92 



The Review of Reviews. 



July I, 190e 



Perhaps a cool observer even in the old da}s 

 would have found little beauty in our grouping. I 

 have our two photographs at hand in this bureau 

 as I write, and they show a gawky youth in ill- 

 fitting, ready-made clothing, and Nettie . In- 

 deed, Nettie is badly dressed, and her attitude is 

 more than a little stiff, but I can see her through 

 the picture, and her living brightness, and something 

 of that mystery of charm she had for me, come 

 back again to mv mind. 



The realitv of beauty yields itself to no words. 

 I wish that t had the sister art and could draw in 

 mv margin something that escapes description. 

 There was a sort of gravity in her eyes. There 

 was something, a matter of the minutest difference, 

 about her upper lip, so that her mouth closed sweetly 

 and broke very sweetly to a smile. That grave, 

 sweet smile ! 



After we had kissed and decided not to tell our 

 parents for a while of the irrevocable choice we had 

 made, the time came for us to part, shyly and be- 

 fore others, and my mother and I went off back 

 across the moonlit park — ^the bracken-thickets 

 rustling with startled deer — to the railwaj'-station 

 at Checkshill and so to our dingy' basement in 

 Clayton, and I saw no more of Nettie — except that 

 I saw her in my thoughts — for nearly a year. But 

 at our next meeting it was decided we must cor- 

 respond, and this we did with much elaboration of 

 secrecv, for Nettie would have no one at home, 

 not even her only sister, know of her attachment. 

 So I had to send my precious documents sealed and 

 under cover bv way of a confidential schoolfellow 

 of hers who lived near London. . . . 



Our correspondence began our estrangement, be- 

 cause for the first time we came into more than 

 sensuous contact and our minds sought expression. 



Now vou must understand that the world of 

 thought in those days was in the strangest condition ; 

 it was choked with obsolete, inadequate formulge, 

 it was tortuous to a mazelike degree with secondary- 

 contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conven- 

 tions and subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the 

 truth on any man's lips. I was brought up by my 

 mother in a quaint, old-fashioned, narrow faith in 

 certain religious formulas, certain rules of conduct, 

 certain conceptions of social and political ordei, 

 that had no more relevance to the realities and 

 needs of every-day contemporary life than if they 

 were clean linen that had been put away with 

 lavender in a drawer. Indeed, her religion did ac- 

 tuallv smell of lavender ; on Sundays she put away 

 all the things of reality, the garments and even 

 the furnishings of every-day, hid her hands, that 

 were gnarled and sometimes chapped with scrub- 

 bing, in carefully mended black gloves, assumed 

 her old black silk dress and bonnet, and took me, 

 unnaturallv clean and sweet also, to church. There 

 we sang and bowed and heard sonorous pravers and 



joined in sonorous responses, and rose with a con- 

 gregational sigh refreshed and relieved when the 

 doxology^ with its opening, '■ Now to God the Father, 

 God the Son," bowed out the tame, brief sermon. 

 There was a hell in that religion of my mothers, 

 a red-haired hell of curly flames that had once been 

 very terrible ; we were expected to believe that most 

 of our poor unhappy world was to atone for its 

 muddle and trouble here by suffering exquisite tor- 

 ments forever after, world without end. Amen. But 

 indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The 

 whole thing had been mellowed and faded into a 

 gentle unreality long before my time ; if it had 

 much terror even in my childhood, I have forgotten 

 that ; it was not so terrible as the Giant who was 

 killed bv the Beanstalk ; and T see it all now as a 

 setting for my poor old mother's worn and grimy 

 face, and almost lovingly as a part of her. And 

 Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little lodger, strangely 

 transformed in his vestments and lifting his voice 

 manfully to the quality of those Elizabethan prayers, 

 seemed, I think, to give her a special and peculiar 

 interest with God. She radiated her own tremulous 

 gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him from all 

 thf implications of vindictive theologians; she was 

 in truth, had I but perceived it, the effectual answer 

 to all she would have taught me. 



Mr. Gabbit:as, you see, did sometimes, as the 

 phrase went, " take notice " of me. He had in- 

 duced me to go on reading after I left school ; and, 

 with the best intentions in the world, and to antici- 

 pate the poison of the times, he had lent me 

 Burble's '' Scepticism Answered," and drawn my 

 attention to the library of the Institute in Clayton. 



The excellent Burble was a great shock to me ; 

 it seemed clear from his answers to the sceptic that 

 the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all that faded 

 and by no means awful hereafter, which I had 

 hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an 

 extremely poor one ; and to hammer home that 

 idea, the first book I got from the Institute hap- 

 pened to be an American edition of the collected 

 works of Shellev, his gassy prose as well as his 

 atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe for blatant un- 

 belief. And at the Young Men's Christian Asso- 

 ciation I presently made the acquaintance of Par- 

 load, who told me under promises of the most 

 sinister secrecy that he was " a socialist out and 

 out." He lent me several copies of a periodical 

 with the clamant title of " The Clarion," which was 

 just taking up a crusade against the accepted re- 

 ligion. The adolescent years of any fairly intelligent 

 vouth lie open, and will always lie healthily open, to 

 the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and 

 new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of 

 that phase badly. Doubt, I say, but it was not so 

 much doubt — which is a complex thing — as startled, 

 emphatic denial. " Have I .believed this/" And I 

 was also, you must remember, just commencmg 

 love-letters to Nettie. 



