "It's so good that"
"Then publish it; but for heaven's sake let me alone. I'm going down to the country for the week- end, and if I'm to catch my train I must"
"Very well then, I'll publish it; but if there's a hideous row afterwards, don't blame me."
Egerton is one of those men who pride themselves on freedom from conventional prejudice. If he thinks a thing is good from a literary point of view he does not care how bad it is in every other way. He rather likes shocking people. I have had to remonstrate with him more than once. His hint about the nature of the story that lay on my table frightened me. I publish The Tower Magazine with the object of making money, and I am painfully aware that it does not do to shock the public.
"Very well," I said, "leave it there. I'll read it in the train and let you know on Monday what I think of it. But if it's the kind of story"
"It is," said Egerton. "Exactly that kind of story, only worse; but it's good. It's—I speak quite literally—infernally good. I wish I knew who wrote it."
I had promised to pay a Saturday to Monday visit to my uncle Ambrose in Cambridgeshire. I owe a little attention to the old gentleman in return for my education, which he paid for, and for his kindness in allowing me to consider his rectory my home. He is rather a big man among the local clergy, being a rural dean, a canon and having some reputation as a scholar. I am told that he is likely to be an Archdeacon when the present man drops off. He has a very nice parish, a clean village inhabited, so far as I have ever seen, entirely by respectful old women who curtsey and small boys who sing in the choir. There is also a squire, but he is the black sheep of the flock, and my uncle sees very little of him. The village is near Newmarket, and the squire is a racing man. When he is at home he has a houseful of fast people and seems particularly fond of fast women. None of his party ever go to church. My uncle is austerely clerical in his outlook upon life. I quite realise that he is bound to disapprove of the squire. I can also, I think, understand the squire's dislike of going to church.
I read Egerton's story in the train. It was all he said it was. Guy de Maupassant at his worst was not much worse; but, on the other hand, Guy de Maupassant was not much better. It was a fine, an uncommonly fine short story; but it was plainly impossible to publish it. I stuffed the MS. into the bottom of my bag and sat for the rest of the journey gloating over the abominable cleverness of the thing. It was an absolutely straightforward, simple piece of writing, and the most sacred precepts of morality were remorselessly ridiculed. I felt, as Egerton did, that I should greatly like to know who wrote it. The man or the woman, whichever it was, had something very like actual genius.
On Sunday, after morning service, my uncle Ambrose took me for a stroll round his garden. He gave me his views on The Tower Magazine, and I felt, as I listened to him, uncommonly glad that I had not left the story in Egerton's hands. If it had been published my uncle would never have spoken to me again. He already deplored the levity of the magazine and regretted its want of serious matter.
"Perhaps," he said, "I shall some day send you a paper myself. I have long felt that some attempt ought to be made to instruct our people in the history of the monastic orders."
This was an embarrassing suggestion. I owe a good deal to my uncle Ambrose, but I am running a magazine with the object of making money. And, besides, a paper on the monastic orders would not be fair to Egerton.
"Surely," I said, "your time must be too fully occupied to allow you to undertake such work. Your contemplated monograph on the English Benedictines, your cathedral sermons, your functions as a rural dean, the round of your parochial duties"
"I have a curate. Mr. Metcalf takes a great deal of routine work off my hands."
I reached out gratefully toward a new subject, one less likely to prove dangerous to my magazine.
"I'm glad you've got a good curate. Is he all you could wish?"
Uncle Ambrose smiled. No curate is all that can be wished.
"Metcalf is a worthy fellow, hard-working and strictly orthodox, a sound churchman; but a little dull. He is very far from being an intellectual companion. You will be able to judge for yourself when you hear him preach this evening."
I thought it very unlikely that I should hear the curate preach. I meant to go to church, of course. I should have no choice about that. But in my youth, when I lived with uncle Ambrose, I acquired a faculty of abstracting my mind from sermons. I could now, I believe, carry on a complicated train of thought undisturbed if St. Chrysostom were thundering golden words in a pulpit close beside me. Nevertheless I did, very much to my surprise, hear that curate's sermon. At least I heard the latter part of it. At first I was fully occupied in going over in my mind the points of the story which lay at the bottom of my bag in the rectory. That story was not a good subject for Sunday meditation, especially in church. But I am glad I happened to be thinking of it, for if my mind had been occupied with anything else I might have missed an interesting sensation.
The curate had been meandering quietly along for about ten minutes, and I sat enjoying my author's method of satirizing a particular moral platitude which he had put in the mouth of one of the characters in the story. Then I heard, actually heard with my ears, the very words which the character in the story had used. The curate said them. I sat up, awakened to consciousness by the extraordinary coincidence. A few minutes later Mr. Metcalf quoted another sentence out of the story, another of the moral truisms which the author had made to look so supremely contemptible. Of course, the curate spoke in all good faith. Still, he used the very words spoken by the character in the story. This was more than a coincidence. I very nearly jumped out of my seat when this amazing curate concluded his sermon with the longest and most irritating of all the speeches of the fictitious character. He gave it out in tones of calm conviction, but he used once more the identical words of the story.
"I suppose," said my uncle Ambrose at supper, "that you must catch the early train tomorrow as usual."
"No," I said; "if I shan't be in your way, I should like to stay till the afternoon. The fact is I want to have a chat with your curate."
My uncle's eyebrows went up in mild surprise.
"With my curate! Do you know him?"
"No, I don't. But I knew a brother of his very well in college. We rowed in a boat together. The poor fellow is in London now. I fear he is going rapidly to the bad; drink, you know, and other things."
When I lie I always do so with such detail as will carry conviction. It would be the curate's business afterwards, not mine, to explain that fallen brother.
"Ah," said my uncle Ambrose. "Sad, very sad. You're sure to find Metcalf in his lodgings about eleven o'clock. He takes the school at half-past nine, and matins at ten. Then he has the Mothers' Saving Club, which will occupy him about half an hour."
I found the Reverend Mr. Metcalf at half-past eleven. He was writing when I entered. I noticed that he covered his MS. with blotting paper as if he were afraid that I should read it. It may have been his next sermon. I chose to pretend that I thought it was something else.
"If that is another story, Mr. Metcalf," I said, "please give me the first refusal of it."
He grew quite white and looked at me with an expression of sheer terror in his face. For fully two minutes he did not speak. Then he blurted out:
"Who are you?"
"I am the owner of The Tower Magazine. I read a story you sent us lately, and I may say without flattery that it is a remarkably fine piece of work. But I'm not going to print it. It is"
"I know," he said. "I know very well what it is. But how on earth did you know I wrote it?"
"Well," I said, "if you quote bits of it in your sermons"
"Did I do that?"
"You did. Oh, don't look frightened. You didn't quote any of the bits I was afraid to print. You quoted, apparently in all good faith, the wretched moral platitudes which the story satirized."
"Good Heavens!" he said. "I can't have done that."
"Yes, you did," I said mercilessly. "You used the exact words."
He stood for a minute with his back toward me leaning over the chimney-piece. Then he turned and said:
"Listen to me. Those things which you call moral platitudes are truths. I believe them. I cling to them. They are the things I live by. They are sacred. But"
"But you see the comic side of them."
"But," he said, without taking any notice of my remark, "I hear them every day of my life and all day long. I hear them from the canon. I hear them from the other clergy who come here constantly. I hear them from the old women in the village when they want things from me. I hear them from my own lips. I never—do you understand?—I never hear anything else. I believe them. But they get to be like bed clothes, like blankets and quilts laid over my mouth and nostrils. I'm smothered by them."
He gripped me by the arm and led me across the room to the window.
"Look out," he said; "what do you see?"
I saw the village post-office, which was very nearly opposite the curate's lodgings. There were, I noticed, glass jars of sweets in the window, as well as notices about the hours of departure of the mail. Mr. Metcalf, using the eye of imagination, saw more. He succeeded in making me see the Cambridgeshire landscape.
"There it all is," he said. "Flat land, flat. There's nothing to break the frightful flatness of it except church spires, sticking up stiff into the air, spires and great foolish windmills. Look at the flat fields, the flat roads, the flat sky and those rigid pointed spires."
While he was speaking, a motor car rushed along the village street, a handsome car, one of the squire's, I suppose. In the tonneau sat a woman I recognised, Lady Crumlin. Her reputation, in several respects, had got beyond the stage of being doubtful; but she is a remarkably handsome woman, and is always dressed as if she owned, instead of owing, a large fortune. Mr. Metcalf appeared to be getting somewhat hysterical over the scenery. I attempted to divert his attention from it.
"That," I said with a smile, "is one of the people whom my uncle particularly dislikes. It's a great pity they don't keep up the old fashion of going to church once a week in the country."
Once more the curate entirely ignored my remark. He had seen Lady Crumlin, but he was not thinking of her as a possible member of his congregation.
"Now and then," he said, "people come flashing along these roads. I get a glimpse at them. I don't know them. I don't speak to them. I don't see them at their races or their cards. But I fancy sometimes I can hear the men laugh or smell the scent off the women's clothes. It's just for a moment. Then I'm back with the flatness again; with what you call the moral platitudes; with the clergy and their matins and evensong; their thin, sharp spires; and their gardens, with little laburnum trees in them, and rose bushes, and strawberry beds; and all the things they say, the quite true things they keep on saying every day. But they smother me. I kick and plunge to get air to breathe. That's how I came to write that story. I'm not a vicious man. I'm not a hypocrite."
"I don't profess to enter fully into your feelings," I said. "But I'm extremely interested. Go on plunging, by all means; but don't kick all the bed clothes off. Remember the decencies and leave a sheet. One sheet won't smother you. And send everything you write to us. It will do you good to get rid of it even if we can't print it."
I went back to London by the afternoon train and told Egerton about the Reverend Mr. Metcalf. He was greatly interested, and agreed with me that we should keep an eye on the curate with a view to securing something from him which it would be possible for us to publish. I promised to have a talk with him next time I paid a visit to my uncle. Unfortunately, most unfortunately as it turned out, I was not able to get away from the office for nearly two months. Then, when I was in a position to run down to Cambridgeshire for a couple of days, I heard that my uncle was ill. The doctor, who was evidently a man with some knowledge of human nature, said that the old gentleman had broken down from over-work, and ordered him abroad for six months' complete rest. I never myself met anyone who seemed to do less work than my reverend relative; but, of course, the mental strain of being a rural dean may very well be greater than I suppose. At all events my uncle went abroad and was evidently very well pleased both with himself and the doctor. I saw him when he was passing through London, and he was simply puffed up with pride and self-importance. I did not grudge him his holiday in the least, but, being a busy man in my own way, I resented the way in which he insisted on regarding himself as a martyr to duty.
He stayed away, somewhere in northern Italy, for two months longer than the doctor ordered, and it was nearly a year before I visited him in his rectory again. I found a new curate in the parish and inquired what had happened to Mr. Metcalf.
"Metcalf," said my uncle, "behaved badly."
He seemed disinclined to enter into particulars, but I was really anxious to hear about Metcalf.
"Did he," I suggested, "get mixed up with the squire and his lot when you weren't here to look after him?"
"No. Not that I heard of. When I say that he behaved badly, I mean toward me personally. He agreed, distinctly and definitely, though I did not have it in writing, to remain here and look after the parish while I was away. He left suddenly and without adequate reason almost immediately after I had gone abroad."
"Very inconsiderate," I said. "Where did he go to?"
"I never cared to inquire. If he had been offered a living there would have been some excuse for it. But there was nothing of the sort. He was too young a man to be promoted. Fortunately the Bishop was extremely kind and secured the man I have at present."
"Do you ever hear from Metcalf?"
"No. He has not had the decency to write to me. Considering that I was exceedingly kind to him—I think, by the way, I met that brother of his in London on my way home."
"Brother?"
"Yes, the unfortunate young man of whom you spoke to me. I saw him in the Strand on the morn- ing of my arrival. I don't think I could have been mistaken. The likeness was most striking."
I said nothing, because I could not for the moment recollect ever having heard of Metcalf's brother. Afterwards, when my uncle spoke again, the story of that poor fellow came back to me.
"Metcalf was scarcely straightforward about his brother," said my uncle. "I mentioned to him one day that I was glad to hear you were looking after the young fellow. Metcalf appeared to be embarrassed when he heard your name, but he denied flatly that he had a brother. I can quite understand a certain amount of reticence. The subject wasn't a pleasant one. Still, I spoke in a most sympathetic way, and I expected, as between two clergymen, that he would have been more candid."
I recollected the brother then. I had myself called him into existence as an excuse for my visit to the original Metcalf. I became greatly interested.
"You're quite sure," I said, "that it was"
"I did not speak to him," said my uncle. "He hurried past me, but the likeness was unmistakable. In fact, I should have thought it was Metcalf himself if I had not recollected what you told me about the brother. Have you seem him lately?"
"No. I have completely lost sight of him."
"Judging from his appearance," said my uncle, "I should say he had sunk very low, very low indeed. There was every mark of dissipation about him."
"Poor fellow," I said, "he has kicked the bedclothes off in earnest then."
"The bedclothes?"
"It's a slang phrase," I said; "I dare say you never heard it. It means"
"I can guess at the meaning, especially after seeing Metcalf's brother. You ought to try if you come across him to"
"I shall," I said. "I'll do the best I can. I'll tell Egerton about him, and between us we'll try and get hold of him. We'll pull him together if we can."
I meant it, and I am sure that Egerton, with the recollection of that story in his mind, would have done his best. But neither he nor I have ever been able to hear of Metcalf. He has gone under altogether, I suppose. I often wonder whose fault it was. The squire and Lady Crumlin are perhaps to blame to some extent. My uncle Ambrose and the clergy of his rural deanery have a certain responsibility. My own conscience is not wholly clear. The landscape of Cambridgeshire and the church spires—poor Metcalf felt those spires greatly—have their share of the blame. But there may be something more. Ought the Christian religion to look hopelessly flat to a man? Ought it to affect him as an eiderdown quilt spread over his mouth?