The Pensacola journal., December 31, 1922, MAGAZINE SECTION, Image 15

About The Pensacola journal. (Pensacola, Fla.) 1898-1985

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if
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IV jM & 0 m m if
;eil trom Preceding rsO
ii n
i -t to the round ryes of
., :;' .r.iilos doing noisy and
vl .ii;,t important and rn-
; - th:t'V. with Prospcro. her
r, (.t!- ;ho most important
!: at:.i worn- scarcely oppmr-
:0'.':g ot.iy what V'y men
tiiora to ;o. Miranda's ap-
iCfs in the si ory were indif-
-V f-k ;pod l.y Rosalie; the
i i j i
i inn1::;.; f-' m ice
i:oiv,- action and
i '..ari.5 in 1 ho
,-!v i'.kii. ami aJl
and t!n
.n" t h e
. i-.' w! r.t .-'-
C'.oron
ros:i'i'o wot'f
appreciated
I'SlOOU.
v life a she. knew it.
!'atN whpn Hosalie
i ion v V! d belonged t o him
rh.'d i.i'.oiit him, was tall
i.i'w n rtiit o; comDicx-
ivk ;;
; iturning reJ. When
d or a u;r;.' his face
as t ! ' c iMvtbers in t'ne
t'n- bellows a-.v;ii.i--;'.. them.
! t nick black oyenrows and
; o'. t'rt'ul no.- -. H' - nose
:"rom hi fnco lik a pro.ioc-
:n a t li'T beneath a' clump
-'ifs. Hf had been at
f and lie v.-as most
v I'otiiI of Cambridge.
tii mo.st fearful scenes
rxcr witnessed A'a on one
u' fiay when Harold ap-
vi'h a piece of Oxford
buttonhole. It whs at
th-e far.iilv for some
i nr other most, unusually ;JI
'm-eakfast together. Rosalie's
first jocnhu-ly bantered
i on his choice of color, and
rybody anxious as always to
:-A placate the owrr of
v.orl'l laughed with father
;-i : Harold. Rut Harold did
Harold smouldered re-
and defiance, and out of
?:-.ou!de-rinr bogan to maintain
o n what chaps had said" that
ord v:as altogether and in every
much bet to i'
p:ac
..anioriuge. in every
; rich of athletics there
v hotter athletes,
-.vied Harold, at Oxford.
I" rn va;ciung u.-nn ''xtfpi
' ' .1 L
-v' "'': . .rv-- :-rVl ,Ji - Vter'vw P . bTW, - lvw vV -J-
ilarold wi o, though adire.-ii:;g his
!;tthr. bad bf-en mumbling "what
en rips 1 ad said" to Ids plate.
Athletic I" cried Rosalie's father
,,;.i'iT.lv in a very terrible voice.
AthbM.'-s! And what about
(.i-'dar?. sir?"
Harold int'ormrd his plate that
lie wasn't talking about scholars.
Rosalie's father raised a mar
malade jar and thumped it down
:pon the table so that it cracked.
"Then what the dickens right have
ou to talk at all, sir'.' How dare
vou try to compare Oxford with
Cambridge- when you know no
more about either than you know
of Jupiter or Mars? Athletes!"
He went off into record of Uni-vm-Hi'tv
contests, cricket scores,
i-'Miidng times, football scores, as
i' his whole life had been devoted
t.. co'.lpcling thevn. They all
howed Cambridge first and Oxford
.iratm and he hurled each one at
Harold's head with a thundering,
What about that, sir?" after it.
He leapt to scholarship and reeled
off scholarships and scholars and
-chools. and professors and endow
ments and prize men, as if he had
neon an educational year-book
- ifted with speech and with partic
ularly loud and violent speech.
Ho spoke of the. colleges of Cam
bridge, and with every college and
vrv particular glory of every
college demanded of the unfor
; inate Harold, "What have you got
in Oxford against that, sir?"
It was awful. It was far more
frightening Hum the night of the
(..rm. Nobody ate. Nobody
.:-ank. Everybody shuddered and
trUd bv every means to avoid
catching father's rolling oyn and
thereby attracting the dirvc blast
if the tempest. Rosalie, who of
course, being a completely neg
ligible ouantitv in the rectory, is
not included in the everybody,
.imply stared, more awed and on-
'.railed than ever before. And
ith much reason. As he de
. 'aimed of the glories of the col
' -es of Cambridge there was per
rytible in her father's voice a
v'.-t curious crack or break. It
'"vame moro noticeable and more
fi-e.niont. He suddenly and most
as'ounrtingly cried out. "Cambridge!
Cambridge !" and threw bis arms
out br tore him on the table, and
Imried his head on them, and
Mjbbfd out, "Cambridge! My
youth! My youth! My C.od, my
Cod. my ). onth !"
iioinehow .,r otht-r thry sll
slipped out of the room and left
him there all except Rosalie who
remained in her high chair staring
upon her father, and upon his
shoulders that heaved up and
down, and upon the coffee from an
overturned cup that oozed slowly
along the tablecloth.
Extraordinary father!
Rosalie's father hail been a
wrangler and one of the brilliant
men of his year at Cambridge. All
manner of brilliance was expected
for him and of him. lie unex
pectedly went into the Church and
as unexpectedly married.
Ilis bride was the daughter of a
clergyman, a widower, who kept
a small private school in Devon
shire. She helped her father to
run the school (an impoverished
business which, beg-un exclusively
for the '"sons of gentlemen," had
slid down into paying- court to
tradesmen in order to get the
pons of tradesmen) and she main
tained him in the very indifferent
health lie suffered. Harold Aubyn,
the brilliant wrangler with the bril
liant future, who had begun his
brilliance by unexpectedly enter
ing the Church, and continued it
by unexpectedly marrying while
on a holiday in the little Devon
shire town where he had gone to
ponder his future (a little unbal
anced by the unpremeditated
plunge into Holy Orders) further
continued his brilliance by unex
pectedly finding himself the assist
ant master in his father-in-law's
second-rate and failing school.
Falling;.
Out After
Them
Plunges
Harold,
One Boot
Half On,
Hobbling,
Leaping,
Panting.
The daughter would not leave her
father; the suitor would not leave
his darling; the brilliant yjung
wrangler who at Cambridge used
to dream of waking to fi:v h'msclf
famous, awoke instead to find him
self six years buried in a now
third-rate and moribund school in
a moribund Devonshire town. He
had a father-in-law now a perma
nent invalid, bedridden. He had
four children and another, Robert,
on the way.
It was his father-in-law s death
thai awoke him; and be awoke
chaTiicterintieaJlv. The old man
dail! ciiie, that wsis one burden
Away They y ; . 'Hi . ' . .Jti4'' 'tV' ' f XUlS - '. " B " j
Meadow,, ".ff SkMWtp , ' . ? Wff W V' Wfl.: If 'f-SS. i . f T",H' X
lifted, one shackle removed! The
school finally wen '. smash at the
same time. Nevermind! Another
burden gone! Another shackle
lifted! Dash the school! How he
hated the school ! How he loathed
and detested the lumping boys!
How he loathed and abominated
teaching them . simple ar; 'imetic
(he the wrangler!) and history
that was a. string of dates, and
geography that was a string of
capes and bays, and Latin as far
as the conjugations (he the wrang
ler!) how he loathed and abomi
nated it! Now a fresh start! Hur
rah! That was like Rosalie's father
in those days. That way blew the
cold fit and the hot fit then.
The magnificent fresh start after
the magnificent escape from the
morass of the moribund father-in-law
and the moribund school and
the moribund Devonshire town
proved to be but a stagger down
into morass heavier and more dev
astating of ambition. He always
lumped blindly and wildly into
filings. Blindly and wildly int j the
Church, blindly and wildly into mar
riage, blindly and wildly into the
school, blindly and wildly, one
might say, into fatherhood on a
lavish scale." Blindly and wildly
the magnificent fresh start into
the rectory' in which Rosalie was
born.
It was "a 'hit in the wilds" (of
Suffolk); "a bit of a tight fit"
(200 a year) and a b:L or two or
three other drawbacks; but it was
thousands of miles from Devcu-
rv tVft :rt;: yzyrr " 'XMijfZArr
shire and from the school and
.schooling, that was the great thing;
and it was a jolly big rectory with
a ripping big garden ; and above
all and beyond everything it was
just going to be a jumping-otf
plr.ee while he looked around for
something suitable to his talents
and while he got in touch again
with his old friends of the brilliant
years.
It was just going to be a jump-ing-off
place, but he never jumped
off from it; a place from which to
look around for something duitttule,
but instead he auiik in it up to his
chin; a place from which to get in
touch again with his friends of tht
bi'illiant years, but his friends were
all doing brilliant things and much
too busy at their brilliance to open
up with one who had missed fire.
The pariah of St. Mary's,
Ibbotsfield, had an . enormous
rectory, falling to pieces; an
enormous church, crumbling
away; an enormous aiea,
purely agricultural; and a
cure of a very few hundred
agricultural souls, enormously
scattered. Years and years
before, prior to railways,
prior to mechanical reapers
everything that took men to
and thrashers, and prior to
cities or whirled them and their
produce farther in an hour
than they ever could have
gone in a week, Ibbotsfield
and its surrounding
villages and hamlets
were a reproach to
the moral conditions
of the day in that
they had no suffi
ciently enormous
church. Well-intentioned
persons re
in oved this re
proach, . adding in
their zeal an enor
mous rectory; and
the time they chose
for their beneficent
and lavish action
was precisely the
time when Ibbots
field, through its
principal land
owners, was stoutly
rejecting the rnon-,
strous idea of
encouraging a
stinking, roar
ing, dangerous
railway in their
direction, and
comb ining to
gethei by all
means in their
power to keep
the roaring,
dangerous atro
city as far aw ay
from them as
possible.
It thus, and
by like influen
c e s , happened
one generation
that, whereas
of the devoutly mtentioned
sat stolidly under the i-eproach of
an enormous and thickly populated
area without a church, later gener
ations with the same stolidity sat
under the reproach of an enor
mou3 church, an erormous rectory
and an infinitesimal stipend, in an
area in which a man might walk all
davwithout meeting any other man.
But the devout of the day, not
having to live in this rectory cr
preach in this church or labori
ously trudge about this arrii, did
not u&duly worry th-nelvr3 with
thia reproach.
jMjt ?5T?G IliiHi .xwylr
' ft H -fWK
That was (in turn) the lookout
of the Rev. Harold Aubyn also
his outlook.
He is to be imagined in those
davs when Rosalie first came to
know him ami to think of him su,
Prosnero, as a terribly lonely man.
He stalked fatiguingly about the
countryside in search of his parish
ioners, and his parishioners were
susoicious of him and disliked his
fierce, thrusting nose, and he re
turned from them embittered, with
them and hating them. He genuine
ly longed to be friendly with them
and on terms of hail, fellow, well
met, with them; but they exaspera
ted him because they could not
meet him either on his own quick
intellectual level or upon his own
quick and verv sensitive emotional
level. They could not respond to
his humor and they could not re
spond, in the way he thought they
ought to respond, to his sympathy.
He once found a man -a farm
laborer who in conversation dis
closed a surprising interest in the
traces of the early and medieval
habitation of the country. The dis
covery delighted him. In the cata
logue of a second-hand, bookseller
of Ipswich he noticed the "Kxcur
ilxjin in the County of SutfulL"
two volumes for thrte shiliirii,
v k C , V A -
and he wrote and had the.u poterj
to the man. b'or days h- ufny
looked in the post for the gratMid
and delighted letter that in bimilar
circumstances he lusc-t If woul-l
have written. He romposed in hi?
mind the phrases of th: letter and
warmed in spirit over anticipation
of reading them. No letter ar
rived. When h" came into the rectory
from visiting lie was always asking,
"Has thai, man Bolas from Ha-I-sham
callfd?" Bolas never culled.
He furiously began to loathe Boh.s.
He was furious with himself for
having "lowered himself" to Bolas.
Kolas" in his ignorance no doubt,
thought the books were a cheap
chariiv of cast-off lumber. Un
couth 'clod! Pi upid clod! Uncouth
parish! Hateful, loathsome parish!
For weeks he kept away from Hail
sham and the possible vicinity of
Bolas. One cay he met him. Bolas
pas-ed with no more than a "Cood
dav. Mr. Aubyn." He could have
killed the man. He swung around
and pusheH his dark face and jutty
nose into the face of Bolas. "Did
you ever get some books I sent
you?-'
"Ou. ay, to be sure, they bocks
He rushed with savage strides
awa from the man. All the wav
hom he suvajfcly nid W idrwelf,
aloud, ioph- tirr.e to it .iui n.a
"11 f v
1 . w
feet, "L'rrn r.n clod. iVi-y.znr-r'A
clo i. honvde, !.r.efu! place! Un
couth finds, hateful cldi, horrible,
l a'ef ol place !"
That v. &s hi attitude to h; par-i.-'iiiO'-.ers.
'I i. y cnyll not enrne up
to the "ev 01 hi- .-e;-iilili iet:
coulu not iown to the level f.f
With the few gentl famili iOjfO
that comi oee.l the society of lb- y--J
hoirfiel.1 h v.-us littif better .cron-
niooa'ed. I h.ey ho) -on,erteJf
ii !.! i;....., , u.., tl.:.
iM li-nni!.-;ru i, uu.iw duuut iiivir 4'
r.M'.Unu l.o- ahn'Tt tV.'i- rii.fi--e .
busy about their amuferr.ents. His pYjp.
hie was ill-ordered and he v;a
never busy about anything: hewai xv '
always either neglecting v.h.?t hid
to be done or doing it, late, with a ..
ferocious and cxhtustirg energy .. j
that caused him to groan over it it
and detest it while Jie did it. In Jj, '
tl.e general level of his life he was f f '
below the standard of his neighbors K-J
ar i knew that he was btlow it; in &Ti
hi.-: i rellect and of his imagination P-J
tvfi3 i .Tnti'irvrj ciiri ViIt' n Kava L. till
intellects of his neighbors and j
k ii a' that he was immeasurably ,:
above them. I here! ore, and in
both moods, he commonly hatH
and despised them. "Fool?, fools!
Unr-id. pompous, petty!"
(It, hm Cf.iif.UJ)
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