Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 3
III
There intervened his Christmas holiday at home—a momentous holiday; for after the first rush of greetings, he found himself standing before Frankie and his sister, and even his mother herself, a stranger in a life from which he had grown away; and the inevitable readjustment began at once almost with pain. Of them all, his mother had clung most closely to his thoughts, from the day he had opened his trunk—and found his handkerchiefs so fondly packed in tissue papers tied with ribbons—to the day he had received her little hoard of Christmas savings with a request that he buy this for Frank and that for Mary and a dozen other gifts and remembrances for his cousins and his aunt. Her letters to him had been full of news and comment—the letters of a woman who looked on life from the windows of her sick-room with a spectator's interest and sympathy. He had felt her watching him in all his absence. He had seen her sitting over her needlework, thinking of him. And he had come to her, now, with a heart full of affection.
But when he sat down opposite her chair, still smiling and blushing awkwardly from the caress of welcome, he found himself facing the loving scrutiny of her gaze; and he looked away quickly, conscious of the change in himself, his beliefs, his outlook on life, his hidden thoughts and the growth of experiences in which she had had no part. It seemed to him that she would penetrate the secret behind his eyes if she saw into them clearly. And this very attempt of concealment betrayed him to her. With a mother's quick suspicion, she began to seek him out, with those apparently trivial questions which are like the tappings of a tiny hammer on the suspected panels of a wainscoating.
They found him by the silences with which he tried to cover his boy's secrets. It took her days to do it; but in the long talks which they had together in her room—sitting with the winter sunlight on the lace curtains and her needle busy in the embroidery with which she occupied her wasted hands—she probed him unerringly because of the very acuteness of her sympathy and the anxiety of her love. Concerning the girl—whoever it might be—she had no fear. She trusted the innocence of his youth. But it was this very innocence that she feared in the matter of his religion; and when to a pointed question of his belief, he replied desperately, "I'd—I'd rather not discuss it," the thought of her boy tempted and miserable kept her awake all night.
She felt that he needed a father's guidance. He was almost a man, now, and it must be that a man would understand him. When he stood before her, tall and quiet—as if thoughtful with his experience of that outer world from which he came into her four-walled prison of sickness—she was so conscious of his new manliness that she looked up to him almost as she looked up to her husband. They were of the same world and the same sex. Perhaps the father could help the son.
That she could have thought of such a plan showed how little she understood the silent lawyer. But she knew that he was constant in his attendance at church, that he took up the collection at the morning service, that he had been employed in legal matters by the bishop, that he was a trustee of the new hospital which had just been built by the Anglicans of the town. He never spoke of religion to her, but he never spoke of politics either, or indeed of any of the interests that kept him busy all day.
She put the case to him in timid hints and queries: Had Don acted strangely in church? Had he spoken of his beliefs at all? She had heard that the University education had a tendency to make boys irreligious. Oh, Don had not said anything, but she was afraid that there was something wrong. She had not felt able. Would he speak to Don?
He would. And he did.
He did it with the cleverness of a mind skilled in betraying witnesses into admissions which they did not wish to make—betraying them not by brow-beating and bewildering them with questions, but by an insinuating friendliness and a flattering attention to their involved replies. He began by congratulating Don on his attendance at church (whither the boy had gone because he knew that to remain away would be to give his mother pain). So many University men, Mr. Gregg had noticed, made a license of their college liberty in order to escape their church duties. It was a great mistake—a mistake which they always regretted later in life. A man depended on his fellow-men for a living in the organized union which we call society; and the church was an organization within the larger body, an organization primarily for worship on the lines of a common belief
"But," Don interrupted, feeling the intolerable hypocrisy of his silence, "there are things one can't believe in."
"Certainly," his father assented, with no change of voice. "There are government policies that I do not believe in, but I do not therefore revolt against the will of the majority. A man may not believe in capital punishment, but he need not break open the gaols to release murderers. Church membership, for a lawyer particularly"
He stopped to raise his hat to a fellow church-member and his wife; and Don, looking down at the powdered snow which he threw up with an impatient shuffle of the foot, put in quickly: "I don't think I'm—law doesn't appeal to me."
His father asked mildly: "What do you intend to do?"
"I don't know. I thought"
"Yes?"
"I thought that the University education alone"
"Along what lines?"
"I—I hadn't decided."
They were at their gate. Mr. Gregg paused with his hand on it and gave Don a stern face and a sudden change of tone. "If you are not going to study law, you must decide what you are going to study. We will talk this over to-night."
Don followed him up the path like a boy led to chastisement. And as long as his father was visibly before him—tall and grave and authoritative—the son's young habit of respect and obedience kept his thought cowed. But as soon as the midday dinner had ended and Don had shut himself in his room, shame and resentment rose in him in a dangerous revolt. He had been tricked; that sudden change from suavity to sternness had been the springing of the trap; the man had played on him with hypocrisy. And for the instant Don despised him.
More than that: in his absence at college, Don had come to see his father as he saw other men, not as a superior creature to be looked up to with awe, but as a human animal—like himself—grown old and hard and mechanical—though he had once been young and had known the enthusiasm of love and marriage—cleverly using his brain to support his wife and family, and pathetically nearing the obscurity of his grave. He saw him, if not with strong affection, at least with pity and respect, as a man who had made the best of an undistinguished success in law and who lived without vices. And if he saw no more in him than this, it was because the father—living up to that stern ideal of British parents which the race has brought to Canada—had never tried to make himself beloved by his sons, but only respected and obeyed.
It is doubtful whether Don, as he went downstairs to that night's interview, went with any respect for the man he was to face. Certainly, he did not intend to obey him. Their short colloquy on the way home from church had been to the boy a brief and misleading glimpse into his father's mind; and he had constructed a whole life of politic hypocrisy from the lawyer's confession of faith in the worldly advantages of church membership. He did not suspect that his father had been through a struggle with these same doubts which now assailed himself; that he had arrived at a working compromise with them and made a peace; that he had preserved the integrity of his own mind without resisting the police of organized religion. Still less did Don suspect that the older man, remembering his own youth, felt a reluctant sympathy for this beginner in life with all the problems of his world thick about him. Don saw his father, merely, as a lawyer whose practice in the courts had dulled his sense of truth and justice and the ideals behind the statutes and had left him only the lesson of conformity which is so often the essence of the law to the priest and the practitioner.
It gave the boy new cause to hate the profession. His mind, at college, had turned from the thought of it with distaste, and rose against it—now that it was to be forced on him—with an almost desperate repulsion. His aunt's allowance, added to the money which he had saved from his small expenses at college, would put him through whatever "course" he chose to take. He would not quarrel with his father, but he would not submit to him.
He entered the "study" with a volume which he pretended he had come to return to its shelf. He found his father walking up and down the room, smoking a curved pipe. A gas lamp, with a frosted shade, lit a precise arrangement of books and papers on the table. Don walked past them almost defiantly, and turned his back from the bookcase.
Mr. Gregg said abruptly: "I judge from your college 'Calendar' that your Political Science course does not really begin until your second year. Is that correct?"
Don answered, without turning: "Yes, sir."
Mr. Gregg cleared his throat. 'You have until then to make up your mind what you are going to do."
Don waited, shutting the glass doors of the bookcase slowly. When he turned around, his father had sat down in his easy chair and taken up his book. Don understood that judgment had been rendered, and started awkwardly toward the door. It seemed a great distance across the room. He had his hand on the door-knob when his father added: 'Meanwhile, for your mother's sake if not for your own, you will go to church and try to behave yourself."
Don got himself out, in silence, with his ears burning. As he closed the door behind him, he heard his father strike a match.
Crestfallen, dismissed with all his heroic insubordination unnoticed, he went upstairs ashamed of himself, and—in spite of himself—admiring the strength that had taken him up, considered him briefly, given him a curt decision, and then turned to other matters with the calm re-lighting of a pipe. For a moment, he doubted whether this old brain might not know what was best for him to do; whether he would not be wise to study law and be at peace with his father. But it was only for a moment. Law was to him a dead and dried collection of classified statutes, printed in old books, in a formal jargon as repellent as the scientific names on a museum of beetles. Life as a lawyer would be life in a musty library with a continual droning of court arguments coming to him through green baise doors, and all the sunlight and freedom of love and happiness beating on the closed windows that shut him in. He shook his head, drawing a long breath of relief. He was free. He had five months in which to choose a career. All the world was before him, like a garden full of inviting paths; and somewhere in the centre of it, in a secret green recess, she sat waiting, with a bunch of violets gathered for him in her hand, and a girlish smile of welcome trembling in a sort of timorous expectation on her lips.
That thought filled his last week at home with a restless impatience. It was as if he were about to start on a tour of the world, and had a week to wait for his date of sailing. He chafed under the enforced inaction of the long sittings with his mother, looking wistfully out of the window, until she silently reproved herself for keeping him too much indoors and unselfishly let him go. (He had said nothing of his interview with his father, but she did not resent his reticence. Her husband had accustomed her to silence, and, like the deaf, she read faces, without words.) She let him go, and he tramped the streets of Coulton in the footprints of his past, marvelling to see how the life of the little town stood rooted, like a village seen from the window of a railroad car as the years whirled him along. The Park was incredibly small—the Park in which he and Conroy had roamed as if it had been a prairie. His ravine, leafless and frozen, was bare and mean, with a little gurgle of water under thin ice. His aunt bored him. His cousins sat and looked at him, unable to reach his interest, or teased and fought around him as if he were not in the room. He came back to his home like a reluctant visitor, feeling the presence of the taciturn head of the house as soon as he saw the maples that stood along the fence, and entering the front door with the silent droop in spirit of a dog suddenly brought to heel.
His whole life was opening before him, inviting him like an adventurous and breezy road; and in those days of waiting, he resolved that wherever that road might lead him, it should bring him back to Coulton—except as a hasty visitor—never again.