"What are you going to do with them?" I said

"That"s a secret!" he said, and made as if he were going in. Then he said, "Come, you shall hear it--you shall share my secret, and be a partner in my dreams, as the fisherman says in Theocritus." But he did not tell me what he was going to do, and seemed half shy of doing so.

"It"s like Dr. Johnson and the orange-peel," I said. ""Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.""

"Well, the truth is," he said at last, "that I"m a perfect baby. I never can resist looking into a hole in the ground, and I happened to look into the pit where we dig gravel. I can"t tell you how long I spent there."

"What were you doing?" I said.

"Looking for fossils," he said; "I had a great gift for finding them when I was a child. I didn"t find any fossils to-day, but I found these stones, and I think they contain crystals. I am going to break them and see."

I took one in my hand. "I think they are only fossil sponges," I said; "there will only be a rusty sort of core inside."

"You know that!" he said, brightening up; "you know about stones too? But these are not sponges--they would rattle if they were--no, they contain crystals--I am sure of it. Come and see!"

We went into the stable-yard. Father Payne fetched a hammer, and then selected a convenient place in the cobbled yard to break the stones. He put one of them in position, and aimed a blow at it, but it glanced off, and the stone flew off with the impact to some distance. "Lie still, can"t you?" said Father Payne, apostrophising the stone, and adding, "This is for my pleasure, not for yours." I recovered the stone, and brought it back, and Father Payne broke it with a well-directed blow. He gathered up the pieces eagerly. "Yes," he said, "it"s all right--they are blue crystals: better than I had hoped."

He handed a fragment to me to look at. The inside of the stone was hollow.

It had a coagulated appearance, and was thickly coated with minute bluish crystals, very beautiful.

"I don"t know that I ever saw a stone I liked as well as this," said Father Payne, musing over another piece. "Think what millions of years this has been like that,--before Abraham was! It has never seen the light of day before--it"s a splash of some molten stone, which fell plop into a cool sea-current, I suppose. I wish I knew all about it. The question, is, why is it so beautiful? It couldn"t help it, I suppose! But for whose delight?"

Then he said, "I suppose this was a vacuum in here till it was broken? That is why it is so clear and fresh. Good Heavens, what would I not give to know why this thing cooled into these lovely little shapes. It"s no use talking about the laws of matter--why are the laws of matter what they are, and not different? And odder still, why do I like the look of it?"

"Perhaps that is a law of matter too," I said.

"Oh, shut up!" said Father Payne to me. "But I understand--and of course the temptation is to believe that this was all done on your account and mine. That is as odd a thing as the stone itself, if you come to think of it, that we should be made so that we refer everything to ourselves, and to believe that G.o.d prepared this pretty show for us."

"I suppose we come in somewhere?" I said.

"Yes, we are allowed to see it," said Father Payne. "But it wasn"t arranged for the benefit of a silly old man like me. That is the worst of our religious theories--that we believe that G.o.d is for ever making personal appeals to us. It is that sort of self-importance which spoils everything."

"But I can hardly believe that we have this sense of self-importance only to get rid of it," I said. "It all seems to me a dreadful muddle--to shut up these lovely little things inside millions of stones, and then to give us the wish to break a couple, only that we may reflect that they were not meant for us to see at all."

Father Payne gave a groan. "Yes, it is a muddle!" he said. "But one thing I feel clear about--that a beautiful thing like this means a sense of joy somewhere: some happiness went to the making of things which in a sense are quite useless, but are unutterably lovely all the same. Beauty implies consciousness--but come, we are neglecting our business. Give me the other stone at once!"

I gave it him, and he cracked it. "Very disappointing!" he said. "I made sure there was a beautiful stone, but it is all solid--only a flaky sort of jelly--it"s no use at all!"

He threw it aside, but carefully gathered up the fragments of the crystalline stone. "Don"t tell of me!" he said, looking at me whimsically.

"This is the sort of nonsense which our sensible friends won"t understand.

But now that I know that you care about stones, we will have a rare hunt together one of these days. But mind--no stuff about geology! It"s beauty that we are in search of, you and I."

XXIX

EARLY LIFE

One day, to my surprise and delight, Father Payne indulged in some personal reminiscences about his early life. He did not as a rule do this. He used to say that it was the surest sign of decadence to think much about the past. "Sometimes when I wake early," he said, "I find myself going back to my childhood, and living through scene after scene. It"s not wholesome--I always know I am a little out of sorts when I do that--it is only one degree better than making plans about the future!"

However, on this occasion he was very communicative. He had been talking about Ruskin, and he said: "Do you remember in _Praeterita_ how Ruskin, writing about his sheltered and complacent childhood, describes how entirely he lived in the pleasure of _sight_? He noticed everything, the shapes and colours of things, the almond blossom, the ants that made nests in the garden walk, the things they saw in their travels. He was entirely absorbed in sense-impressions. Well, that threw a light on my own life, because it was exactly what happened to me as a child. I lived wholly in observation. I had no mind and very little heart. I suppose that I had so much to do looking at everything, getting the shapes and the textures and the qualities of everything by heart, that I had no time to think about ideas and emotions. I had a very lonely childhood, you know, brought up in the country by my mother, who was rather an invalid, my father being dead.

I had no companions to speak of, and I didn"t care about anyone or need anyone--it was all simply a collecting of impressions. The result is that I can visualise anything and everything--speak of a larch-bud or a fir-cone, and there it is before me--the little rosy fragrant tuft, or the glossy rectangular squares of the cone. Then I went to Marlborough, and I was dreadfully unhappy, I hated everything and everybody--the ugliness and slovenliness of it all, the noise, the fuss, the stink. I did not feel I had anything in common with those little brutes, as I thought them. I lived the life of a blind creature in a fright, groping aimlessly about. I joined in nothing--but I was always strong, and so I was left alone. No one dared to interfere with me; and I have sometimes wished I hadn"t been so strong, that I had had the experience of being weak. I dare say that nasty things might have happened--but I should have known more what the world was like, I should have depended more upon other people, I should have made friends.

As it was, I left school entirely innocent, very solitary, very modest, thinking myself a complete duffer, and everyone else a beast. It got a little better at the end of my time, and I had a companion or two--but I never dreamed of telling anyone what I was really thinking about."

He broke off suddenly. "This is awful twaddle!" he said. "Why should you care to hear about all this? I was thinking aloud."

"Do go on thinking aloud a little," I said; "it is most interesting!"

"Ah," he said, "with the flatterers were busy mockers! You enjoy staring and looking upon me."

"No, no," I said, rather nettled. "Father Payne, don"t you understand? I want to hear more about you. I want to know how you came to be what you are: it interests me more than I can say. You asked me about myself when I came here, and I told you. Why shouldn"t I ask you, for a change?"

He smiled, obviously pleased at this. "Why, then," he said, "I"ll go on.

I"m not above liking to tell my tale, like the Ancient Mariner. You can beat your breast when you are tired of it." He was intent for a moment, and then went on. "Well, I went up to Oxford--to Corpus. A funny little place, I now think--rather intellectual. I could hardly believe my senses when I found how different it was from school, and how independent. Heavens, how happy I was! I made some friends--I found I could make friends after all--I could say what I liked, I could argue, I could even amuse them. I really couldn"t make you realise how I adored some of those men. I used to go to sleep after a long evening of chatter, simply hating the darkness which separated me from life and company. There were two in particular, very ordinary young men, I expect. But they were fond of me, and liked being with me, and I thought them the most wonderful and enchanting persons, with a wide knowledge of the great mysterious world. The world! It wasn"t, I saw, a nasty, jostling place, as I had thought at school, but a great beautiful affair, full of love and delight, of interest and ideas. I read, I talked, I flew about--it was simply a new birth! I felt like a prisoner suddenly released. Of course, the mischief was that I neglected my work.

There wasn"t time for that: and I fell in love, too, or thought I did, with the sister of one of those friends, with whom I went to stay. I wonder if anyone was ever in love like that! I daresay it"s common enough. But I won"t go into that; these raptures are for private consumption. I was roughly jerked up. I took a bad degree. My mother died--I had very little in common with her: she was an invalid without any hold on life, and I took no trouble to be kind to her--I was perfectly selfish and wilful. Then I had to earn my living. I would have given anything to stay at Oxford: and you know, even now, when I think of Oxford, a sort of electric shock goes through me, I love it so much. I daren"t even set foot there, I"m so afraid of finding it altered. But when I think of those dark courts and bowery gardens, and the men moving about, and the fronts of blistered stone, and the little quaint streets, and the meadows and elms, and the country all about, I have a physical yearning that is almost a pain--a sort of home-sickness--"

He broke off, and was silent for a moment, and I saw that his eyes were full of tears.

"Then it was London, that accursed place! I had a tiny income: I got a job at a coaching establishment, I worked like the devil. That was a cruel time. I couldn"t dream of marriage--that all vanished, and she married pretty soon, I couldn"t get a holiday--I was too poor. I tried writing, but I made a hash of that. I simply went down into h.e.l.l. One of my great friends died, and the other--well, it was awkward to meet, when I had had to break it off with his sister. I simply can"t describe to you how utterly horrible it all was. I used to teach all the terms, and in the vacations I simply mooned about. I hadn"t a club, and I used to read at the Museum--read just to keep my senses. Then, I suppose I got used to it. Of course, if I had had any adventurousness in me, I should have gone off and become a day-labourer or anything--but I am not that sort of person.

"That went on till I was about thirty-three--and then quite suddenly, and without any warning, I had my experience. I suppose that something was going on inside me all the time, something being burnt out of me in those fires. It was a mixture of selfishness and stupidity and perverseness that was the matter with me. I didn"t see that I could do anything. I was simply furious with the world for being such a hole, and with G.o.d for sticking me in the middle of it. The occasion of the change was simply too ridiculous.

It was nothing else but coming back to my rooms and finding a big bowl of daffodils there. They had been left, my landlady told me, by a young gentleman. It sounds foolish enough--but it suddenly occurred to me to think that someone was interested in me, pitied me, cared for me. A sort of mist cleared away from my eyes, and I saw in a flash, what was the mischief--that I had walled myself in by my misery and bad temper, and by my expectation that something must be done for me. The next day I had to take a lot of pupils, one after another, for composition. One of them had a daffodil in his hand, which he put down carelessly on the table. I stared at it and at him, and he blushed. He wasn"t an interesting young man to look at or to talk to--but it was just a bit of simple humanity. It all came out. I had been good to him--I looked as if I were having a bad time.

It was just a little human, signal, and a beautiful one. It was there, then, all the time, I saw--human affection--if I cared to put out my hand for it. I can"t describe to you how it all developed, but my heart had melted somehow--thawed like a lump of ice. I saw that there was no specific ill-will to me in the world. I saw that everything was there, if I only chose to take it. That was my second awakening--a glimmer of light through a c.h.i.n.k--and suddenly, it was day! I had been growling over bones and straw in a filthy kennel, and I was not really tied up at all. Life was running past me, a crystal river. I was dying of thirst: and all because it was not given me in a clean gla.s.s on a silver tray, I would not drink it--and G.o.d smiling at me all the time."

Father Payne walked on in silence.

"The truth is, my boy," he said a minute later, "that I"m a converted man, and it isn"t everyone who can say that--nor do I wish everyone to be converted, because it"s a ghastly business preparing for the operation. It isn"t everyone who needs it--only those self-willed, devilish, stand-off, proud people, who have to be braised in a mortar and pulverised to atoms.

Then, when you are all to bits, you can be built up. Do you remember that stone we broke the other day? Well, I was a melted blob of stone, and then I was crystallised--now I"m full of eyes within! And the best of it is that they are little living eyes, and not sparkling flints--they see, they don"t reflect! At least I think so; and I don"t think trouble is brewing for me again--though that is always the danger!"

I was very deeply moved by this, and said something about being grateful.

"Oh, not that," said Father Payne; "you don"t know what fun it has been to me to tell you. That"s the sort of thing that I want to get into one of my novels, but I can"t manage it. But the moral is, if I may say so: Be afraid of self-pity and dignity and self-respect--don"t be afraid of happiness and simplicity and kindness. Give yourself away with both hands. It"s easy for me to talk, because I have been loaded with presents ever since: the clouds drop fatness--a rich but expressive image that!"

x.x.x

OF BLOODSUCKERS

"I"m feeling low to-night," said Father Payne in answer to a question about his prolonged silence. "I"m not myself: virtue has gone out of me--I"m in the clutches of a bloodsucker."

"Old debts with compound interest?" said Rose cheerfully.

"Yes," said Father Payne with a frown; "old emotional I.O.U."s. I didn"t know what I was putting my name to."

"A man or a woman?" said Rose.