The rest cure; a novel

Front matter

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II

Perhaps the first time he showed true business capacity was when he refused to take over his father’s highly respectable practice as a solicitor at Willingford, Hampshire.

He was eighteen then, hard at work in the offices of Mr. Barnard’s London agents, and he received an unexpected summons to come home for a family council — or rather a combined family appeal. Father’s health had begun to fail ; the burden of age was telling, too, on mother, and she pined for the supporting presence of her loved son; they both wanted strong, brave Jack — source of constant pride and increasing hope — to qualify himself as soon as possible for partnership and succession. The elder son, Richard, had proved a failure; he handsomely acknowledged this himself; he willingly stood aside in favor of Jack, and joined his voice to the general entreaty. Mary, the simple, good-natured sister, added her prayers.

“ There you are, Jack,” said Barnard Senior, confidently yet pleadingly. “ I’ll keep things together for the next few years; and then you shall relieve me. Not a bad offer, I think — and I hope you’ll think so, too. You will come back to an assured position — to settle down in your native town — with my name behind you, as counter balance to you and inexperience.”

To this little household — and, indeed, to the rest of Willingford — the world was bounded on the south by the Solent water, on the west and north by the New Forest, on the east by the unexplored downs or marshes

Mue near Portsmouth. It was not easy to make them believe in a world beyond their reach. It was difficult to tell an affectionate old father that his offer might be good, but it was not good enough. Yet this was something that had to be done.

Jack did it, little by little, during the three September days spent by him in his childhood’s home.

It was a red-brick Georgian house, dignified without, capacious within, squarely planted in what had always been considered the best position of the High Street, opposite the Dolphin Hotel, between a butcher’s shop and a baker’s. Behind it there was a long strip of garden; and here he walked with his mother, and gradually unfolded the mapped course of his ambition.

“ You must break it to father,” he said. “ I’m not going to be a solicitor at all. You see, success as a solicitor leads nowhere. No, I shall go to the bar.”

“ The bar! Your father says the bar is so crowded.”

“ There’s room at the top.”

“ But how can you get there — right to the top — without influence, without money?”

“ By work. There’s nothing in this world that work won’t do, if you put in enough of it.”

The old mother was of humble origin, and had thought it grand to be the wife of a solicitor. A labor-worn hand pressed and twitched upon Jack’s arm while they discussed these lofty views and glorious uncertainties. Pride and fear mingled in her thoughts. It is a fine thing to rise like a soaring eagle — but then again one is safer on the ground.

“As to money — just at first! Well, the governor is allowing me a hundred a year — and if he can continue the allowance for a little while, I shall regard it as a loan. I promise to pay it back. I shall get on fast — I mean to get on — trust me and I’ll do you credit. Mother, you’ve no idea how ambitious I am.”

And he unfolded more of the mapped course, displaying marvels that dazzled the eye and took the breath away — Parliament; the lower chamber, the upper; coronet, robes of state, and what not overpoweringly magnificent.

“ Of course,” said the mother, and her lips trembled, and her voice had a husky pathos, “ you must leave us, if you feel you ought to. Your father and I should be your best friends — shouldn’t stand in your way.”

“ Well, I do feel that if I stayed here, it would be selfannihilation. It would be just falling asleep,” and he made a broad sweeping gesture of the right hand, “ with everything round me, and never waking.”

They were at the bottom of the garden, amid the prolific autumn tangle of flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees. One looked out over many similar gardens, all surrounded by low brick walls, across the unseen river to the tranquil hillside, where long shadows lay upon the bare fields, and the white obelisk gleamed softly in the afternoon sunlight. It was warm but not hot, with pleasant harvest perfumes drifting on the air.

In neighboring gardens, quiet, respectable women were idly busy, picking flowers or cutting beans. These were the sedate wives of the comfortable shop-keepers. At their backs were the solid houses of the High Street — all of them old.

It was extraordinarily peaceful, in these gardens of the sleepy little town : almost more so, it seemed to him, than in the solitude of the open country. In the wild woodlands one is conscious of work behind the silence — the activity of nature, trees struggling for existence, prey-hunting creatures that steal along beneath the cover of the undergrowth. And birds spring up with noisy cries, startling one by their 10 strength and life. But here, among the unchanging houses, nothing struggled or pressed forward — it was not life, only a gentle, soothing dream of life.

“ Of course,” said the mother, after blowing her nose and wiping her eyes, “ of course, if you feel about it like that. But Jack,” and she looked at him with solemn simplicity, “ there’s something that you might find here and you mayn’t find anywhere else.”

“ What’s that, mother ? ”

“ Happiness! . . . You’ve made these grand plans,

but there’s a lot left out of them. Where’s love? Where does that come in? . . . Jack, my dear boy, before I

die, I’d like to see you married to a good woman.”

Jack laughed gayly.

“ Oh, women ! I reckon that for fifteen years I can’t afford to think of them — good or bad. Then I hope to be rich enough to marry. And then my wife shall be good as well as beautiful — and I think she will have a handle to her name. Nothing helps a rising man like an aristocratic marriage.”

Dick and Mary had been sauntering together at a respectful distance, not venturing to plunge hurriedly upon talk of so great moment. They waited until their mother returned to the house, and then they shyly came forward to join in the concerted family appeal.

“ I do hope,” said Dick, looking diffidently at his masterful young brother, “ that you’ll be able to do what our parents wish.”

“ No, I doubt if it will be possible.”

“ It’s for you to decide,” said Dick, with humbleness. “ I shouldn’t have the arrogance to advise you. But you know it will be a great disappointment to the mater. You have almost all her love, old chap. I don’t mean that,” he hastened to add, “ as complaining. No, it’s very natural

ii and proper — in the circumstances. I only meant that l am nobody — so I can’t attempt to fill your place.”

“ Oh, Jack,” said amiable, stupid Mary, “ if you could stop with us forever, it would be nice.”

Everything with Mary was nice or not nice. She attempted no other classification.

“ Really,” said Jack, smiling, “ two stay-at-homes are enough in one family. You mustn’t ask for a third.”

“ It’s for him to decide,” repeated Dick; and then, as if his mind had wandered from the subject of debate, he chuckled rather foolishly. “ Jack, old chap, have they told you of my good luck — in the literary line? ”

Dick tapped his brother on the chest, and chuckled again.

“ I wrote a long letter in the Willingford Chronicle. About Christian Science! It was accepted at once. And I’m writing another one — on Mysticism and Materialism.

. . . I’ve been steeping myself in philosophy lately.”

“Yes,” said Mary, “Dick talks nothing but philosophy. Mother doesn’t think it very nice. And it makes father quite angry.”

“ There’s an immense deal in philosophy,” said Dick, with a queer assumption of doggedness. “ It’s a comfort to me, and I don’t intend to drop it.”

Jack looked at him pityingly. Poor old Dick! Surely never had the town of Willingford produced a more lamentable failure.

From boyhood he had been good-ftatured and kind, very kind; but he would not work. He would watch railway trucks being shunted; he would travel to and fro on the steam-boats that plied between Willingford harbor and the Isle of Wight; he would go off into the forest, and chase butterflies or collect birds’ eggs ; but languor and clumsiness 12 prevented him from enjoying either regular labor or regular sport. Perhaps his most salient characteristic used to be a deep love of his bedroom. It was a large apartment with dormer windows in the roof, next to a room that had never been furnished. Dick made of his own room a fortress, and of the adjoining room a playground. The fortress contained masses of incongruous property : packing cases, broken boxes, strange contrivances fashioned by rudest carpentry. Everything in the house that was smashed, and ought to have been thrown upon the rubbish heap, found its way upstairs. For a little while Dick kept animals up here — a secret confided to little Jack. The guinea pigs themselves, and not Jack, betrayed the secret. Papa mistook the odors of this hidden menagerie for a gross defect in the drains, and wrote his landlord just the kind of letter you might expect from an indignant tenant who happened also to be a solicitor.

At twenty-five, Dick was still the boy who would not work. He had a little boat, and sailed about the shallow river, crossing and recrossing the wake of the passenger steam-boats; his friends were the ticket-inspectors on the pier, the hands from the yacht-builders’ yards, stokers, lightermen; and his one great ambition was to ride on the foot-plate of the Bournemouth express. “ First stop, Christchurch! Think of that! Oh, dad, couldn’t you get me a permit from the railway company? ”

Yet not without gifts — some sort of dim and undeveloped intelligence; able to talk — in a rambling, radical, socialistic style — he sometimes astonished dad during a protracted argument.

Father said, “ The boy has faculties. He has not such faculties as his brother.” Faculty w’as a favorite w r ord with Barnard Senior. “ But, oh, how I wish he would take up something in earnest ! ”

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And at last Dick did take up something in deadly earnest — drink.

It was a horrible phase; but he emerged from it. He suddenly swore to a pledge of total abstinence, and displayed a dirty strip of blue ribbon in his shabby pea-jacket. But he seemed to go to pieces under the violent passage from alcohol to water. He had been puffy and white, with a big paunch. Now he became thin and reddish-nosed, with a scanty, straggling beard, and gray streaks in the receding hair on his forehead. Only his eyes were unchanged — dreamy, childish, unable to flash into enthusiasm except for nonsense.

Jack remembered all these things, and felt a warm glow of affectionate pity, while Dick talked to him of the comfort of philosophy.

He had quite made up his mind; and yet, in the enervating home atmosphere, doubts and self-questionings troubled him. He thought of himself and of his family. Could it possibly be right to sacrifice one’s self to the immediate satisfaction of others?

The father and mother who loved him and craved for him were fast passing from the realm of substance to the realm of shadows. Soon they would have gone — have changed from facts to memories; and then where would he be? Left here, with the brother and sister, to fade in his turn from reality to nothingness. He, as well as they, might sink into incompetence, poverty, death-in-life. It would eventually prove a futile, useless sacrifice; as when a man, marching at night with an army, is drawn from his place in the ranks by faint cries for help, goes groping through the darkness, and is himself destroyed.

No, if really he is to help these dear weak people, he must march forward — to return later on, bringing powerful succor. He can help them from a distance more effectually than at hands’ reach. It will be practically kinder to leave them than to stay with them.

Ten times kinder for them, and how many million times kinder for himself? He thought of a long career as the most eminent solicitor in Willingford, and shook himself, as if throwing off a damp and heavy cloak. Suicide, spun out for fifty years in its accomplishment !

He left them at the end of the third day. His parents insisted upon hiring a fly from the Dolphin and driving him to the junction five miles off, to catch the evening express. This arrangement would save him trouble, and give them his company to the last possible moment. Their boy was going out into the world, to conquer it. Who could say how long he might require for the task, or when they would see him again ?

As they drove out of the town there came the sound of a distant gun — the signal of sun-down at Cowes or Yarmouth. It was like a dull blow on the heart, and the old father roused himself and talked cheerfully.

“ You’ll write to us often — won’t you, Jack? ”

There was a glorious sunset. While they drove across the common, the sky from the horizon upwards slowly filled with orange-golden light; and then slowly became suffused with rose tints. From this high ground one’s view ranged over the stretching forest — a vast gray sea. Imperceptibly the rose color deepened and glowed; until, when they drove among tall pines, the sky seen through the dark trees was like red fire.

The transition from the open common and the wide view to the darkness and mystery of the road where it passed beneath the trees was remarkable. All fell silent; dead leaves softened the noise of wheels and hoofs; the old couple sat motionless as ghosts; and Jack’s thought flowed deeper and more rapidly along his mapped course. It w r as as if he had been the only live thing, passing through a dead shadowland.

Brockenhurst station, with platform lamps and signal lamps twinkling, with the red sky behind it, looked fine. He was impatient as they stood together waiting for the train, which was not due for a quarter of an hour. Very soon now it grew dark. The sky above the big forest trees began to show stars faintly — and when one glanced up again, night had come. Mars glittered fiercely and redly.

He felt full of health, full of strength, full of confidence; and almost wished that the world was larger, so that he might have more to conquer.

Ill

He was called to the bar, and made some slight success at once. He wrote articles for the newspapers — not airy, imaginative trifles, but plain expositions of facts. Before he received his first brief he had obtained permanent employment on two responsible journals as city and financial correspondent. He studied commercial law — company acts, bankruptcy acts, and so forth — with white-hot ardor. He taught himself to speak of his facts, as well as to write about them. He spouted and debated, in Institutes, Athenaeums, Hornsey and Peckham Parliaments. He put the work in, as he had promised. It was a desperate, unceasing fight, but he liked it.

In a few years he was not only keeping himself, but was paying back the annual allowance. A hundred a year going into the High Street house instead of going out of it — something very useful now to the feeble old man who pottered about the dusty, unfrequented office, and boasted to rare clients of his clever, prospering son.

In these same years there came to unresting John Barnard mental pictures of the sleepy High Street and the red-brick house, of the father growing so woefully feeble that doctors said the end was near, of the gray-haired mother shedding tears of pride and stifling her selfish desires to hold the world-conqueror in her arms — and with the swift thought-pictures came transitory regrets. These were like calls, of which the sound waves rippled to him through space, or transmitted themselves on impalpable threads that sometimes for a few moments pulled at his heart-strings.

But he had to resist them. On one side, his work; on the other, sentiment, sympathy, disturbing emotion. He was faithful to the mapped course. And soon the pictures faded, the calls grew faint, the threads broke.

After his father’s death, when he ran down for the funeral, he was able to tell the widow that he would in future allow her three hundred a year. That is to say, he was now in a position to do for his family three times as much as his family had done for him. And this substantial aid was really needed. The famous practice had dwindled nearly to nothing; and all that remained of it died with the practitioner. One glance at the office gave John a correct perception of the state of affairs. Cracked tin boxes and rusty locks, fly-blown auction bills, pens corroded with stale ink — why, if all that had been offered to him as inheritance were divided into lots and sold to the highest bidders, the brass plate and the letter-press would fetch as much as the good-will.

Having dried his mother’s tears and assured her that his generosity was justified by his earning power, he hurried back to London and his work.

He did better and better at the bar. He had important briefs. He appeared conspicuously in the interminable litigation that follows the collapse of big companies. Solicitors to new companies thought fifty guineas cheap for his opinion on a draft prospectus. He spoke in public now — upon platforms of political meetings instead of behind desks in school-room debating societies — and was known to and encouraged by party organizations. People said that no impecunious young barrister had ever made such rapid progress.

But the progress was too slow for John Barnard. A chance of a business job came to him, and he took it. Some man interested in Ceylon tea-gardens wanted a longer head than his own as guide through the intricacies of a blighted enterprise. A good thing going to ruin for want of grit in its possessors — wonderful estates out there, which won’t grow fragrant tea, but which might grow oozing rubber

— if one could get a man, a real man, to go out and knock all these duffers’ heads together, plant common sense in overseers, plant hardy trees in the ground. Something to do in this long vacation — yes, John Barnard will go. It will be very hot out there; but the niggers have to work in the hot weather — why should white men shirk?

He went to Ceylon, and stayed there three months — right into the cool weather. In that time he successfully performed his commission, and learned everything worth knowing about the island. No doubt as to the importance of rubber-growing in Ceylon ; the industry is going to be a big thing, a very big thing. He mastered the subject of rubber; and he did not waste one hour on sacred monuments, pearl-divers, or Veddahs.

He returned with a cabin trunk full of statistics, plans, tracings, photographs; and, better still, concessions, options, conditional leases, etc., etc. By the new year he had launched a rubber company and was engaged on the flotation of a second company. He saw his way clearly before him, and deliberately abandoned wig and gown for desk and type-writing machine. He must throw himself into business

— pure business. It was not a failure in pursuing the mapped course, but the discovery of a short cut that would carry him quicker to the goal.

He had no capital, but he would bring the driving power of his brain. He would take his fees as chairman, his salaries and percentages of profit as manager ; and he would earn then. All small things, these companies, but all absolutely real — genuine enterprise from start to finish. He would not touch a rotten thing or a blown-out thing.

And soon he would occupy a unique position; he would be like one of the greatest company promoters on the smallest scale.

During the summer that followed his Ceylon trip, there came a call to which he could not turn a deaf ear. Old Mrs. Barnard urgently implored his presence in the narrowed home circle, for the purpose of frustrating an imprudent marriage that was being plotted by his elder brother.

He worked all the way dowm in the train — complicated statements with figures that required careful analysis, agents 5 reports that asked for close verification, proofs of balance sheets that must be purged of the smallest printer’s error — full occupation for the three hours’ journey. When he packed his papers in the leather bag and looked out of the window, the train was creeping into Willingford. The place seemed strange to him. The muddy, shallow river, the tiled roofs of the town, and the low hillside looked infinitely tame, absurdly insignificant. A long time had passed since he had seen this trivial landscape in a mental picture.

“ Oh, Jack,” cried the mother, “ do avert the disgrace. Do use your authority. You are the head of the family — to whom we owe everything. You have the right to be firm. Do shake the nonsense out of him.”

She was perceptibly older, much grayer and more frail; the fingers that clutched his strong right hand had a feeble, spasmodic quiver.

1 11 do what I can, mother — since you are set against the alliance. But tell me, who is the young lady.”

She is not a lady at all. She is just a common serving girl, down in the Harbor Refreshment Rooms.”

“ A decent girl? ”

U No, 5 said the mother, “ indecent! A disgrace to any 20 respectable family. All the town knows her character. It was a public scandal.”

“ You can’t be surprised,” said Mary, “ that mother doesn’t think it nice. No one but Dick would have suggested such a thing — but Dick has become too nonsensical.”

“ Shake the nonsense out of him,” said the mother again.

“ As mother says,” Mary continued, “ it was a widespread scandal ; and what makes it worse is this — the man who ought to have married her is still employed about the town. That isn’t nice for any of us, is it? ”

“ Our only hope is in you,” said the mother, with passionate entreaty. “ If you can’t shake the nonsense out of him, he’ll do it.”

“Where is old Dick?”

“ He’s waiting to see you. He has pledged himself to listen respectfully to all you have to say.”

“ Very well. Then I won’t lose time in getting to work.”

Dick, produced by Mary, greeted his brother sheepishly but affectionately.

“ Come out for a stroll with me, will you, Jack? Come down the town, and I’ll give you a cup of tea.”

“ By all means,” said John Barnard ; and, as they passed out into the High Street, he smilingly asked, “ Shall I be privileged to meet your siren at tea? ”

“ The girl who has promised to be my wife,” said Dick, “ will wait upon us.”

Then they walked side by side in silence, down the High Street to the Harbor Rooms.

No one seeing them seated together at the tea-table in the humble eating-house would have guessed that they were brothers. Indeed, they formed so strong a contrast that they might have been representatives of different races and different worlds. The younger man, in his neat London clothes, with well-brushed, close-cropped hair, and perfectly shaven face, seemed an embodiment of purposeful force, opulent health, and self-possessed prosperity. He squared his heavy shoulders, raised his broad forehead, and scrutinized people and things with steel-bright attention. The older man, in a shabby long-shore suit of dittos, with gray, untidy head and dreamy, introspective eyes, sat limply on his chair, and sprawled a lean arm and dirty hand across the stained tablecloth. His wavering lips drooped at the corners; and he stared at the floor as if not looking at the dusty mats, but into some vague, unmeasured depths.

Barnard observed all the outward signs of sloth and neglect — from the grimy flannel shirt that showed behind the faded red tie to the black crescents that lurked beneath the untrimmed finger nails. Outwardly, his poor old brother reminded him of some autumn vegetable — say a cabbage — run to seed in a forgotten corner of one of the High Street gardens.

The waitress brought the tea things, and nervously clattered the saucers and cups as she put them on the table.

“ Nellie,” said Dick, “ this is my brother. Shake hands with him.”

The girl obeyed shyly, looking at the redoubtable stranger in obvious trepidation. She had the prettiness of a draggled, broken flower on a stalk that is too weak to keep its head high in the sunlight. She was fair-haired, slim, anaemic — type of the pretty house-servant who has not stamina to resist the importunities of her master and is soon bundled into the streets by her justly-offended mistress.

“ Mr. Richard has told me all about you, sir,” she murmured lispingly. “ And I hope you’ll be our friend. I’m sure we want friends — him and me. . . . Comine

sir.”

A seafaring gentleman at the other end of the room was 22 tapping his spoon against his cup, and she bustled off, on her high heels, to take the gentleman’s commands.

When they had drunk their tea, the brothers walked together by the river. Dick, with hands that shook perceptibly, was a long while filling and lighting his blackened pipe.

“ I can’t talk unless I smoke,” he said jerkily. “ Well, what do you think of her? ”

“ She is certainly pretty.”

“No, I meant her — herself ”

“ May I speak quite frankly — without too much delicacy? ”

Dick flushed.

“ Do you ever speak in any other way? ”

“ I don’t want to force my advice on you. I thought you wanted my opinion.”

“Yes, I do. That is, I am to have your opinion. I promised mother to listen to you. Go on — with your opinion.”

“ Then, she seems to me a pleasant, kind, obliging sort of girl — and very comfortable where she is. Why not leave her where she is? ”

“ Because I have need of her somewhere else — by my side, till death us do part.”

“ Have you considered whether that isn’t a sentimental inclination, rather than a rational necessity? ”

There were tears in Dick’s blue eyes as he answered. “ I want her — not altogether selfishly, though she’ll be my salvation, I do believe. She can help me in many ways. Old temptations may return, if I’m always alone.”

And John Barnard surmised that this was an allusion to the ancient craving for ardent drink.

“ Alone? ” he echoed. “ You have the mater and Mary.”

“ They don’t understand me.”

“ But, in regard to a married helpmate, there are certain attributes — qualifications — credentials that men of the world make a sine qua non. People are particular when they engage a cook. When it is a matter of taking a wife . .

“Yes?”

“ I’d better come to the point. Aren’t there bad marks against her name? Isn’t it common knowledge that she has made at least one lapse from strict propriety? ”

“ Well,” said Dick defiantly, “ I don’t mind that.”

Barnard shrugged his shoulders.

“ Oh, of course, if you have none of the usual prejudices — ”

“ It is what she is now — not what she was. All that’s over and done’ with.”

“ Yours is a lenient view.”

“ Not too lenient. She might say to me, ‘ I won’t marry you, because you are a drunkard ? ’ But that’s not true, I •was a drunkard. I’m not a drunkard now.”

“ So the past is to be wiped out? No turning back of the page, no looking up previous convictions to see if the plaintiff enters the court with a clean record.”

“ I don’t mind about her past for a very simple reason, I won’t think of it. And if I don’t think of it, it doesn’t exist — I mean, for me”

“ That’s very convenient, but it isn’t at all my notion of a husband’s attitude.”

“ But you and I, Jack, look at these matters so differently.”

“ Everyone has his own point of view.”

“Yes, Jack; but my view is from the opposite standpoint.”

“ Everything has two sides, of course.”