MR. GRESLEY had often remarked to persons in affliction that when things are at their worst they generally take a turn for the better. This profound truth was proving itself equal to the occasion at Warpington Vicarage.
Mrs. Gresley was well again, after a fortnight at the seaside with Regie. The sea air had blown back a faint colour into Regie’s cheeks. The new baby’s vaccination1 was ceasing to cast a vocal2 gloom over the thin-walled house. The old baby’s whole attention was mercifully diverted from his wrongs to the investigation3 of that connection between a chair and himself, which he perceived the other children could assume at pleasure. He stood for hours looking at his own little chair, solemnly seating himself at long intervals4 where no chair was. But his mind was working, and work, as we know, is the panacea5 for mental anguish6.
Mr. Gresley had recovered that buoyancy of spirits which was the theme of Mrs. Gresley’s unceasing admiration7.
On this particular evening, when his wife had asked him if the beef were tender, he had replied, as he always did if in a humorous vein8: “Douglas, Douglas, tender and true.” The arrival of the pot of marmalade (that integral part of the mysterious meal which begins with meat and is crowned with buns) had been hailed by the exclamation9, “What! More family jars.” In short, Mr. Gresley was himself again.
The jocund10 Vicar, with his arm round Mrs. Gresley, proceeded to the drawing-room.
On the hall table was a large parcel insured for two hundred pounds. It had evidently just arrived by rail.
“Ah! Ha!” said Mr. Gresley, “my pamphlets at last. Very methodical of Smithers insuring them for such a large sum,” and without looking at the address he cut the string.
“Well packed,” he remarked. “Waterproof sheeting, I do declare. Smithers is certainly a cautious man. Ha! at last!”
The inmost wrapping shelled off, and Mr. Gresley’s jaw11 dropped. Where were the little green and gold pamphlets entitled “Modern Dissent,” for which his parental12 soul was yearning13? He gazed down frowning at a solid mass of manuscript, written in a small, clear hand.
“This is Hester’s writing,” he said. “There is some mistake.”
He turned to the direction on the outer cover.
“Miss Hester Gresley, care of Rev14. James Gresley.” He had only seen his own name.
“I do believe,” he said, “that this is Hester’s book, refused by the publisher. Poor Hester! I am afraid she will feel that.”
His turning over of the parcel dislodged an unfolded sheet of notepaper, which made a parachute expedition to the floor. Mr. Gresley picked it up, and laid it on the parcel.
“Oh! it’s not refused after all,” he said, his eye catching15 the sense of the few words before him. “Hester seems to have sent for it back to make some alterations16, and Mr. Bentham, I suppose that is the publisher, asks for it back with as little delay as possible. Then she has sold it to him. I wonder what she got for it. She got a hundred for ‘The Idyll.’ It is wonderful to think of, when Bishop17 Heavysides got nothing at all for his Diocesan sermons, and had to make up thirty pounds out of his own pocket as well. But as long as the public is willing to pay through the nose for trashy fiction to amuse its idleness, so long will novelists reap in these large harvests. If I had Hester’s talent —”
“You have. Mrs. Loftus was saying so only yesterday.”
“If I had time to work it out I should not pander18 to the depraved public taste as Hester does. I should use my talent, as I have often told her, for the highest ends, not for the lowest. It would be my aim,” Mr. Gresley’s voice rose sonorously19, “to raise my readers, to educate them, to place a high ideal before them, to ennoble them.”
“You could do it,” said Mrs. Gresley with conviction. And it is probable that the conviction both felt was a true one, that Mr. Gresley could write a book which would, from their point of view, fulfil these vast requirements.
Mr. Gresley shook his head, and put the parcel on a table in his study.
“Hester will be back the day after to-morrow,” he said, “and then she can take charge of it herself.” And he filled in the railway form of its receipt.
Mrs. Gresley, who had been to tea with the Pratts for the first time since her convalescence20, was tired, and went early to bed, or, as Mr. Gresley termed it, “Bedfordshire;” and Mr. Gresley retired21 to his study to put a few finishing touches to a paper he was writing on St. Augustine — not by request — for that receptacle of clerical genius, the parish magazine.
Will the contents of parish magazines always be written by the clergy23? Is it Utopian to hope that a day will dawn when it will be perceived even by clerical editors that Apostolic Succession does not invariably confer literary talent? What can an intelligent artisan think when he reads — what he reads — in his parish magazine. A serial24 story by a Rector unknown to fame, who, if he possesses talent, conceals25 it in some other napkin than the parish magazine; a short paper on “Bees,” by an Archdeacon; “An Easter Hymn26,” by a Bishop, and such a good Bishop, too — but what a hymn! “Poultry Keeping,” by Alice Brown. We draw breath, but the relief is only momentary27; “Side Lights on the Reformation,” by a Canon. “Half-hours with the Young,” by a Rural Dean.
But as an invalid28 will rebel against a long course of milk puddings, and will crave29 for the jam roll which is for others, so Mr. Gresley’s mind revolted from St. Augustine, and craved30 for something different.
His wandering eye fell on Hester’s book.
“I can’t attend to graver things to-night,” he said, “I will take a look at Hester’s story. I showed her my paper on ‘Dissent,’ so of course I can dip into her book. I hate lopsided confidences, and I daresay I could give her a few hints, as she did me. Two heads are better than one. The Pratts and Thursbys all think that bit in ‘The Idyll’ where the two men quarrelled was dictated31 by me. Strictly32 speaking, it wasn’t, but no doubt she picked up her knowledge of men which surprises people so much from things she has heard me say. She certainly did not want me to read her book. She said I should not like it. But I shall have to read it some time, so I may as well skim it before it goes to the printers. I have always told her I did not feel free from responsibility in the matter after ‘The Idyll’ appeared with things in it which I should have made a point of cutting out if she had only consulted me before she rushed into print.”
Mr. Gresley lifted the heavy mass of manuscript to his writing-table, turned up his reading-lamp and sat down before it.
The church clock struck nine. It was always wrong, but it set the time at Warpington.
There were two hours before bedtime — I mean “Bedfordshire.”
He turned over the first blank sheet and came to the next, which had one word only written on it.
“Husks!“ said Mr. Gresley. “That must be the title. Husks that the swine did eat. Ha! I see. A very good sound story might be written on that theme of a young man who left the Church, and how inadequate33 he found the teaching — the spiritual food — of other denominations34 compared to what he had partaken freely of in his Father’s house. Husks! It is not a bad name, but it is too short. ‘The Consequences of Sin’ would be better, more striking, and convey the idea in a more impressive manner.” Mr. Gresley took up his pen, and then laid it down. “I will run through the story before I alter the name. It may not take the line I expect.”
It did not.
The next page had two words on it:
“TO RACHEL.”
What an extraordinary thing! Any one, be they who they might, would naturally have thought that if the book were dedicated35 to any one it would be to her only brother. But Hester, it seemed, thought nothing of blood relations. She disregarded them entirely36.
The blood relation began to read. He seemed to forget to skip. Page after page was slowly turned. Sometimes he hesitated a moment to change a word. He had always been conscious of a gift for finding the right word. This gift Hester did not share with him. She often got hold of the wrong end of the stick. He could hardly refrain from a smile when he came across the sentence, “He was young enough to know better,” as he substituted in a large illegible37 hand the word old for young. There were many obvious little mistakes of this kind that he corrected as he read, but now and then he stopped short.
One of the characters, an odious38 person, was continually saying things she had no business to say. Mr. Gresley wondered how Hester had come across such doubtful women — not under his roof. Lady Susan must have associated with thoroughly39 unsuitable people.
“I keep a smaller spiritual establishment than I did,” said the odious person. “I have dismissed that old friend of my childhood, the devil. I really had no further use for him.”
Mr. Gresley crossed through the passage at once. How could Hester write so disrespectfully of the devil?
“This is positive nonsense,” said Mr. Gresley irritably40, coming as it does just after the sensible chapter about the new vicar who made a clean sweep of all the old dead regulations in his parish because he felt he must introduce spiritual life into the place. Now that is really good. I don’t quite know what Hester means by saying he took exercise in his clerical cul-de-sac. I think she means surtout, but she is a good French scholar, so she probably knows what she is talking about.”
Whatever the book lacked it did not lack interest. Still it bristled41 with blemishes42.
And then what could the Pratts, or indeed any one, make of such a sentence as this:
“When we look back at what we were seven years ago, five years ago, and perceive the difference in ourselves, a difference amounting almost to change of identity; when we look back and see in how many characters we have lived and loved and suffered and died before we reached the character that momentarily clothes us, and from which our soul is struggling out to clothe itself anew; when we feel how the sympathy even of those who love us best is always with our last expression, never with our present feeling, always with the last dead self on which our climbing feet are set —”
“She is hopelessly confused,” said Mr. Gresley without reading to the end of the sentence, and substituting the word ladder, for dead self. “Of course, I see what she means, the different stages of life, the infant, the boy, the man, but hardly any one else will so understand it.”
The clock struck ten. Mr. Gresley was amazed. The hour had seemed like ten minutes.
“I will just see what happens in the next chapter,” he said. And he did not bear the clock when it struck again. The story was absorbing. It was as if through that narrow shut-up chamber43 a gust22 of mountain air were sweeping44 like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely45 stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was only saved from that reproach by the fact that it hung on his kitchen hob. What was so unfair about him was that he took gorillas46 and alligators47, and the “wart pig” and all its warts48 on trust, though he had never seen them. But the emotions which have shaken the human soul since the world began, long before the first “wart pig,” was thought of — these he disbelieved.
All the love which could not be covered by his own mild courtship of the obviously grateful Mrs. Gresley, Mr. Gresley put down as exaggerated. There was a good deal of such exaggeration in Hester’s book, which could only be attributed to the French novels of which he had frequently expressed his disapproval49 when be saw Hester reading them. It, was given to Mr. Gresley to perceive that the French classics are only read for the sake of the hideous50 improprieties contained in them. He had explained this to Hester, and was indignant that she had continued to read them just as frequently as before, even translating parts of some of them into English, and back again into the original. She would have lowered the Bishop for ever in his Vicar’s eyes, if she had mentioned by whose advice and selection she read, so she refrained.
Suddenly as he read, Mr. Gresley’s face softened52. He came to the illness and death of a child. It had been written long before Regie fell ill, but Mr. Gresley supposed it could only have been the result of what had happened a few weeks ago since the book was sent up to the publisher.
Two large tears fell on to the sheet. Hester’s had been there before them. It was all true every word. Here was no exaggeration, no fantastic over-colouring for the sake of effect.
“Ah! Hester,” he said, wiping his eyes. “If only the rest were like that. If you would only write like that.”
A few pages more, and his eyes were like flint. The admirable clergyman who had attracted him from the first reappeared. His opinions were uncommonly53 well put. But gradually it dawned upon Mr. Gresley that the clergyman was toiling54 in very uncomfortable situations, in which he did not appear to advantage. Mr. Gresley did not see that the uncomfortable situations were the inevitable55 result of holding certain opinions, but he did see that “Hester was running down the clergy.” Any fault found with the clergy was in Mr. Gresley’s eyes an attack upon the Church, nay56, upon religion itself. That a protest against a certain class of the clergy might be the result of a close observation of the causes that bring ecclesiastical Christianity into disrepute could find no admission to Mr. Gresley’s mind. Yet a protest against the ignorance or inefficiency57 of some of our soldiers he would have seen without difficulty might be the outcome, not of hatred58 of the army, but of a realisation of its vast national importance, and of a desire of its well-being59.
Mr. Gresley was outraged60. “She holds nothing sacred,” he said striking the book. “I told her after the ‘Idyll,’ that I desired she would not mention the subject of religion in her next book, and this is worse than ever. She has entirely disregarded my expressed wishes. Everything she says has a sting in it. Look at this. It begins well, but it ends with a sneer61.
“Christ lives. He wanders still in secret over the hills and the valleys of the soul, that little kingdom which should not be of this world, which knows not the things that belong unto its peace. And earlier or later there comes an hour when Christ is arraigned62 before the judgment63 bar in each individual soul. Once again the Church and the world combine to crush Him Who stands silent in their midst, to condemn64 Him who has already condemned65 them. Together they raise their fierce cry ‘Crucify Him. Crucify Him.’”
Mr. Gresley tore the leaf out of the manuscript, and threw it in the fire.
But worse remained behind. To add to its other sins, the book, now drawing to its close, took a turn which had been led up to inevitably66 step by step from the first chapter, but which, in its reader’s eyes, who perceived none of the steps, was a deliberate gratuitous67 intermeddling with vice51. Mr. Gresley could not help reading, but as he laid down the manuscript for a moment to rest his eyes he felt that he had reached the limit of Hester’s powers, and that he could only attribute the last volume to the Evil One himself.
He had hardly paid this high tribute to his sister’s talent when the door opened, and Mrs. Gresley came in in a wrapper that had once been white.
“Dear James,” she said, “is anything wrong? It is past one o’clock. Are you never coming to bed?”
“Minna,” said her pastor68 and master, “I have been reading the worst book I have come across yet, and it was written by my own sister under my own roof.”
He might have added “close under the roof,” if he had remembered the little attic69 chamber where the cold of winter and the heat of summer had each struck in turn and in vain at the indomitable perseverance70 of the writer of those many pages.
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1
vaccination
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| n.接种疫苗，种痘 | |
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vocal
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| adj.直言不讳的；嗓音的；n.[pl.]声乐节目 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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panacea
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| n.万灵药；治百病的灵药 | |
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anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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vein
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| n.血管，静脉；叶脉，纹理；情绪；vt.使成脉络 | |
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exclamation
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| n.感叹号，惊呼，惊叹词 | |
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jocund
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| adj.快乐的，高兴的 | |
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jaw
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| n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训 | |
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parental
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| adj.父母的；父的；母的 | |
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yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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alterations
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| n.改动( alteration的名词复数 )；更改；变化；改变 | |
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bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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pander
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| v.迎合；n.拉皮条者，勾引者；帮人做坏事的人 | |
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sonorously
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| adv.圆润低沉地；感人地；堂皇地；朗朗地 | |
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convalescence
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| n.病后康复期 | |
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retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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23
clergy
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| n.[总称]牧师，神职人员 | |
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serial
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| n.连本影片，连本电视节目；adj.连续的 | |
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conceals
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，遮住( conceal的第三人称单数 ) | |
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hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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invalid
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| n.病人，伤残人；adj.有病的，伤残的；无效的 | |
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crave
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| vt.渴望得到，迫切需要，恳求，请求 | |
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craved
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| 渴望，热望( crave的过去式 )； 恳求，请求 | |
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dictated
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| v.大声讲或读( dictate的过去式和过去分词 )；口授；支配；摆布 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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denominations
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| n.宗派( denomination的名词复数 )；教派；面额；名称 | |
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dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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illegible
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| adj.难以辨认的，字迹模糊的 | |
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odious
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| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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irritably
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| ad.易生气地 | |
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bristled
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| adj. 直立的，多刺毛的 动词bristle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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blemishes
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| n.（身体的）瘢点( blemish的名词复数 )；伤疤；瑕疵；污点 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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gorillas
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| n.大猩猩( gorilla的名词复数 )；暴徒，打手 | |
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alligators
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| n.短吻鳄( alligator的名词复数 ) | |
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warts
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| n.疣( wart的名词复数 )；肉赘；树瘤；缺点 | |
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disapproval
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| n.反对，不赞成 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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52
softened
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| （使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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uncommonly
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| adv. 稀罕(极，非常) | |
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54
toiling
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| 长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的现在分词 )； 艰难缓慢地移动，跋涉 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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inefficiency
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| n.无效率，无能；无效率事例 | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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well-being
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| n.安康，安乐，幸福 | |
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outraged
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| a.震惊的，义愤填膺的 | |
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61
sneer
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| v.轻蔑；嘲笑；n.嘲笑，讥讽的言语 | |
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arraigned
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| v.告发( arraign的过去式和过去分词 )；控告；传讯；指责 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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condemn
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| vt.谴责，指责；宣判(罪犯)，判刑 | |
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condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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67
gratuitous
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| adj.无偿的，免费的；无缘无故的，不必要的 | |
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68
pastor
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| n.牧师，牧人 | |
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69
attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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70
perseverance
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| n.坚持不懈，不屈不挠 | |
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