CHAPTER XVIII
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
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Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction?
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Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?
—Walt Whitman.
In her sittings in the studio of Pierce Everett, Anna had found from time to time numbers of an English magazine devoted to social reform. Some of these, at Everett’s suggestion, she had taken home with her and read with care. Coming to the studio one May afternoon, for the work had been laid aside for a time for various reasons, and only resumed with the spring, Anna laid down on a table three or four of these magazines with the remark:—
“I wish I knew who John Gregory is.”
Everett glanced up quickly.
“I mean the man who wrote those articles on the ‘Social Ideals of Jesus,’” added Anna.
“Do you like them?” asked Everett.
“I do not know how to answer that question,” said Anna, musingly; “perhaps you hardly can say you like what makes you thoroughly uncomfortable. What he says of the immorality of a life of selfish ease appeals to me powerfully.”
“It is a great arraignment,” said Everett, working on in apparent absorbedness.
“What stirs me so deeply,” continued Anna, “is that this writer not only says what I believe to be true, but that he makes you feel a sense of power, authority, finality almost, in the way he says it. And by that, you know, I do not mean that he is authoritative or autocratic; it is simply that he writes as one who sees, who knows, who has gone beyond the mists of doubt and has a clear vision.”
“You are quite right, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quietly, looking up from his work, his eyes kindling with unwonted light. “John Gregory is a man of his generation—a seer; as you say, one who sees. He is my master. You did not know, perhaps, that I am a socialist?”
“No,” Anna said simply; “I do not even rightly know what a socialist is.”
“It is, as far as my personal definition is concerned,—there are a dozen others,—a man who believes that the aim of individual and private gain and advantage, to the ignoring of the interests of his fellow-men, is immoral; this, whether it is the struggle for the man’s salvation in a future life, or his social or material advancement in this.”
Anna looked very sober. In a moment of silence, she was asking herself, “I wonder what becomes of people who are forced into lives of selfish inaction; who have to live luxuriously when they don’t want to; who are obliged to go in carriages when they far prefer walking; and who find their hands tied whenever they seek any line of effort not absolutely conventional?”
Looking up then with a sudden smile, she exclaimed, “I should like to ask this Mr. Gregory a few questions!”
“Perhaps you may be able to some time. He is in this country now, and he is so good as to honour me with his personal friendship. However, he passes like night from land to land; one can never count upon his coming, or plan for his staying an hour. But if I can bring it about, Mrs. Burgess, you shall meet some time.”
“Thank you. What is he? A clergyman, a teacher, or what?”
“You found something a little sermonic in his articles?” and Everett smiled. “I believe he can never throw it off entirely. He is an Oxford man, a scholar, and a writer on sociology. He is first and last and always, however, a Christian in the purest and most practical sense.”
“That seemed to me unmistakable.”
“He used to be a preacher; in fact, he was for a number of years a famous evangelist in England, and also in this country. He was led into that work by a sense of obligation. I should almost think you must have heard of his wonderful success. John Gregory—his name was in everybody’s mouth a few years ago.”
Anna tried to recall some vague sense of association with the name, which failed to declare itself plainly.
“He was holding great revival meetings somewhere in New England, simply sweeping everything before him; all the great cities were seeking him, you know his income could have been almost anything he would have made it. All this I know, but I never heard a word of it from Gregory himself.”
“He is not doing this still?”
“I will tell you. Really to understand, you must try to imagine something of the man’s personality. He has in the highest degree that indefinable quality which we usually call magnetism. He has an almost irresistible personal influence with many people. Well, on a certain night, four or five years ago, I should think, during the course of a most successful meeting, it suddenly became clear to him that he was bringing the people in that audience to a religious crisis, and to a committal of themselves to a profession of a knowledge of God, by doubtful means. I cannot tell you the details, I have forgotten them; but I know that he went through something like agony in that meeting, and that in saying the words ‘The Spirit is here,’ he had an overwhelming sense of presumption and even of blasphemy. He did not know that the Spirit was present. He was not sure but the influence at work was the product of music, of oratory, of his own will and personality, of the contagion of an excited crowd—in short, was purely human. If this were so, what could the results be but confusion and dismay when the hour of reaction should come? He was borne down by a sense of pity and remorse even for the coming spiritual doubts and struggles of the people who were at that hour placed almost helplessly in his hands, and abruptly he left the place—hall, whatever it was. That night in his hotel he made no attempt to sleep, but studied the situation, its dangers, its losses, its benefits, with the result that he never again held that order of revival meetings. Whatever good other men might do with the forces at work and put into their hands to wield at such crises, for himself he was convinced that the human had usurped the divine, and made of him, not only an unauthorized experimenter with souls, but a violator of their sacred rights, albeit hitherto unconsciously to himself.”
“What has he been doing since?”
“Studying. He has gone deeply into social and religious problems, has travelled largely, has seen and talked with many of the most famous leaders of modern thought, and I think he has now some large plans which are maturing slowly. Meanwhile he writes such things as you have read.”
The following week Anna was again in Everett’s studio. This sitting, he promised her as it drew to a close, should be the last, as he could finish the picture without her.
“Am I to see it now?” asked Anna, timidly.
“Not quite yet, if you can be patient still after such long forbearance,” was the answer, given with a bright but half-pleading smile. “I want you to like the thing if you can, Mrs. Burgess, and I know my chances are better if you see it when the final touches are on.”
“Very well. I am not in a hurry.”
When Anna left the studio the sun was low and the room fast growing shadowy. Seeing how hard and intensely Everett was working to use the last light of the day, she insisted that he should not come down the three long flights of stairs with her. The studio was at the top of the house. They parted, therefore, with a brief, cordial good-by, and earnest thanks from the young artist, whose admiration and reverence for his model had grown with every hour spent in her presence.
On the second flight of stairs Anna encountered the housemaid coming up, a tray with a card in her hand. Otherwise the house seemed strangely still and deserted that evening. As she descended slowly from the broad landing of the main staircase, where a window of stained glass threw a deep radiance from the western sky like a shaft of colour down into the dim hall below, Anna perceived that some one stood there, waiting.
As she looked, amazement and a strange, deep joy took hold on her. The man who stood with arms crossed upon his breast where the shaft of light fell full upon him in the gathering shadow was of heroic height and stature, with a large leonine head, grey hair thrown carelessly from his forehead, strong features, and eyes stern and grave in their fixed look straight before him as he stood.
It was not the first time that Anna Mallison had confronted this face. Twice in her girlhood she had seen it as she saw it now. It was the face of her dream, the dream which for years secretly dominated her inner life as a vision of human power and greatness touched with supernatural light. Even in later time, in this year of her Fulham life, she had at intervals recalled that presence and influence distinctly, and never without quickened pulses and mysterious longing. And now she saw bodily before her the very shape and substance of her dream.
With her heart beating violently and her breath painfully quickened, she proceeded down the stairs, through the hall, and so past the place where the stranger stood. When she reached him he became aware of her presence for the first time. Throwing back his head slightly with the action of one surprised, he met Anna’s eyes lifted with timid joy and dreamlike appeal to his face, and smiled, bending slightly as if in spiritual bestowment, and shedding into her heart the inexplicable delight which she had known before only as the effluence of a dream.
Neither spoke. The house door opened and closed, and Anna hastened down the street alone under the pale, clear sky, with a sense that the greatest event of her life had befallen her, but she knew not what it was. As she went on her homeward way she seemed to herself to be palpably taken up and borne onward by a power beyond herself, as of some rushing, mighty “wind of destiny.”
She found her husband at home, alone in the dusky library by an oppressive fire. She wanted to tell him what had happened; but when she sought to do this she found that nothing had happened; there was nothing to tell unless she should seek to put into words that mysterious dream of her past, and this she found impossible. The dream was her own. No one else could understand.
Keith had returned from a long and tiresome journey in her absence, and Anna was filled with penitence that she had not been in the house to receive him and make him comfortable. He looked worn and dispirited, and complained of the weather, which she had thought celestial, but which prostrated his strength.
In her quiet, skilful way she ministered to him, hiding in her heart the deep happiness in which no one could share, and as she bathed his head he caught her hand and kissed it.
“Oh, my wife,” he said, so low that she could hardly hear, “you are too beautiful, too wonderful for a miserable weakling of a man like me; but how I love you, Anna! Tell me that I do not spoil your life.”