Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

It was humiliating, for example, to one who would wish every one to be dependent and honest, to see the embarrassment into which some of my neighbours could be plunged when I had come suddenly upon them while they were talking with Sir Edmund or Lady Fergusson. They had to decide in a moment which side to be on, whether to acknowledge me or not. I was, of course, in the long run, of infinitely more use to them than the Hall people could be: but wealth is wealth, and position is position, and poor human nature is poor human nature and ever will be. I don’t expect it to change, but I cannot bear to be a cause of plunging it into its less admirable moods.

Our community was too small for the Hall people and the doctor to be at enmity; and a large part of a country doctor’s duty is to act as cement, a fuser of classes, and while the vendetta held how could I be this?

But if a sigh of relief went up when it was known that I had been seen to drive into the Hall gates again, no one emitted it with more genuine heartiness than the rector, who had been put in a peculiarly awkward position. For although my friend of many years’ standing, he had not, poor fellow, enough courage to take any stand in the matter. I am not blaming him. The church does not train men to take a very strong stand on such occasions, nor indeed require recruits from the ranks of the independent and outspoken. Clerics, it is true, can become approximately courageous and frank, but preferment usually precedes the operation. Your country rector or vicar keeps himself as free from trouble as possible—very wisely—and listens to all sides even if he is not a partisan of all sides.

The Fergussons were too important for our rector even to contemplate the risk of losing them. So far as his church was concerned, he was safe, as I was not an attendant; but I was on this committee and that with both Sir Edmund and himself; we were all three of us governors of the almshouses. I had brought the rector’s numerous children into the world; I was even godfather to one of them. The rector was continually coming to me for advice. My usefulness was as necessary to him, or at any rate as comforting, as the Hall’s prestige, patronage and port.

Both of us he had, of course, held reprehensible in a very high degree for the effect on his parishioners of the defiance of morality involved in Ronnie and Rose’s escapade. He blamed the Fergussons for providing a Ronnie, and me for my association, although so vicarious, with Rose. How could he expect his simple flock to keep in the straight path, he asked, if the seventh commandment was treated with such contempt by the sons and daughters of the rich and exalted? He felt that his stewardship was under a cloud, even though Ronnie was merely a visitor among us from India and Rose from Wilton Place. Both had been children under him, when he was young and far more energetic than now. If they had weakened and fallen, was it not a reflection on his own zeal?

Mrs. O’Gorman told me something of the good man’s line of self-torturing argument when I called on her one day, for he did not himself dare to present the case to me.

“What do you think the old fellow’s saying now?” she said. “He’s saying that if any of the husbands and wives in his congregation—Joe Smithers, for example, and Alice Leith—were to bolt together for the bad motive, he’d have not a word to reply to them if they were to say they did it because Captain Fergusson and Mrs. Holt had made a break.

“‘Rubbish! my dear sir,’ I said to him. ‘People don’t argue like that; at least not honestly: only for effect. And people don’t wait for examples; they do what they want if they have the courage, but for the most part they do nothing at all, because they’re cowards.’

“It takes more courage, I told him, to do what Captain Fergusson and Mrs. Holt have done than to resist temptations; and my own belief is that no temptation worth the name ever is resisted. It’s only resisted when it’s pretending to be strong. Passion isn’t resisted; but mercifully there’s very little of it in England. What we call passion is usually a mixture of a certain amount of loneliness and a certain amount of curiosity and a certain amount of appetite and a tremendous desire to escape from what one is doing and have an adventure. But passion, burning hot and self-sacrificing—there’s very little!

“The rector,” she went on, “actually had the nerve to congratulate himself on the good conduct of the parish. He seemed to think it’s due to his sermons. I put him right. ‘My dear man,’ I said, ‘it’s not your sermons; it’s the want of opportunity.’”