The Beth Book
"I must be quiet," she said to Angelica one day when they were
discussing her future. "I am done for so far as work is concerned when
I come into contact with crowds. I want to live things then; I don't
want to think about them. Excitement makes me content to be, and
careless about doing. My truest and best life is in myself, and I can
only live it in circumstances of tranquil monotony. People talk so
much about making the most of life, but their attempts are curiously
bungling. What they call living is for the most part more pain than
pleasure to them; for the truth is, that life should not be lived by
men of mind, but contemplated; it is the spectator, not the actor, who
enjoys and profits. The actor has his moment of applause, but all the
rest is misery. People rush to great centres to obtain a knowledge of
life, and do not succeed, for there they see nothing but broad
effects. We find our knowledge of life in individuals, not in crowds.
There is no more individuality in a crowd of people than there is in a
flock of sheep. All I know of life, of its infinite diversity, I have
learnt here and there from some one person or another, known
intimately. A solitary experience, rightly considered in all its
bearings, teaches us more than numbers of those incidents of which we
see the surface only 'in the joy of eventful living;' and, if the
truth were known, I expect it would be found that each one of us had
obtained the most valuable part of our experience in such homely
details of simple unaffected human nature as came under our
observation in our native villages."
"Yes," Angelica answered thoughtfully, "the looker-on sees most of the
game. But I don't think you allow enough for differences of
temperament. You are thinking of the best conditions for creative
work. You mustn't lose sight of all the active service that is going
on."
"No; but it is in retirement that the best preparation is made for
active service also. And I was thinking of active service more than of
creative work just then. The truth is, I am in a state of being
oppressed by the thought of my new book. I don't know what has come to
me. I am all fretty about it. Writing has lost its charm. I doubt if I
shall ever do well enough to make it worth while to write at all. And
even if I could, I don't think mere literary success would satisfy me.
I have tasted enough of that to know what it would be--a sordid
triumph, a mere personal thing."
"Ideala does not think that it is necessarily as a literary woman that
you will succeed," Angelica answered. "_I_ thought it was because all
the indications you have given of special capacity seem to me to lie
in that direction. However, versatile people make mistakes sometimes.
They don't always begin with the work they are best able to do; but
there is no time lost, for one thing helps another--one thing is
necessary to another, I _should_ say, perhaps. Your writing may have
helped to perfect you in some other form of expression."
"You cheer me!" Beth exclaimed. "But what form?" She reflected a
little, and then she put the puzzle from her. "It will come to me, I
dare say," she said, "if I shut the din of the world far from me, and
sit with folded arms in contemplation, waiting for the moment and the
match which shall fire me to the right pitch of enthusiasm. Nothing
worth doing in art is done by calculation."
"I think you are right to keep out of the crowd," said Angelica. "You
will get nothing but distraction from without. I should take one of
the privileges of a great success to be the right to refuse all
invitations that draw one into the social swim. Men and women of high
purpose do not arrive in order to be crowded into stuffy drawing-rooms
to be stared at."
"My idea of perfect bliss," Beth pursued, "when my work is done, and
my friends are not with me, is to lie my length upon a cliff above the
sea, listening to the many-murmurous, soothed by it into a sense of
oneness with Nature, till I seem to be mixed with the elements, a part
of sky and sea and shore, and akin to the wandering winds. This mood
for my easy moments; but give me work for my live delight. I know
nothing so altogether ecstatic as a good mood for work."
"What you call work is power of expression," said Angelica; "the power
to express something in yourself, I fancy."
"Ye--yes," Beth answered, hesitating, as if the notion were new to
her. "I believe you are right. What I call work is the effort to
express myself."
Mr. Kilroy had come in while they were talking, and sat listening to
the last part of the conversation.
"I have just the sort of 'neat little cot in a quiet spot, with a
distant view of the rolling sea' that you yearn for, Beth," he said,
smiling, when she paused, "and I have come to ask you and Angelica to
drive over with me to see it."
"You mean Ilverthorpe Cottage," said Angelica, jumping up. "O Daddy!
it's the very place. Two storeys, Beth, ivy, roses, jasmine, wisteria
without; and within, space and comfort of every kind--and the sea in
sight! Such a pretty garden, too, grass and trees and shrubs and
flowers. And near enough for us all to see you as often as you wish.
Beth, be excited too! I must bring my violin, I think, and play a
triumphal march on the way."
Ilverthorpe Cottage was all and more than Angelica had said, and Beth
did not hesitate to take it. It was Mr. Kilroy's property, and the
rent was suspiciously low, but Beth supposed that that was because the
house was out of the way. She and Angelica spent long happy days in
getting it ready for occupation, choosing paper, paint, and
furnishments. Mr. Kilroy saw to the stables, which he completed with a
saddle-horse and a pony-carriage. There was a short cut across the
fields, a lovely walk, from Ilverthorpe House to the Cottage, and when
Angelica could not accompany her, Beth would stroll over alone to see
how things were getting on, and wander about her little demesne, and
love it. Outside her garden, in front of the house, the highroad ran,
a sheltered highroad, with a raised footpath, bordered on either side
with great trees, oak and elm, chestnut and beech, and a high hawthorn
hedge just whitening into blossom. The field-path came out on this
highroad, down which she had to walk a few hundred yards to her own
gate. Day after day there was an old Irish labourer, a stonebreaker,
by the wayside, kneeling on a sack beside a great heap of stones, who
gave her a cheery good-morrow as she passed. Once she went across the
road and spoke to him. He had the face of a saint at his devotions.
"You kneel there all day long," she said, "and as you kneel you pray,
perhaps. Will you pray for me? Pray, pray that I may"--she was going
to say succeed, but stopped--"that I may be good."
The man raised his calm eyes, and looked her in the face. "You _are_
good, lady," he said simply.
"Yet pray," she entreated; "and pray too that all I do may be good,
and of good effect."
"All you do is good, lady," he answered once more, in the same quiet
tone of conviction.
"But I want all I do to be the best for the purpose that can be done."
She put some money in his hand and turned away, and as she went he
watched her. She had touched him with her soft gloveless fingers in
giving him the money, and when she had gone, he was conscious of the
touch; it tingled through him, and he looked at the spot on which the
impression remained, as if he expected it to be in some sort visible.
"Now Our Lady love you and the saints protect you, bless your sweet
face," he muttered; "and may all you do be the best that can be done
for every one. Amen."
* * * * *
A few months in her lovely little house sufficed to restore Beth's
mind to its natural attitude--an attitude of deep devotion. She even
began to work again, but rather with a view to making herself useful
to her friends than to satisfy any ambition or craving of her own.
Whatever she did, however, she approached in the spirit of the great
musician who dressed himself in his best, and prayed as at a solemn
service, when he shut himself up to compose. Beth had stepped away
from the old forms by this time. She had escaped from the bondage of
the letter that killeth into the realm of the spirit that giveth life.
It is not faith in any particular fetish that makes a mind religious,
but the quality of reverence. Churches Beth had come to look upon, not
with distrust, but with indifference, as an ineffectual experiment of
man's. She could find no evidence of a holier spirit or a more divine
one in the church than in any other human institution for the
propagation of instruction. The church has never been superior to the
times, never as far advanced as the best men of the day, never a
leader, but rather an opposer of progress, hindering when ideas were
new, and only coming in to help when workers without had proved their
discoveries, and it was evident that credit would be lost by refusing
to recognise them. There is no cruelty the church has not practised,
no sin it has not committed, no ignorance it has not displayed, no
inconsistency it has not upheld, from teaching peace and countenancing
war, to preaching poverty and piling up riches. True, there have been
great saints in the church; but then there have been great saints out
of it. Saintliness comes of conscientiously cultivating the divine in
human nature; it is a seed that is sown and flourishes under the most
diverse conditions.
Beth thought much on religion in those quiet days, and read much,
looking for spiritual sustenance among the garbage of mind with which
man has overlaid it, and finding little to satisfy her, until one
night, quite suddenly, as she sat holding her mind in the attitude of
prayer, there came to her a wonderful flash of illumination. She had
not been occupied with the point that became apparent. It entered her
mind involuntarily, and was made clear to her without conscious effort
on her part; but it was that which she sought, the truth that moves,
makes evident, makes easy, props and stays, and is the instigator of
religious action, the source of aspiration, the ground of hope--the
which was all contained for Beth in the one old formula interpreted in
a way that was new to her: _The communion of saints_ (that
inexplicable sympathy between soul and soul), _the forgiveness of
sins_, (working out our own salvation in fear and trembling), _the
resurrection of the body_ (reincarnation), _and the life everlasting_
(which is the crown or glory, the final goal).
"But God?" Beth questioned.
"God is love," she read in the book that lay open on the table before
her.
Then she clasped her hands over the passage and laid her head on them,
and for a long time she sat so, not thinking, but just repeating it to
herself softly: "God is love," till all at once there was a blank in
her consciousness; thought was suspended. When it returned, she looked
up, and in herself were the words: "God is Love--no! _Love is God!_"
In the joy of the revelation, she arose, and, going to the window,
flung it wide open. Far down the east the dawn was dimly burning; the
faint sweet breath of it fanned her cheeks; her chest expanded with a
great throb, and she exclaimed aloud: "I follow, follow--_God_--I know
not where."
* * * * *
Beth had a task before her that day which she did not relish in the
anticipation. She was going as a stopgap to speak at a large meeting
to oblige Angelica. She had the credit of being able to speak, and she
herself supposed that she could in a way, because of the success of
her first attempt; but she did not consent to try again without much
hesitation and many qualms, and she would certainly not have consented