Robert Elsmere
During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic efforts to
make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he had
been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous
succession of enthusiasms, and now at the critical moment his stock of
nerve and energy was at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired, his
friends watching anxiously for the result. On the day of the Logic
paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his arm caught
by Mr. Grey.
'Come with me for a walk, Elsmere; you look as if some air would do you
good.'
Robert acquiesced, and the two men turned into the passage way leading
out on to Radcliffe Square.
'I have done for myself, sir,' said the youth with a sigh, half
impatience, half depression. 'It seems to me to-day that I had neither
mind nor memory. If I get a second I shall be lucky.'
'Oh, you will get your second whatever happens,' said Mr. Grey quietly,
'and you mustn't be too much cast down about it if you don't get your
first.'
This implied acceptance of his partial defeat, coming from another's
lips, struck the excitable Robert like a lash. It was only what he had
been saying to himself, but in the most pessimist forecasts we make for
ourselves, there is always an under protest of hope.
'I have been wasting my time here lately,' he said, hurriedly raising
his college cap from his brows as if it oppressed them, and pushing his
hair back with a weary restless gesture.
'No,' said Mr. Grey, turning his kind frank eyes upon him. 'As far as
general training goes, you have not wasted your time at all. There are
many clever men who don't get a first class, and yet it is good for them
to be here--so long as they are not loungers and idlers, of course. And
you have not been a lounger; you have been headstrong, and a little
over-confident, perhaps,'--the speaker's smile took all the sting out
of the words--'but you have grown into a man, and you are fit now for
man's work. Don't let yourself be depressed, Elsmere. You will do better
in life than you have done in examination.'
The young man was deeply touched. This tone of personal comment and
admonition was very rare with Mr. Grey. He felt a sudden consciousness
of a shared burden which was infinitely soothing, and though he made no
answer, his face lost something of its harassed look as the two walked
on together down Oriel Street and into Merton Meadows.
'Have you any immediate plans?' said Mr. Grey, as they turned into the
Broad Walk, now in the full leafage of June, and rustling under a brisk
western wind blowing from the river.
'No; at least I suppose it will be no good my trying for a fellowship.
But I meant to tell you, sir, of one thing--I have made up my mind to
take orders.'
'You have? When?'
'Quite lately. So that fixes me, I suppose, to come back for divinity
lectures in the autumn.'
Mr. Grey said nothing for a while, and they strolled in and out of the
great shadows thrown by the elms across their path.
'You feel no difficulties in the way?' he asked at last, with a certain
quick brusqueness of manner.
'No,' said Robert eagerly. 'I never had any. Perhaps,' he added, with a
sudden humility, 'it is because I have never gone deep enough. What I
believe might have been worth more if I had had more struggle; but it
has all seemed so plain.'
The young voice speaking with hesitation and reserve, and yet with a
deep inner conviction, was pleasant to hear. Mr. Grey turned towards it,
and the great eyes under the furrowed brow had a peculiar gentleness of
expression.
'You will probably be very happy in the life,' he said. 'The Church
wants men of your sort.'
But through all the sympathy of the tone Robert was conscious of a veil
between them. He knew, of course, pretty much what it was, and with a
sudden impulse he felt that he would have given worlds to break through
it and talk frankly with this man whom he revered beyond all others,
wide as was the intellectual difference between them. But the tutor's
reticence and the younger man's respect prevented it.
When the unlucky second class was actually proclaimed to the world,
Langham took it to heart perhaps more than either Elsmere or his mother.
No one knew better than he what Elsmere's gifts were. It was absurd that
he should not have made more of them in sight of the public. '_Le
clericalisme, voila l'ennemi!_' was about the gist of Langham's mood
during the days that followed on the class list.
Elsmere, however, did not divulge his intention of taking orders to him
till ten days afterwards, when he had carried off Langham to stay at
Harden, and he and his old tutor were smoking in his mother's little
garden one moonlit night.
When he had finished his statement Langham stood still a moment watching
the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious interest
in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months had made
him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own
languid, paradoxical self.
'Well, after all,' he said at last, very slowly, 'the difficulty lies in
preaching anything. One may as well preach a respectable mythology as
anything else.'
'What do you mean by a mythology?' cried Robert hotly.
'Simply ideas, or experiences, personified,' said Langham, puffing away.
'I take it they are the subject-matter of all theologies.'
'I don't understand you,' said Robert, flushing. 'To the Christian,
facts have been the medium by which ideas the world could not otherwise
have come at have been communicated to man. Christian theology is a
system of ideas indeed, but of ideas realised, made manifest in facts.'
Langham looked at him for a moment, undecided; then that suppressed
irritation we have already spoken of broke through. 'How do you know
they are facts?' he said drily.
The younger man took up the challenge with all his natural eagerness,
and the conversation resolved itself into a discussion of Christian
evidences. Or rather Robert held forth, and Langham kept him going by an
occasional remark which acted like the prick of a spur. The tutor's
psychological curiosity was soon satisfied. He declared to himself that
the intellect had precious little to do with Elsmere's Christianity. He
had got hold of all the stock apologetic arguments, and used them, his
companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they were merely the
outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something
wholly distinct from intellectual conviction--by moral passion, by love,
by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy youth should
be without.
'He imagines he has satisfied his intellect,' was the inward comment of
one of the most melancholy of sceptics, 'and he has never so much as
exerted it. What a brute I am to protest!'
And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out his hand to his
companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness in his black eyes, such as on
one or two critical occasions before had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere.
'No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of course, and
you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging away at reforming and
enlightening the world, don't trample too much on the people who have
more than enough to do to enlighten themselves.'
As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this new turn of her son's fortunes, she realised
with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert had been
educating her as well as himself. Her old rebellious sense of something
inherently absurd in the clerical status had been gradually slain in her
by her long contact through him with the finer and more imposing aspects
of church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the Harden
curates, and at times she would flame out into the wildest, wittiest
threats and gibes, for the momentary satisfaction of her own essentially
lay instincts; but at bottom she knew perfectly well that, when the
moment came, no mother could be more loyal, more easily imposed upon,
than she would be.
'I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell before very
long,' she said to him one morning abruptly, studying him the while out
of her small twinkling eyes. What dignity there was already in the young
lightly-built frame! what frankness and character in the irregular,
attractive face!
'Mother,' cried Elsmere indignantly, 'what do you take me for? Do you
imagine I am going to bury myself in the country at five or
six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, and nothing to do for it? That
would be a deserter's act indeed.'
Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. 'Oh, I supposed you would insist on
killing yourself, to begin with. To most people nowadays that seems to
be the necessary preliminary of a useful career.'
Robert laughed and kissed her, but her question had stirred him so much
that he sat down that very evening to write to his cousin Mowbray
Elsmere. He announced to him that he was about to read for orders, and
that at the same time he relinquished all claim on the living of
Murewell. 'Do what you like with it when it falls vacant,' he wrote,
'without reference to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman in
health and strength, and in no immediate want of money, allows himself
the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for some years at any rate,
to meet the challenge of evil and poverty where the fight is
hardest--among our English town population.'
Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two to the effect that
Robert's letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir Mowbray, had nothing
to do with his cousin's views. When the living was vacant--the present
holder, however, was uncommon tough and did not mean dying--he should
follow out the instructions of his father's will, and if Robert did not
want the thing he could say so.
In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. The following
spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation completely by winning a
Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the best men
of his year, and in June he was ordained.
In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at Merton, and by
Mr. Grey's advice he accepted it, thus postponing for a while that
London curacy and that stout grapple with human need at its sorest for
which his soul was pining. 'Stay here a year or two,' Grey said bluntly;
'you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you are not
one of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the better
worth having afterwards, and there is no lack of work here for a man's
moral energies.'
Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three happy and
fruitful years followed. The young lecturer developed an amazing power
of work. That concentration which he had been unable to achieve for
himself his will was strong enough to maintain when it was a question of
meeting the demands of a college class in which he was deeply
interested. He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of
the most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility towards
his pupils made him load himself with burdens to which he was constantly
physically unequal, and fill the vacations almost as full as the terms.
And as he was comparatively a man of means, his generous impetuous
temper was able to gratify itself in ways that would have been
impossible to others. The story of his summer reading parties, for
instance, if one could have unravelled it, would have been found to be
one long string of acts of kindness towards men poorer and duller than
himself.
At the same time he formed close and eager relations with the heads of
the religious party in Oxford. His mother's Evangelical training of him
and Mr. Grey's influence, together, perhaps, with certain drifts of