Young Lives - Richard Le Gallienne
YOUNG LIVES
BY
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
1899
TO
ALFRED LEE
IN MEMORY OF ANGEL
_September, 1898_.
_Let thy soul strive that still the same
Be early friendship's sacred flame;
The affinities have strongest part
In youth, and draw men heart to heart:
As life wears on and finds no rest,
The individual in each breast
Is tyrannous to sunder them_.
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. HARD YOUNG HEARTS.
II. CONCERNING THOSE "ATLANTIC LINERS" AND AN OLD DESK.
III. OF THE LOVE OF HENRY AND ESTHER.
IV. OF THE PROFESSIONS THAT CHOOSE, AND MIKE LAFLIN.
V. OF THE LOVE OF ESTHER AND MIKE, AND THE MESURIER LAW IN REGARD TO
"SWEETHEARTS".
VI. THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF HOME.
VII. A LINK WITH CIVILISATION.
VIII. A RHAPSODY OF TYRE.
IX. A PENITENTIARY OF THE MATHEMATICS.
X. THE GRASS BETWEEN THE FLAG-STONES.
XI. HUMANITY IN HIGH PLACES.
XII. DAMON AND PYTHIAS.
XIII. DAMON AND PYTHIAS AT THE THEATRE.
XIV. CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS A GENEALOGY.
XV. MERELY A HUMBLE INTERRUPTION AND ILLUSTRATION OF THE LAST.
XVI. CHAPTER FOURTEEN CONCLUDED.
XVII. DOT'S DECISION.
XVIII. MIKE AND HIS MILLION POUNDS.
XIX. ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF A BACKWATER.
XX. THE MAN IN POSSESSION.
XXI. LITTLE MISS FLOWER.
XXII. MIKE'S FIRST LAURELS.
XXIII. THE MOTHER OF AN ANGEL.
XXIV. AN ANCIENT THEORY OF HEAVEN.
XXV. THE LAST CONTINUED, AFTER A BRIEF INTERVAL.
XXVI. CONCERNING THE BEST KIND OF WIFE FOR A POET.
XXVII. THE BOOK OF ANGELICA.
XXVIII. WHAT COMES OF PUBLISHING A BOOK.
XXIX. MIKE'S TURN TO MOVE.
XXX. UNCHARTERED FREEDOM.
XXXI. A PREPOSTEROUS AUNT.
XXXII. THE LITERARY GENTLEMAN IN THE BACK PARLOUR.
XXXIII. "THIS IS LONDON, THIS IS LIFE".
XXXIV. THE WITS.
XXXV. BACK TO REALITY.
XXXVI. THE OLD HOME MEANWHILE.
XXXVII. STAGE WAITS, MR. LAFLIN.
XXXVIII. ESTHER AND HENRY ONCE MORE.
XXXIX. MIKE AFAR.
XL. A LEGACY MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD.
XLI. LABORIOUS DAYS.
XLII. A HEAVIER FOOTFALL.
XLIII. STILL ANOTHER CALLER.
XLIV. THE END OF A BEGINNING.
YOUNG LIVES
CHAPTER I
HARD YOUNG HEARTS
Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class,
fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable
middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway
between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters
that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house
boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried
slips of front and back gardens,--on a May evening some ten or twelve
years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.
The house was still as for a battle. It was holding its breath to hear
what was going on in the front parlour, the door of which seemed to wear
an expression of being more than usually closed. A mournful half-light
fell through a little stained-glass vestibule into a hat-racked hall, on
the walls of which hung several pictures of those great steamships known
as "Atlantic liners" in big gilt frames--pictures of a significance
presently to be noted. A beautiful old eight-day clock ticked solemnly
to the flickering of the hall lamp. From below came occasionally a
furtive creaking of the kitchen stairs. The two servants were half way
up them listening. The stairs a flight above the hall also creaked at
intervals. Two young girls, respectively about fourteen and fifteen,
were craning necks out of nightdresses over the balusters in a shadowy
angle of the staircase. On the floor above them three other little girls
of gradually diminishing ages slept, unconscious of the issues being
decided between their big brother and their eldest sister on the one
side, and their father and mother on the other, in the front
parlour below.
That parlour, a room of good size, was unostentatiously furnished with
good bourgeois mahogany. A buxom mahogany chiffonier, a large square
dining-table, a black marble clock with two dials, one being a
barometer, three large oil landscapes of exceedingly umbrageous trees
and glassy lakes, inoffensively uninteresting, more Atlantic liners, and
a large bookcase, apparently filled with serried lines of bound
magazines, and an excellent Brussels carpet of quiet pattern, were
mainly responsible for a general effect of middle-class comfort, in
which, indeed, if beauty had not been included, it had not been wilfully
violated, but merely unthought of. The young people for whom these
familiar objects meant a symbolism deep-rooted in their earliest
memories could hardly in fairness have declared anything positively
painful in that room--except perhaps those Atlantic liners; their
charges against furniture, which was unconsciously to them accumulating
memories that would some day bring tears of tenderness to their eyes,
could only have been negative. Beauty had been left out, but at least
ugliness had not been ostentatiously called in. There was no bad taste.
In fact, whatever the individual character of each component object,
there was included in the general effect a certain indefinable dignity,
which had doubtless nothing to do with the mahogany, but was probably
one of those subtle atmospheric impressions which a room takes from the
people who habitually live in it. Had you entered that room when it was
empty, you would instinctively have felt that it was accustomed to the
occupancy of calm and refined people. There was something almost
religious in its quiet. Some one often sat there who, whatever his
commonplace disguises as a provincial man of business, however
inadequate to his powers the work life had given him to do, provincial
and humiliating as were the formulae with which narrowing conditions had
supplied him for expression of himself, was in his central being an
aristocrat,--though that was the very last word James Mesurier would
have thought of applying to himself. He was a man of business, serving
God and his employers with stern uprightness, and bringing up a large
family with something of the Puritan severity which had marked his own
early training; and, as in his own case no such allowance had been made,
making no allowance in his rigid abstract code for the diverse
temperaments of his children,--children in whom certain qualities and
needs of his own nature, dormant from his birth, were awakening,
supplemented by the fuller-fed intelligence and richer nature of the
mother, into expansive and rebellious individualities.
It was now about eleven o'clock, and the house was thus lit and alive
half-an-hour beyond the rigorously enforced bed-time. An hour before,
James Mesurier had been peacefully engaged on the task which had been
nightly with him at this hour for twenty-five years,--the writing of his
diary, in a shorthand which he wrote with a neatness, almost a
daintiness, that always marked his use of pen and ink, and gave to his
merely commercial correspondence and his quite exquisitely kept
accounts, a certain touch of the scholar,--again an air of distinction
in excess of, and unaccounted for, by the nature of the interests which
it dignified.
His somewhat narrow range of reading, had you followed it by his careful
markings through those bound volumes of sermons in the bookcase, bore
the same evidence of inherited and inadequately occupied refinement. His
life from boyhood had been too much of a struggle to leave him much
leisure for reading, and such as he had enjoyed had been diverted into
evangelical channels by the influence of a certain pious old lady, with
whom as a young man he had boarded, and for whose memory all his life
he cherished a reverence little short of saint-worship.
The name of Mrs. Quiggins, whose portrait had still a conspicuous niche
among the _lares_ of the household,--a little thin silvery old
widow-lady, suggesting great sadness, much gentleness, and a little
severity,--had thus become for the family of James Mesurier a symbol of
sanctity, with which a properly accredited saint of the calendar could
certainly not, in that Protestant home, have competed. It was she who
had given him that little well-worn Bible which lay on the table with
his letters and papers, as he wrote under the lamplight, and than which
a world full of sacred relics contains none more sacred. A business-like
elastic band encircled its covers, as a precaution against pages
becoming loose with much turning; and inside you would have found
scarcely a chapter unpencilled,--texts underlined, and sermons of
special helpfulness noted by date and preacher on the margin,--the
itinerary of a devout human soul on its way through this world to
the next.
The Bible and the sermons of a certain famous Nonconformist Divine of
the day were James Mesurier's favourite and practically his only
reading, at this time; though as a young man he had picked up a fair
education for himself, and had taken a certain interest in modern
history. For novels he had not merely disapproval, but absolutely no
taste. Once in a specially genial mood he had undertaken to try
"Ivanhoe," to please his favourite daughter,--this night in revolt
against him,--and in half-an-hour he had been surprised with laughter,
sound asleep. The sermon that would send him to sleep had never been
written, at all events by his favourite theologian, whose sermons he
read every Sunday afternoon, and annotated with that same loving
appreciation and careful pencil with which a scholar annotates some
classic; so true is it that it is we who dignify our occupations,
not they us.
Similarly, James Mesurier presided over the destinies of a large
commercial undertaking, with the air of one who had been called rather
to direct an empire than a business. You would say as he went by, "There
goes one accustomed to rule, accustomed to be regarded with great
respect;" but that air had been his long before the authority that once
more inadequately accounted for it.
Thus this night, as he sat writing, his handsome, rather small,
iron-grey head bent over his papers, his face somewhat French in
character, his short beard slightly pointed; distinguished, refined,
severe; he had the look of a marshal of France engrossed with
documents of state.
The mother, who sat in an armchair by the fire, reading, was a woman of
about forty-five, with a fine blonde, aquiline face, distinctively
English, and radiating intelligence from its large sympathetic lines.
She was in some respects so different from her husband as at times to
make children precociously wise--but nevertheless, far from knowing
everything--wonder why she had ever married their father, for whom, at
that time, it would be hypocrisy to describe their attitude as one of
love. To them he was not so much a father as the policeman of home,--a
personification of stern negative decrees, a systematic thwarter of
almost everything they most cared to do. He was a sort of embodied "Thou
shalt not," only to be won into acquiescence by one influence,--that of
the mother, whose married life, as she looked back on it, seemed to
consist of little else than bringing children into the world, with a
Christian-like regularity, and interceding with the father for their
varying temperaments when there.
Though it might have been regarded as certain beforehand, that seven
children would differ each from each other in at least as many ways, it
never seems to have occurred to the father that one inflexible system
for them all could hardly be wise or comfortable. But, indeed, like so
many parents similarly trained and circumstanced, it is questionable
whether he ever realised their possession of separate individualities
till they were pleaded for by the mother, or made, as on this evening,
surprising assertion of themselves.
Though this system of mediation had been responsible for the only
disagreements in their married life, there had never been any long or
serious difference between husband and wife; for, in spite of natures so
different, they loved each other with that love which is given us for
the very purpose of such situations, the love that no strain can snap,
the love that reconciles all such disparities. Though Mary Mesurier had
also been brought up among Nonconformists, and though the conditions of
her youth, like her husband's, had been far from adequate to the
demands of her nature, yet her religion had been of a gentler character,
broadening instead of narrowing in its effects, and had concerned itself
less with divinity than humanity. Her home life, if humble, had been
genial and rich in love, and there had come into it generous influences
from the outer world,--books with more of the human beat in them than is
to be found in sermons; and particularly an old travelled grandfather
who had been regarded as the rolling stone of his family, but in whom,
at all events, failure and travel had developed a great gentleness and
understanding of the human creature, which in long walks and talks with
his little grand-daughter somehow passed over into her young character,
and proved the best legacy he could have left her. Through him too was
encouraged a native love of poetry, of which in her childhood her memory
acquired a stock which never failed her, and which had often cheered her
lonely hours by successive cradles. She had a fine natural gift of
recitation, and in evening hours when the home was particularly united
in some glow of visitors or birthday celebration, she would be persuaded
to recall some of those old songs and simple apologues, with such charm
that even her husband, to whom verse was naturally an incomprehensible
triviality, was visibly softened, and perhaps, deep in the sadness of
his silent nature, moved to a passing realisation of a certain something
kind and musical in life which he had strangely missed.
This greater breadth of temperament and training enabled Mary Mesurier
to understand and make allowances for the narrower and harder nature of
her husband, whom she learnt in time rather to pity for the bleakness of
his early days, than to condemn for their effect upon his character. He
was strong, good, clever, and handsome, and exceptionally all those four
good reasons for loving him; and the intellectual sympathy, the sharing
of broader interests, which she sometimes missed in him, she had for
some three or four years come to find in her eldest son, who, to his
father's bewilderment and disappointment, had reincarnated his own
strong will, in connection with literary practices and dreams which
threatened to end in his becoming a poet, instead of the business man
expected of him, for which development that love of poetry in one
parent, and a certain love of books in both, was no doubt to some degree
guiltily responsible.
James Mesurier, as we have said, was no judge of poetry; and, had he
been so, a reading of his son's early effusions would have made him
still more obdurate in the choice for him of a commercial career; but on
general principles he was quite sufficiently firm against any but the
most non-committing, leisure-hour flirtation with the Muse. The mother,
while agreeing with the father's main proposition of the undesirability,
nay, impossibility, of literature as a livelihood,--had not the great
and successful Sir Walter himself described it as a good walking-stick,
but a poor crutch; a stick applied, since its first application as an
image, to the shoulders of how many generations of youthful genius,--was
naturally more sympathetic towards her son's ambition, and encouraged it
to the extent of helping from her housekeeping money the formation of
his little library, even occasionally proving successful in winning sums
of money from the father for the purchase of some book specially, as the
young man would declare, necessary for his development.
As this little library had outgrown the accommodation of the common
rooms, a daring scheme had been conceived between mother and son,--no
less than that he should have a small room set apart for himself as a
study. When first broached to the father, this scheme had met with an
absolute denial that seemed to promise no hope of further consideration;
but the mother, accepting defeat at the time, had tried again and again,
with patient dexterity at favourable moments, till at last one proud day
the little room, with its bookshelves, a cast of Dante, and a strange
picture or two, was a beautiful, significant fact--all ready for the
possible visitation of the Muse.
In such ways had the mother negotiated the needs of all her children;
though the youth of the rest--save the eldest girl, whose music lessons
had meant a battle, and whose growing attractiveness for the boys of the
district, and one in particular, was presently to mean another--made as
yet but small demands. In one question, however, periodically fruitful
of argument, even the youngest was becoming interested,--the question of
the visits to the household of the various friends and playmates of the
children. To these, it must be admitted, James Mesurier was apt to be
hardly less of a figure of fear than to his own children; for, apart
from the fact that such inroads from without were apt to disturb his few
quiet evening hours with rollicking and laughter, he, being entirely
unsocial in his own nature, had a curious idea that the family should be
sufficient to itself, and that the desire for any form of entertainment
outside it was a sign of dissatisfaction with God's gifts of a good
home, and generally a frivolity to be discouraged.
As a boy he had grown up without companions, and as a man had remained
lonely, till he had met in his wife the one comrade of his days. What
had been good enough for their father should be good enough for his
children, was a formula which he applied all round to their bringing up,
curiously forgetful, for a man at heart so just, of the pleasure one
would have expected it to be to make sure that the errors of his own
training were not repeated in that of his offspring. But, indeed, there
was in him constitutionally something of the Puritan suspicion of, and
aversion from, pleasure, which it had never occurred to him to consider
as the end of, or, indeed, as a considerable element of existence. Life
was somehow too serious for play, spiritually as well as materially; and
much work and a little rest was the eternal and, on the whole, salutary
lot of man.
Such were some of the conditions among which the young Mesuriers found
themselves, and of which their impatience had become momentously
explosive this February evening.
For some days there had been an energetic simmer of rebellion among the
four elder children against a new edict of early rising which was surely
somewhat arbitrary. Early rising was one of James Mesurier's articles of
faith; and he was always up and dressed by half-past six, though there
was no breakfast till eight, and absolutely no necessity for his rising
at that hour beyond his own desire. There was still less, indeed none at
all, for his children to rise thus early; but nevertheless he had
recently decreed that such, for the future, must be the rule. The rule
fell heaviest upon the sisters, for the elder brother had always enjoyed
a certain immunity from such edicts. His sense of justice, however,
kindled none the less at this final piece of tyranny. He blazed and
fumed indignantly on behalf of his sisters, in the sanctuary of that
little study,--a spot where the despot seldom set foot; and out of this
comparatively trivial cause had sprung a mighty resolution, which he and
she whom he proudly honoured as "sister and friend" had, after some
girding of the loins, repaired to the front parlour this evening to
communicate.
They had entered somewhat abruptly, and stood rather dramatically by the
table on which the father was writing,--the son with dark set face, in
which could be seen both the father and mother, and the daughter, timid
and close to him, resolutely keeping back her tears, a slim young copy
of the mother.
"Well, my dears?" said the father, looking up with a keen, rather
surprised glance, and in a tone which qualified with some severity the
"my dears."
The son had had some exceedingly fine beginnings in his head, but they
fled ignominiously with the calm that was necessary for their successful
delivery, and he blurted at once to the point.
"We have come to say that we are no longer comfortable at home, and have
decided to leave it."
"Henry," exclaimed the mother, hastily, "what do you mean, how can you
be so ungrateful?"
"Mary, my dear," interrupted the father, "please leave the matter to
me." Then turning to the son: "What is this you are saying? I'm afraid I
don't understand."
"I mean that Esther and I have decided to leave home and live together;
because it is impossible for us to live here any longer in happiness--"
"On what do you propose to live?"
"My salary will be sufficient for the present."
"Sixty pounds a year!"
"Yes!"
"And may I ask what is wrong with your home? You have every comfort--far
more than your mother or father were accustomed to."
"Yes, indeed!" echoed the mother.
"Yes, we know you are very good and kind, and mean everything for our
good; but you don't understand other needs of our natures, and you make
no allowance for our individualities--"
"Indeed! Individualities--I should like you to have heard what my
father would have said to talk about individualities. A rope's end would
have been his answer to that--"
"It would have been a very silly one, and no argument."
"It would have been effective, at all events."
"Not with me--"
"Well, please don't bandy words with me, sir. If you," particularly
addressing his son, "wish to go--then go; but remember that once you
have left your father's roof, you leave it for ever. As for your sister,
she has no power to leave her mother and father without my consent, and
that I shall certainly withhold till she is of a proper age to know what
is best for herself--"
"She will go then without your consent," defiantly answered the son.
"Oh, Henry, for shame!" exclaimed Mrs. Mesurier.
"Mother dear, I'm sorry,--we don't mean to be disrespectful or
undutiful,--but father's petty tyrannies are more than we can bear. He
objects to the friends we care for; he denies us the theatre--"
"Most certainly, and shall continue to do so. I have never been inside a
theatre in my life; nor, with my consent, shall any child of mine enter
one of them."
"You can evidently know little about them then, and you'd be a much
finer man if you had," flashed out the son.
"Your sitting in judgment on your father is certainly very pretty, I
must say,"--answered the father,--"very pretty; and I can only hope that
you will not have cause to regret it some future day. But I cannot allow
you to disturb me," for, with something of a pang, Henry noticed signs
of agitation amid the severity of his parent, though the matter was too
momentous for him to allow the indulgence of pity.
"You have been a source of much anxiety to your mother and me, a child
of many prayers;" the father continued. "Whether it is the books you
read, or the friends you associate with, that are responsible for your
strange and, to my thinking, impious opinions, I do not know; but this I
know, that your influence on your sister has not of late been for good,
and for her sake, and the sake of your young sisters, it may perhaps be
well that your influence in the home be removed--"
"Oh, James," exclaimed the wife.
"Mary, my dear, you must let me finish. If Henry will go, go he shall;
but if he still stays, he must learn that I am master in this house, and
that while I remain so, not he, but I shall dictate how it is to be
carried on."
It was at this point that Esther ventured to lift the girlish tremor of
her voice.
"But, father, if you'll forgive my saying so, I think it would be best
for another reason for us to go. There are too many of us. We haven't
room to grow. We get in each other's way. And then it would ease you; it
would be less expense--"
"When I complain of having to support my children, it will be time to
speak of that--"
"But you have complained," hotly interrupted the son; "you have
reproached us many a time for what we cost you for clothes and food--"
"Yes, when you have shown yourselves ungrateful for them, as you do
to-night--"
"Ungrateful! For what should we be grateful? That you do your bare duty
of feeding and clothing us, and even for that, expect, in my case at all
events, that I shall prove so much business capital invested for the
future. Was it we who asked to come into the world? Did you consult us,
or did you beget us for anything but your own selfish pleasure, without
a thought--"
Henry got no further. His father had grown white, and, with terrible
anger pointed to the door.
"Leave the room, sir," he said, "and to-morrow leave my house for ever."
The son was not cowed. He stood with an unflinching defiance before the
father, in whom he forgot the father and saw only the tyrant. For a
moment it seemed as if some unnatural blow would be struck; but so much
of pain was spared the future memory of the scene, and saying only, "It
is true for all that," he turned and left the room. The sister followed
him in silence, and the door closed.