Canon Alington’s handwriting was neat to the point of exquisiteness, and since he was already quite certain of the correctness of his premises and the justice of his conclusions, it was but a short work to run through the finished paper again with an eye for punctuation and a detective’s keenness for any possible slips of grammar, for his horror of closed windows was outrivalled by his dread of split infinitives. His brown, lean face, with its thick crop of hair just beginning to turn gray, that rose upright in wiry fashion from his forehead, pointed to great physical vigour, while the fact that on this broiling day he had sat down directly after lunch and worked for more than three hours without rising from his chair, except at the end of his business to get that “earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye,” was sufficient indication that no mental weakness belied his appearance of strong vitality. He had written this paper, which would take him a full hour to read at the “Literific,” without notes of any kind, and without (as he found when he read it over) any of what he habitually called vain repetition, or (another critical term of his) “confused noises within.” All he had meant to say he had said, and, a rarer merit, he had said absolutely nothing that he did not mean to say. The whole paper gave as accurate a reflection of that which was in his mind as the best looking-glass.
He placed his sheets when he had finished their revision under a piece of labelled Sinaitic rock (1902), and then granted himself a few minutes’ leisure as he smoked the remainder of the pipe which had assisted him toward the composition of that uncompromising last paragraph. Though he had been busily engaged all day, first in parish business and then in this “literific” effort, he was not at all tired, and indeed the rest of the hours till bedtime were not without further duties. He had at present had no exercise all day, though he considered exercise to be as distinct a duty as any other, since the body reacts on the mind, and he purposed before dinner to do a little late seeding in the garden, and finish up very likely with half an hour with the heavy roller on the lawn. Then, too, he had long made it strictly incumbent upon himself to do an hour’s reading every day; not of the kind that was necessarily congenial to him, but reading which he felt it his duty to do in order to keep abreast of the times. Had he been a selfish, pleasure-loving person, he would certainly from preference have devoted this hour to some well-thumbed favourite, such as “Paradise Lost,” or Miss Corelli’s wonderful “Romance of Two Worlds.” But to be abreast with the times he always made a point of keeping on hand some novel dealing with affairs strictly of the present and its fashionable foibles and frailties. He learned from this how frivolous and unearnest London society was becoming, and could thus warn Mannington both by example and precept against the insidious infection. Mannington, indeed, especially in the summer months, he was afraid, was not altogether outside the danger-zone, and perhaps spent more time over garden-parties, strawberries, and scandal than was right. Not that Canon Alington was sour or Puritanical, or at all underrated the value of timely social gaieties; but to the unwary these things might tend to become an end in themselves, or, more dangerous yet, degenerate into that continuous and expensive round of pure pleasure, week in and week out, that seemed to characterise the season in London. But the clergy generally, he thought, did not make the most of their opportunities of usefulness by not keeping abreast of the times, and warning their flocks of the dangers that lurked beneath too great an indulgence of innocent and, indeed, helpful socialites, and also by too sad an aspect at tea-parties, or total abstention from them, which gave the impression that they thought such things wrong. Canon Alington never fell into these mistakes, and his wife’s fortnightly little dinners, which were distinguished for their plain yet excellent cooking, the soundness of the wines (though he was himself a teetotaller), and the sober strenuousness of the conversation, from which indeed scarcely any topic was barred, were quite a feature in Mannington society. The range of his guests, too, was extremely broad; one was liable to meet there “the military,” for Mannington was a garrison town; the “Close,” for it was a cathedral one; the “county” (for his wife was a Grainger and quite distinctly of the county), and many of the inhabitants of the detached houses with gardens that stretched their feelers into the country, such as The Firs, The Cedars, Apsley House, The Engadine, Holyrood, Holland House, and heaps of manors and granges. Nor was there any hint of religious disability in these parties; dissenting town councillors were entertained there, and Canon Alington never showed a shade of abated cordiality in his welcome of them, despite the great gulf that divided him from them. Indeed, there was a reputed atheist among his regular guests, who never went to any sort of church at all, and though there was wonder in the Canon’s flock when first it was known that Mr. Frawley had dined there (this, by the way, was common knowledge long before lunch-time next day), this broadness perhaps set Canon Alington on a higher pinnacle than ever. The text “all things to all men” was felt to be at last rightly understood. He also dined at the Frawleys’s, and had been asked to say grace, and did so. So Mr. Frawley, in his groping, purblind way, was broad, too.
To-night, too, the duties of the host would be his also, for his wife’s brother, Hugh Grainger, was coming to stop with them for a week-end of Friday till Tuesday, and though it cannot be said, without gross misuse of language, that he approved of Hugh, he could not help being somewhat stimulated by him, and occasionally in his quick, youthful way Hugh made remarks that the more mature and cultivated mind of Canon Alington found very suggestive. It was he, for instance, who had said that the “Rake’s Progress” was unsuitable to put up in a drawing-room because it was so intensely and violently moral; you might as well have gramophones shouting the Ten Commandments all day on a side-table; and though this remark was, of course, exaggerated and implied a certain flippancy that the Canon did not find at all to his taste, this had not prevented him from using the germ of truth which it contained in his recently-written paper for the “Literific.” Hugh also, in point of fact, had been the author of the little conceit about the earliest pipe, though it is only just to him to say that he had no idea this was to be or had been solemnly inscribed on the sill of the Gothic window of a pipe-rack. Yet Canon Alington had been more than half author of it, for he had quoted the original line of Tennyson to Hugh, who had merely said:
“Birdseye! Put it on your pipe-rack.”
Indeed, Hugh had not known where the original quotation came from, for with all his superficial quickness he seemed to his brother-in-law to have very little real knowledge, and the Canon often told him that what he needed was “deepening.”
His meditation over this half-pipe of tobacco lasted but a few minutes, for it was alien to his native activity of mind to indulge in vague reflections of any kind, and soon he took up the morning paper of the day, which, so busy had he been, he had not yet had time to look at. Outside he heard the crunch of the gravel of what is called the “carriage-sweep,” but it was probably not Hugh, who usually arrived only just before dinner-time; and if it was a caller, his wife was out, and he himself was never disturbed in his study for any chance visitor. Indeed, on the outside door of it he had playfully put up the motto, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” and the explanation of it often formed a pleasant little topic at his dinner-parties, when he and his men-guests crossed the hall to join the rest of the company in the drawing-room.
So he turned over the pages of his paper, secure from interruption. In the general way, there was not much to detain him, but in “London Day by Day” a short paragraph concerning the huge success of this new play, “Gambits,” arrested him, and he read it with some distress, remembering the original criticism of the drama that had appeared in the same paper, which had shown him so clearly that this play was typical of all those tendencies of the day which seemed to him so dangerous. For—such was the outline of the plot—a girl had been married young, far too young, in fact, to a man much older than herself, who, as Canon Alington easily saw, was a person of extreme feebleness and indecision of mind. Subsequently she fell in love with a young cousin of her husband who lived with them, and though there was no suggestion of infidelity on her part, yet it was clear that the author’s intention (one Andrew Robb, from the solid sound of which something better might have been expected) was that pity and sympathy should be extended to them both. It was only by degrees that the indecisive husband saw and realised this miserable state of affairs, and, after wretched vacillations, committed suicide. That, to put it baldly (and Canon Alington always put baldly affairs with which he felt no sympathy), was the skeleton of the play of which the Daily Telegraph had so warm and appreciative a critique. And now it appeared that London was going mad over the play, and pined to know who Andrew Robb was. But the Canon’s opinion of London had always been low. The very fact, too, that the play itself was said to be beautifully written, to be instinct with humanity and true pathos, made it all the more dangerous. In no single point were any of the tests of literary and artistic immortality, which he had laid down so convincingly in his paper of this afternoon, satisfied. A husband committed suicide because his wife had weakly allowed herself to fall in love with somebody else. There could not possibly be any germ of immortality in this hodge-podge of weakness and wickedness. Yet in the interval it looked as if it was going to live long and lustily. And it was called human! Frail and feeble as Canon Alington knew humanity, alas, to be, he did not think of it so badly as that!
At this point, however, his musings, set up again by that paragraph, were interrupted, for the carriage, the departing wheels of which had just again crunched the gravel, contained not callers, but Hugh, who had caught an earlier train. He crossed the grass to below the window of the study, put his hand on to the sill, and vaulted on to it, upsetting a small saucer of seeds which had been put there to soak before being planted.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve upset something. How are you, Dick?”
Dick, it must be confessed, had constantly to make little efforts of self-control when Hugh was in the house. He made them quite willingly, and was ashamed to think that they were efforts. He made one now.