Later on, when Mr. Trimblerigg moved to a house efficiently supplied with a hot-water system, his baths were taken daily, but they were not always cold ones; and though he still pretended that they were, the modifications were so various and so habitual, that he left off saying ‘naughty boy!’ when he looked at himself in the glass. Also, when he really did begin to become chubby he left off telling himself that he was getting fat. Sometimes he would look at himself a little sadly, and in order to avoid the moral conclusion that you cannot have the fat things of life without the adipose tissue, preferred to reflect that he was ‘getting middle-aged,’ which was still ten years away from the truth.
But the sadness was only momentary; he had so good an opinion of himself that he was almost always cheerful, and easy to get on with. And if after he had turned thirty he did begin to become a little ball of a man, he kept the ball rolling with energy. The amount of work he could do, and do happily, was phenomenal; and under his stimulus the foreign mission work of the Free Evangelicals grew and flourished.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Virtuous Adventure
NOBODY who has followed this narrative with any intelligence can suppose that Mr. Trimblerigg was a man who did not have his temptations. What happened when he immersed Davidina in the stream without intending it, what happened when he did not immerse himself in the bath on a cold morning, has been faithfully told. But what he did to Davidina had hurt him far more than what he did to himself. It had hurt him because Davidina had found him out, and then had not allowed him to explain.
He liked explaining. Explaining always made him feel right again with his own conscience. Even the look of understanding which he exchanged with himself in the glass, after some involuntary reversion to type, was sufficient as a rule to restore him to his own good opinion. To explain things, therefore, which generally meant to explain them away, was spiritual meat and drink to him.
But there were two people in the world to whom he very seldom explained anything: his wife, the quiet Caroline, who understood so little that it was not worth while; and his sister Davidina who understood so much that it was dangerous.
And between these two Guardian angels—who should have been his confidantes, but were not—he led a life of temptations. Not gross, or serious in kind, or extreme in degree, but temptations none the less, and all having their root in a very laudable trait of his character, his abounding love of adventure.
All his life Mr. Trimblerigg had been respectable: when he married he had no bachelor episodes to conceal from his wife, except perhaps that sixpenny sale of a kiss to Lizzie Seebohm, of which he had ceased to be proud, and his temporary infatuation for Isabel Sparling which had afterwards so embarrassed him. And this rectitude of conduct was not for lack of opportunity or inclination; for women attracted him and he attracted them. Puritan training and Puritan ancestry had no doubt something to do with it: the bath-habit which he had failed in his youth to acquire materially, he had acquired spiritually.
And so also with other things. He had never drunk wine or spirits; only once or twice a glass of beer, and that not for its potency or taste, but because it had froth on the top, and he liked dipping his lips into it. Surreptitiously, for the mere pleasure of concealment and doing it with boys older than himself, he had smoked a pipe a few times before becoming an adherent of True Belief, and he had not, upon escaping from the confinement of its doctrine, relinquished the abstention which had become a habit. Nor had he ever betted; though now, with a little money to turn round in, he had begun to speculate; but that was different. Finally he had never travelled.
In all these ways he, to whom change and adventure instinctively appealed, had been cut off from adventure; and adventure—even when it could not be called wrong—tempted him more than most people. To see himself in a tight place, and get out of it, meant self-realization; to find his way into unaccustomed circumstances, and fit them perfectly, was intellectual and moral training of a stimulating kind. During his days at College in the annual students’ rag on the Fifth of November, a plot had been formed by the anti-feminists to make a Guy Fawkes of him dressed as a woman preacher. And he had escaped by stealing a policeman’s helmet, truncheon, and overcoat, which were all much too large for him, and had then helped to batter the heads of the turbulent crowd which was out seeking for him and breaking the windows of the lodging-house where he was supposed to be.