Kabanata Kabanata 69 · 第69章

. 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.