“One must,” thought Francis, half apologising to himself. “One must think of these things materially. If I had thought of it materially I should never have. . .”
He broke off the thought and began to tell himself that he ought to encourage the young in high-souled endeavour. Young Lawrie was certainly remarkable, talented, very much in earnest, and, as far as one could see, very much in love. To be sure Gertrude was a good ten years older than he, but that was no bad thing for a young man of an ardent temperament. Certainly from Gertrude’s point of view it was better for her to be the wife of a clergyman than the wife of a clerk. But ought one to let these social considerations weigh in the matter? It was very difficult (thought Francis), very difficult. She would be poor in any case. She might have a large family. She was a little woman, rather plain, just the type that produces enormous families. And families—could there be anything more harassing than to have a large family and to have no means of making provision for them?
On that Francis’s reflections stopped. They went round and round. It was his business to encourage the production of children (in wedlock), and year in and year out he had faithfully fulfilled his duty, without ever pausing to consider whether he had practised what he preached. Now he saw that he had done so, and was shocked to find himself rather dismayed at the result, and reluctant to face the possibility of his daughter doing the same. For years he had hardly thought about his work. Since the death of his son and the brutal outbreak that followed it, hostilities had ceased (with the exception of an occasional splutter at an Easter vestry meeting) and the work of his church, like his domestic life, had run on automatically. Time had hardly existed for him. His thoughts from disuse had grown sluggish, and it was very very slowly borne in upon him that his children were beginning to claim a separate existence, and that they had every right to do so. When he realised it he was forced painfully to face the fact that he was impotent to help them either with money, or, what is more precious, real sympathy. It was only with an effort that he was able to set aside the grotesqueness of Gertrude’s fancy and to force himself to see it with her eyes and to take it seriously. He looked back over the years and caught a glimpse of the wasted opportunities, and though he never indulged in the luxury of self-torment he cried in his heart:
“God forbid that when they are as old as I they should be even as I am.”
He was not sufficiently skilled in self-analysis to lay his finger on the weakness that had brought him to such a pass. He thought no ill of his wife. He knew enough of human nature to admit that nothing outside a man’s own soul could dishonour him or bring him to harm. Unconsciously he was disloyal to the tenets of his calling in considering his own case. With all others he professed that God moved in a mysterious way and that everything happened for the best according to God’s providence. He had long since abandoned all belief in the possibility of a noble collective life here on earth, for he had seen too much not to know that when two or three are gathered together it is not to seek God, but to promote knavery and jealousy. Moments of agony he had had when he had half seen his own scepticism, but the simple devotion of some of his parishioners, craftsmen, and factory hands, and his own great liking for many of his poor had kept him from throwing up his work, and he would say:
“Though I do it ill, yet it might be done worse.”
Besides, he could not afford to renounce the stipend. Every year he had made small inroads upon his capital, fifty pounds here and a hundred there to satisfy creditors or sudden demands of charity for larger sums than he could afford to pay out of income.
Well, well—no doubt he was making a mountain out of a molehill, and things were not nearly so bad as they seemed. The house had been much jollier since Serge came back and Annette brought youth and joy into it, and if none of the family seemed to be on the way to brilliant lives, after all there were better things in the world than success, and nothing mattered so much as affection and love. And yet, how small a part love played in human life! How soon it died!
In the end Francis laughed at himself, and told himself that thinking was no use. It neither made good better nor bad worse. Things were what they were and nothing would alter them. Young Lawrie, with his brain stuffed full of illusions, wished to enter into Holy Orders. So be it. He had promised to do all he could to help him: after all it was something to find a young man with thoughts higher than the pleasure next to hand, and the first step seemed to be to see his father.
So Francis Folyat wrote to James Lawrie in his awkward spidery hand—(he could not bear writing letters)—and asked for an interview in order to discuss with him the future of his son Bennett.