Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance

that his mother got drunk. The neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o’clock, crawled downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that “she was very bad, and he could not go to sleep.” The father, then, had to keep his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and manage in the best way he could. Over and over again was he obliged to sit by this wretched woman’s bedside till breakfast time, and then had to go to work as usual. Let anybody who has seen a case of this kind say whether the State ought not to provide for the relief of such men as John, and whether he ought not to have been able to send his wife away to some institution where she might have been tended and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but her husband and her child. John hardly bore up under this sorrow. A man may endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when his day’s toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he falls. Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which not a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear that while he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days, whose close nevertheless he dreaded! Beaten down, baffled, disappointed, if we are in tolerable health we can contrive to live on some almost impossible chance, some most distant flicker of hope. It is astonishing how minute a crack in the heavy uniform cloud will relieve us; but when with all our searching we can see nothing, then at last we sink. Such was John’s case when I first came to know him. He attracted me rather, and bit by bit he confided his story to me. He found out that I might be trusted, and that I could sympathise, and he told me what he had never told to anybody before. I was curious to discover whether religion had done anything for him, and I put the question to him in an indirect way. His answer was that “some on ’em say there’s a better world where everything will be put right, but somehow it seemed too good to be true.” That was his reason for disbelief, and heaven had not the slightest effect on him. He found out the room, and was one of our most constant friends.

Another friend was of a totally different type. His name was Cardinal. He was a Yorkshireman, broad-shouldered, ruddy in the face, short-necked, inclined apparently to apoplexy, and certainly to passion. He was a commercial traveller in the cloth trade, and as he had the southern counties for his district, London was his home when he was not upon his journeys. His wife was a curious contrast to him. She was dark-haired, pinched-up, thin-lipped, and always seemed as if she suffered from some chronic pain or gnawing⁠—not sufficient to make her ill, but sufficient to make her miserable. They had no children. Cardinal in early life had been a member of an orthodox Dissenting congregation, but he had fallen away. He had nobody to guide him, and the position into which he fell was peculiar. He never busied himself about religion or philosophy; indeed he had had no training which would have led him to take an interest in abstract questions, but he read all kinds of romances and poetry without any order and upon no system. He had no discriminating faculty, and mixed up together the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery novels, French translations, and the best English authors, provided only they were unworldly or sentimental. Neither did he know how far to take what he read and use it in his daily life. He often selected some fantastical motive which he had found set forth as operative in one of his heroes, and he brought it into his business, much to the astonishment of his masters and customers. For this reason he was not stable. He changed employers two or three times; and, so far as I could make out, his ground of objection to each of the firms whom he left might have been a ground of dislike in a girl to a suitor, but certainly nothing more. During the intervals of his engagements, unless he was pressed for money, he did nothing⁠—not from laziness, but because he had got a notion in his head that his mind wanted rest and reinvigoration. His habit then was to consume the whole day⁠—day after day⁠—in reading or in walking out by himself. It may easily be supposed that with a temperament like his, and with nobody near him to take him by the hand, he made great mistakes. His wife and he cared nothing for one another, but she was jealous to the last degree. I never saw such jealousy. It was strange that, although she almost hated him, she watched him with feline sharpness and patience, and would even have killed any woman whom she knew had won his affection. He, on the other hand, openly avowed that marriage without love was nothing, and flaunted without the least modification the most ideal theories as to the relation between man and woman. Not that he ever went actually wrong. His boyish education, his natural purity, and a fear never wholly suppressed, restrained him. He exasperated people by his impracticability, and it must be acknowledged that it is very irritating in a difficult complexity demanding the gravest consideration⁠—the balancing of this against that⁠—to hear a man suddenly propose some naked