Catharine was one of those creatures whose life is not uniform from sixteen to sixty, a simple progressive accumulation of experiences, the addition of a ring of wood each year. There had come a time to her when she had suddenly opened. The sun shone with new light, a new lustre lay on river and meadow, the stars became something more than mere luminous points in the sky, she asked herself strange questions, and she loved more than ever her long wanderings at Chapel Farm. This phenomenon of a new birth is more often seen at some epochs than at others. When a nation is stirred by any religious movement it is common, but it is also common in a different shape during certain periods of spiritual activity, such as the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth in England and Germany. Had Catharine been born two hundred years earlier, life would have been easy. All that was in her would have found expression in the faith of her ancestors, large enough for any intellect or any heart at that time. She would have been happy in the possession of a key which unlocks the mystery of things, and there would have been ample room for emotion. How impatient she became of those bars which nowadays restrain people from coming close to one another! Often and often she felt that she could have leaped out towards the person talking to her, that she could have cried to him to put away his circumlocutions, his forms and his trivialities, and to let her see and feel what he really was. Often she knew what it was to thirst like one in a desert for human intercourse, and she marvelled how those who pretended to care for her could stay away so long: she could have humiliated herself if only they would have permitted her to love them and be near them. Poor Catharine! the world as it is now is no place for people so framed! When life runs high and takes a common form men can walk together as the disciples walked on the road to Emmaus. Christian and Hopeful can pour out their hearts to one another as they travel towards the Celestial City and are knit together in everlasting bonds by the same Christ and the same salvation. But when each man is left to shift for himself, to work out the answers to his own problems, the result is isolation. People who, if they were believers, would find the richest gift of life in utter confidence and mutual help are now necessarily strangers. One turns to metaphysics; another to science; one takes up with Rousseau’s theory of existence, and another with Kant’s; they meet; they have nothing to say; they are of no use to one another in trouble; one hears that the other is sick; what can be done? There is a nurse; he does not go; his old friend dies, and as to the funeral—well, we are liable to catch cold. Not so Christian and Hopeful! for when Christian was troubled “with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits, even on the borderland of Heaven—oh, Bunyan! Hopeful kept his brother’s head above water, and called upon him to turn his eyes to the Gate and the men standing by it to receive him.” My poor reader-friend, how many times have you in this nineteenth century, when the billows have gone over you—how many times have you felt the arm of man or woman under you raising you to see the shining ones and the glory that is inexpressible?
Had Catharine been born later it would have been better. She would perhaps have been able to distract herself with the thousand and one subjects which are now got up for examinations, or she would perhaps. have seriously studied some science, which might at least have been effectual as an opiate in suppressing sensibility. She was, however, in Eastthorpe before the new education, as it is called, had been invented. There was no elaborate system of needle points, Roman and Greek history, plain and spherical trigonometry, political economy, ethics, literature, chemistry, conic sections, music, English history, and mental philosophy, to draw off the electricity within her, nor did she possess the invaluable privilege of being able, after studying a half-crown handbook, to unbosom herself to women of her own age upon the position of Longland as an English poet.
Shakespeare or Wordsworth might have been of some use to her, but to Shakespeare she was not led, although there was a brown, dusty, one-volume edition at the Terrace; and of Wordsworth nobody whom she knew in Eastthorpe had so much as heard. A book would have turned much that was vague in her into definite shape; it would have enabled her to recognise herself; it would have given an orthodox expression to cloud singularity, and she would have seen that she was a part of humanity in her most extravagant and personal emotions. As it was, her position was critical because she stood by herself, affiliated to nothing, an individual belonging to no species, so far as she knew. She then met Mr. Cardew. It was through him the word was spoken to her, and he was the interpreter of the new world to her. She was in love with him—but what is love? There is no such thing: there are loves, and they are all different. Catharine’s was the very life of all that was Catharine, senses, heart, and intellect, a summing-up and projection of her whole selfhood. He was more to her than she to him—was any woman ever so much to a man as a man is to a woman? She was happy when she was near him. When she was in ordinary Eastthorpe society she felt as a pent-up lake might feel if the weight of its waters were used in threading needles, but when Mr. Cardew talked to her, and she to him, she rejoiced in the flow of all her force, and that horrible oppression in her chest vanished.
Nevertheless, the fear, the shudder, came to her and not to him; the wrench came from her and not from him. It was she and not he who watched through the night and found no motive for the day, save a dull, miserable sense that it was her duty to live through it.
CHAPTER XI
It was a fact, and everybody noticed it, that since the removal to the Terrace, and the alteration in their way of living, Mr. Furze was no longer the man he used to be, and seemed to have lost his grasp over his business. To begin with, he was not so much in the shop. His absences in the Terrace at meal-times made a great gap in the day, and Tom Catchpole was constantly left in sole charge. Mr. Bellamy came home one evening and told his wife that he had called at Furze’s to ask the meaning of a letter Furze had signed, explaining the action of a threshing-machine which was out of order. To his astonishment Furze, who was in his counting-house, called for Tom, and said, “Here, Tom, this is one of your letters; you had better tell Mr. Bellamy how the thing works.”
“I held my tongue, Mrs. Bellamy, but I had my thoughts all the same, and the next time I go there, if I go at all, I shall ask for Tom.”
Mr. Furze was aware of Tom’s growing importance, and Mrs. Furze was aware of it too. The worst of it was that Mr. Furze, at any rate, knew that he could not do without him. It is very galling to the master to feel that his power is slipping from him into the hands of a subordinate, and he is apt to assert himself by spasmodic attempts at interference which generally make matters worse and rivet his chains more tightly. There was a small factory in Eastthorpe in which a couple of grindstones were used which were turned by water-power at considerable speed. One of them had broken at a flaw. It had flown to pieces while revolving, and had nearly caused a serious accident. The owner called at Mr. Furze’s to buy another. There were two in stock, one of which he would have taken; but Tom, his master being at the Terrace, strongly recommended his customer not to have that quality, as it was from the same quarry as the one which was faulty, but that another should be ordered. To this he assented. When Mr. Furze returned Tom told him what had happened. He was in an unusually irritable, despotic mood. Mrs. Furze had forced him to yield upon a point which he had foolishly made up his mind not to concede, and consequently he was all the more disposed to avenge his individuality elsewhere. After meditating for a minute or two he called Tom from the counter.
“Mr. Catchpole, what do you mean by taking upon yourself to promise you would obtain another grindstone?”
“Mean, sir! I do not quite understand. The two out there are of the same sort as the one that broke, and I did not think them safe.”