More Pages from a Journal

by William Hale White

‘Surely your own minister has instructed you on this point; it is the foundation even of Protestantism.’

‘I prefer to seek instruction and guidance from you; answer me this one question.’

‘Satan has never thus assaulted me, and I have never heard of any such suggestion to one of my people. I am a poor parish priest. Take the manual. It has been compiled by learned men: read it carefully with prayer: I also will pray for you that you may be gathered into the eternal Church.’

Kate took the manual and went home. There was but little history in it, but there was much about the person of Christ. He was man and God ‘without confusion and without change.’ As man he had to learn as other men learn, and, as God, he knew everything. He was sinless, and the lusts of the flesh had no power over him, but he had a human body, and was necessarily subject to its infirmities. His human nature was derived from his mother. God was not born from her, and yet she was the mother of God. Kate was able to see that some part of what looked like sheer contradiction was the conjunction of opposites from which it is impossible to escape in the attempt to express the Infinite, but in the manual this contradiction was presented with repulsive hardness. The compiler desired to subjugate and depose the reason. This was not the Christ she wanted. She hungered for the God, the Man, at whose feet she could have fallen: she would have washed them with tears, she would have wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed them and anointed them with ointment. She could have followed Him to the court of the High Priest and have gloried in discipleship: she could have taken the thief’s place beside Him on the cross, and she would not have exchanged those moments of torture in companionship with Him for a life of earthly bliss. But—that fatal but—did He ever live, did He still live, did He love her, did He know how much she loved Him? Thus it has always been. There is an impulse in man which drives him to faith; the commonplace world does not satisfy him; he is forced to assume a divine object for his homage and love, and when he goes out into the fields it has vanished.

Kate did not call again upon the priest. Her father came to the conclusion that there was nothing in his suspicions, and that she had been suffering from one of her not uncommon fits of nervous restlessness and depression. This was a mercy, for his bodily health had begun to fail. The winter was very severe, and in the dark days just before Christmas he took to his bed and presently died, having suffered no pain and with no obscuration of his mind until the last ten minutes. Kate had nursed him with pious care: she was alone with him and closed his eyes about four o’clock in the morning. At first she was overcome with hysterical passion, and this was succeeded by shapeless thoughts which streamed up in her incessantly as the mists stream up from a valley at sunrise. Not until day broke did she leave the room and waken the household.

An epoch is created rather by the person than by the event. The experience which changes one man is nothing to another. Some will pass through life without a mark from anything that happens to them; others are transformed by a smile or a cloud. So also the same experience will turn different men into totally different paths. Kate had never seen death before. It smote her with such force that for months and months her father was before her eyes and she could not convince herself that he was not with her. But she went no further towards Roman Catholicism. She let the facts stand. Once when she was walking on the moors she stretched out her arms again and was urged to pray, but she felt that her prayer would be loss of strength and she stood erect. For nearly a twelvemonth she simply endured. She remembered a story in an old Amulet, one of a series of annuals, bound in crimson cloth and fashionable at that time, of a sailor stranded on a rock in the sea. The waves rose to his lips, but he threw back his head, and at that moment there was a pause and the tide turned. It might turn for her or it might not; she must not move. She read scarcely any books and lived much in the open air. The autumn was one of extraordinary splendour. September rains after a dry summer washed the air and filled the tarns and becks. Wherever she went she was accompanied by that most delicious sound of falling waters. The clouds, which through July and August had been nothing but undefined, barren vapour, gathered themselves together and the interspaces of sky were once more brilliantly blue. Day after day earth and heaven were almost too beautiful, for it was painful that her finite apprehension should be unequal to such infinite loveliness. She received no such answer as that for which she hoped when she knelt by the grey rock, but that is the way with the celestial powers; they reply to our passionate demands by putting them aside and giving us that for which we did not ask. We know not how to pray as we ought.

MR. WHITTAKER’S RETIREMENT

I had been a partner in the house of Whittaker, Johnson, and Marsh, in the wholesale drug trade, for twenty-five years, and, for the last ten years, senior partner. For the first nine years of my seniority I was not only nominally, but practically, the head of the firm. I had ceased to occupy myself with details, but nothing of importance was concluded without consulting me: I was the pivot on which the management turned. In the tenth year, after a long illness, my wife died: I was very ill myself, and for months not a paper was sent to me. When I returned to work I found that the junior partners, who were pushing men, had distributed between them what I was accustomed to do, and that some changes which they thought to be indispensable had been made. I resumed my duties as well as I could, but it was difficult to pick up the dropped threads, and I was dependent for explanation upon my subordinates.

Many transactions too, from a desire to avoid worrying me, were carried through without my knowledge, although formerly, as a matter of course, they would have been submitted to me. Strangers, when they called, asked to see Johnson or Marsh. I directed the messenger that they were to be shown into my room if I was disengaged. This was a failure, for, when they came, I was obliged to ask for help, which was not given very generously. Sometimes I sent for the papers, but it took a long time to read them, and my visitors became impatient. During one of these interviews, I remember that I was sorely perplexed, but I had managed to say something loosely with no particular meaning. Johnson came in and at once took up the case, argued for ten minutes while I sat silent and helpless, and an arrangement was concluded in which I really had no voice whatever. Now and then I strove to assert myself by disapproval of suggestions offered to me, but in the end was generally forced to admit I was wrong. We had a very large order for which we were obliged to make special arrangements with manufacturers. Both Johnson and Marsh were of opinion that a particular firm which had often supplied us was not to be trusted, as our dealings with them during my absence had been unsatisfactory. I was inclined foolishly but naturally, to attach little importance to anything which had been done entirely without me, ridiculed their objections, and forced my decision upon them. The firm broke down; our contract with them was cancelled; another had to be made under pressure, and we lost about five hundred pounds. Although I was not reminded of my responsibility in so many words, I knew that I was solely to blame; I became more than ever convinced I was useless, and I was much dejected. At last I made up my mind to retire. I was urged to remain, but not, as I imagined, with any great earnestness, and on the 31st December 1856 I left the office in Eastcheap never to enter it again.

For the first two or three weeks I enjoyed my freedom, but when they had passed I had had enough of it. I had nothing to do! Every day at the hours when business was at its height, I thought of the hurry, of the inquiries, of the people waiting in the anteroom, of the ringing of bells, of the rapid instructions to clerks, of the consultations after the letters were opened, of our anxious deliberations, of the journeys to Scotland at an hour’s notice, and of the interviews with customers. I pictured to myself that all this still went on, but went on without me, while I had no better occupation than to unpack a parcel, pick the knots out of the string, and put it in a string-box. I saw my happy neighbours drive off in the morning and return in the evening. I envied them the haste, which I had so often cursed, over breakfast. I envied them, while I took an hour over lunch, the chop devoured in ten minutes; I envied them the weariness with which they dragged themselves along their gravel-paths, half an hour late for dinner. I was thrown almost entirely amongst women. I had no children, but a niece thirty-five years old, devoted to evangelical church affairs, kept house for me, and she had a multitude of female acquaintances, two or three of whom called every afternoon. Sometimes, to relieve my loneliness, I took afternoon tea, and almost invariably saw the curate. I was the only man present. It was just as if, being strong, healthy, and blessed with a good set of teeth, I were being fed on water-gruel. The bird-wittedness, the absence of resistance and of difficulty, were intolerable. The curate, and occasionally the rector, tried to engage me, as I was a good subscriber, in discussion on church affairs, but there seemed to me to be nothing in these which required the force which was necessary for the commonest day in the City. Mrs. Coleman and the rector were once talking together most earnestly when I entered the room, and I instinctively sat down beside them, but I found that the subject of their eager debate was the allotment of stalls at a bazaar. They were really excited—stirred I fully admit to their depths. I believe they were more absorbed and anxious than I was on that never-to-be-forgotten morning when Mortons and Nicholsons both failed, and for two hours it was just a toss-up whether we should not go too.