In a Canadian Canoe; The Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories

by Barry Pain

Maurice had not been long at Cambridge before he received news of the sudden death of Mr. Meyner. Apart from the friendship he had always felt for Mr. Meyner, the death seemed to him peculiarly distressing and pathetic. The man had worked hard at a study which fascinated him, not from any desire for gain, or fame to be derived from it, but with the most genuine devotion to the study itself; and he had died before his work was done, before he had arrived at any large and definite result. Yet Maurice felt assured that Meyner’s patience, and judgment, and freedom from prejudice, would, if he had but lived longer, have brought him some reward, some light. He had always distrusted and undervalued himself; his humility was genuine, but almost irritating. He had been at school, and subsequently at college, with Maurice’s guardian, and had first met Maurice when he was a boy of fifteen; the friendship between the boy and the middle-aged man had formed slowly, but surely, since then; yet, although he gave every sign of his liking for Maurice, he never seemed to expect Maurice to like him in return; he certainly never realised the admiration which Maurice had for his knowledge and attainments. So too he loved his wife and only child dearly, and he knew that they loved him; but he had never realised how much they loved him, and would very possibly have thought such love almost irrational. To some extent, perhaps, his studies had spoiled him; he had been groping in the darkness after great things, and the one result that he seemed to have found there was a sense of his own insignificance. Yet, illogically enough, he had never thought others insignificant; he had never reached the cynical conclusion that nobody matters very much. If his friends and his sympathies were so few, it was not because the outside world did not matter to him, but because he could not believe that he mattered to the outside world. He had died without ever having learned his own value.

A parcel which was forwarded to Maurice from Mrs. Meyner shortly afterwards contained the many note-books which her husband had filled with the evidence he had collected, and the work he had done, until death interrupted him. With them was a simple and pathetic letter that he had written to Maurice on the day before he died. “Look through them,” the letter said, in reference to the note-books. “You will see and understand what I was aiming at. If you think it worth while, carry on the investigation which I began; I own that it is some pleasure to me to think that it is possible that you may do so; that one who was intimate with my views, and who shared some of my opinions, which are not generally held, may be able to give those views and opinions their justification. But I do not want you to pledge yourself in any way, nor do I ask you to give up your tripos or your career at college for the purpose.”

Maurice paused as he read this last sentence. How often he had thought, as he turned English verse into indifferent alcaics, that this classical work could only lead, was only educative, could never be considered as an end. But he came to no final decision until he had spent nearly a month in a rapid survey of those note-books. They startled him; the minute accuracy and patience shown in the collection of evidence were only what he expected from such a man as Meyner, but the brilliant audacity of his theories, the almost savage independence of an original mind, looked far different when plainly stated in black and white, than when they had fallen humbly and almost hesitatingly from the man’s own lips. The romantic side in Maurice’s character was touched most by what was worst in Meyner’s books; the finished and unprejudiced scholar would have shaken his head over much that looked like vain imagining, that was extravagant, and, so far, unsupported. Maurice was younger; Meyner’s fierce opposition of an accepted view attracted him, and awoke his pugnacity. He would linger over page after page of what seemed to him splendid conjecture, of what might have seemed to others very useless stuff, and say to himself: “If only one could prove that this is so, instead of longing that it may be so!” The air of conviction with which Meyner wrote down his own views on his own subject gained immeasurably in Maurice’s eyes from the personal knowledge which Maurice had of Meyner’s perpetual tendency to undervalue himself, and to distrust himself in all other matters. Even with these views in his mind, he had expected no great results; he had been too honest to support them with any evidence that was not thoroughly tested. They seemed to Maurice to be the guess of genius; the air of conviction had for him the strange attraction of a religious, not wholly rational, faith. He decided to abandon his University career, and to devote his time to a further prosecution of Meyner’s investigations.

His guardian, who was also his uncle, made very little opposition. Maurice had given so much evidence that he was stable. He had an unusually large allowance for a young man at Cambridge, and yet he had not run into debt. At Cambridge the wealthy are the most in debt, because they have most credit and most temptations. As a matter of fact, Maurice never had considered the financial side of anything; it had simply happened that he had never wanted more than he could well afford. But this weighed very much in Maurice’s favour with his guardian. He felt that his nephew was a man who understood value, and could be trusted. The property to which Maurice would succeed, when he came of age, made it unnecessary for him to adopt any profession; nor did it bring with it any of those special responsibilities for which a special training is supposed to be necessary.

Maurice, therefore, spent the next two years abroad, for the most part in Paris. He had carried with him an introduction to a physician at one of the Paris hospitals, who sympathised with him in his work, and was able to be of great assistance to him. In this man he gained a friend; in other respects these were years, it seemed to him, of disillusion. One by one the great, beautiful theories had to go; a tiny meagre fact would start up, a fact that meant but little to the ordinary observer, and it would be strong enough to overthrow years of work, and send the conjecture on which they were founded to some limbo for lost absurdities. He had long ago been aghast when he had tried to realise how vast is the amount of the things that no man knows. And now for “knows” he put “can know.”

Mrs. Meyner and Marjorie had also been abroad, but he had seen them very seldom in those two years. Marjorie seemed to be slowly changing; he was no longer the recipient of childish confidences. She was grave and more beautiful, perhaps, than she had been; and she was also more quiet and reserved; she was friendly with him, up to a limit; she told him news, of a kind; she sympathised with his disappointments in his work, within decent bounds. At the end of the second year, when Mrs. Meyner and Marjorie were staying for a few days in Paris, and Maurice was at last awakening to the fact that he could not expect childish confidences from one who was no longer a child, Marjorie told him some news which surprised him.

“Aunt Julia has changed very much. I like her now.”

“She must certainly have changed then,” said Maurice smiling.

“I don’t mean,” Marjorie explained, “that she is different to other people—only to mamma and myself. Her servants are in terror of her, and her tenants hate her, and so on; but she has been really kind to me. I think she likes me. We were staying with her a few weeks ago. You’ll be surprised to hear that she likes you too.”

“Of course,” said Maurice, “it is surprising that any one likes me, as you say.”