________________________________________________
_ In coming to the conclusion that he would sever the connection
between himself and his family once for all Ernest had reckoned
without his family. Theobald wanted to be rid of his son, it is
true, in so far as he wished him to be no nearer at any rate than
the Antipodes; but he had no idea of entirely breaking with him. He
knew his son well enough to have a pretty shrewd idea that this was
what Ernest would wish himself, and perhaps as much for this reason
as for any other he was determined to keep up the connection,
provided it did not involve Ernest's coming to Battersby nor any
recurring outlay.
When the time approached for him to leave prison, his father and
mother consulted as to what course they should adopt.
"We must never leave him to himself," said Theobald impressively;
"we can neither of us wish that."
"Oh, no! no! dearest Theobald," exclaimed Christina. "Whoever else
deserts him, and however distant he may be from us, he must still
feel that he has parents whose hearts beat with affection for him no
matter how cruelly he has pained them."
"He has been his own worst enemy," said Theobald. "He has never
loved us as we deserved, and now he will be withheld by false shame
from wishing to see us. He will avoid us if he can."
"Then we must go to him ourselves," said Christina, "whether he
likes it or not we must be at his side to support him as he enters
again upon the world."
"If we do not want him to give us the slip we must catch him as he
leaves prison."
"We will, we will; our faces shall be the first to gladden his eyes
as he comes out, and our voices the first to exhort him to return to
the paths of virtue."
"I think," said Theobald, "if he sees us in the street he will turn
round and run away from us. He is intensely selfish."
"Then we must get leave to go inside the prison, and see him before
he gets outside."
After a good deal of discussion this was the plan they decided on
adopting, and having so decided, Theobald wrote to the governor of
the gaol asking whether he could be admitted inside the gaol to
receive Ernest when his sentence had expired. He received answer in
the affirmative, and the pair left Battersby the day before Ernest
was to come out of prison.
Ernest had not reckoned on this, and was rather surprised on being
told a few minutes before nine that he was to go into the receiving
room before he left the prison as there were visitors waiting to see
him. His heart fell, for he guessed who they were, but he screwed
up his courage and hastened to the receiving room. There, sure
enough, standing at the end of the table nearest the door were the
two people whom he regarded as the most dangerous enemies he had in
all the world--his father and mother.
He could not fly, but he knew that if he wavered he was lost.
His mother was crying, but she sprang forward to meet him and
clasped him in her arms. "Oh, my boy, my boy," she sobbed, and she
could say no more.
Ernest was as white as a sheet. His heart beat so that he could
hardly breathe. He let his mother embrace him, and then withdrawing
himself stood silently before her with the tears falling from his
eyes.
At first he could not speak. For a minute or so the silence on all
sides was complete. Then, gathering strength, he said in a low
voice:
"Mother," (it was the first time he had called her anything but
"mamma"?) "we must part." On this, turning to the warder, he said:
"I believe I am free to leave the prison if I wish to do so. You
cannot compel me to remain here longer. Please take me to the
gates."
Theobald stepped forward. "Ernest, you must not, shall not, leave
us in this way."
"Do not speak to me," said Ernest, his eyes flashing with a fire
that was unwonted in them. Another warder then came up and took
Theobald aside, while the first conducted Ernest to the gates.
"Tell them," said Ernest, "from me that they must think of me as one
dead, for I am dead to them. Say that my greatest pain is the
thought of the disgrace I have inflicted upon them, and that above
all things else I will study to avoid paining them hereafter; but
say also that if they write to me I will return their letters
unopened, and that if they come and see me I will protect myself in
whatever way I can."
By this time he was at the prison gate, and in another moment was at
liberty. After he had got a few steps out he turned his face to the
prison wall, leant against it for support, and wept as though his
heart would break.
Giving up father and mother for Christ's sake was not such an easy
matter after all. If a man has been possessed by devils for long
enough they will rend him as they leave him, however imperatively
they may have been cast out. Ernest did not stay long where he was,
for he feared each moment that his father and mother would come out.
He pulled himself together and turned into the labyrinth of small
streets which opened out in front of him.
He had crossed his Rubicon--not perhaps very heroically or
dramatically, but then it is only in dramas that people act
dramatically. At any rate, by hook or by crook, he had scrambled
over, and was out upon the other side. Already he thought of much
which he would gladly have said, and blamed his want of presence of
mind; but, after all, it mattered very little. Inclined though he
was to make very great allowances for his father and mother, he was
indignant at their having thrust themselves upon him without warning
at a moment when the excitement of leaving prison was already as
much as he was fit for. It was a mean advantage to have taken over
him, but he was glad they had taken it, for it made him realise more
fully than ever that his one chance lay in separating himself
completely from them.
The morning was grey, and the first signs of winter fog were
beginning to show themselves, for it was now the 30th of September.
Ernest wore the clothes in which he had entered prison, and was
therefore dressed as a clergyman. No one who looked at him would
have seen any difference between his present appearance and his
appearance six months previously; indeed, as he walked slowly
through the dingy crowded lane called Eyre Street Hill (which he
well knew, for he had clerical friends in that neighbourhood), the
months he had passed in prison seemed to drop out of his life, and
so powerfully did association carry him away that, finding himself
in his old dress and in his old surroundings, he felt dragged back
into his old self--as though his six months of prison life had been
a dream from which he was now waking to take things up as he had
left them. This was the effect of unchanged surroundings upon the
unchanged part of him. But there was a changed part, and the effect
of unchanged surroundings upon this was to make everything seem
almost as strange as though he had never had any life but his prison
one, and was now born into a new world.
All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the
process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed
and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, in nothing else than
this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are
stupid, when we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it
temporarily we sleep, when we give up the attempt altogether we die.
In quiet, uneventful lives the changes internal and external are so
small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and
accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is
also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain
with little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not
according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to
the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.
The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity
of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there
is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both
as external and internal at one and the same time, subject and
object--external and internal--being unified as much as everything
else. This will knock our whole system over, but then every system
has got to be knocked over by something.
Much the best way out of this difficulty is to go in for separation
between internal and external--subject and object--when we find this
convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity
convenient. This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and
they are always absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is
always illogical. It is faith and not logic which is the supreme
arbiter. They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that
I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or
else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these
pages, that the just shall live by faith, that is to say that
sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may
interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for
conscience sake. Take any fact, and reason upon it to the bitter
end, and it will ere long lead to this as the only refuge from some
palpable folly.
But to return to my story. When Ernest got to the top of the street
and looked back, he saw the grimy, sullen walls of his prison
filling up the end of it. He paused for a minute or two. "There,"
he said to himself, "I was hemmed in by bolts which I could see and
touch; here I am barred by others which are none the less real--
poverty and ignorance of the world. It was no part of my business
to try to break the material bolts of iron and escape from prison,
but now that I am free I must surely seek to break these others."
He had read somewhere of a prisoner who had made his escape by
cutting up his bedstead with an iron spoon. He admired and
marvelled at the man's mind, but could not even try to imitate him;
in the presence of immaterial barriers, however, he was not so
easily daunted, and felt as though, even if the bed were iron and
the spoon a wooden one, he could find some means of making the wood
cut the iron sooner or later.
He turned his back upon Eyre Street Hill and walked down Leather
Lane into Holborn. Each step he took, each face or object that he
knew, helped at once to link him on to the life he had led before
his imprisonment, and at the same time to make him feel how
completely that imprisonment had cut his life into two parts, the
one of which could bear no resemblance to the other.
He passed down Fetter Lane into Fleet Street and so to the Temple,
to which I had just returned from my summer holiday. It was about
half past nine, and I was having my breakfast, when I heard a timid
knock at the door and opened it to find Ernest. _
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