HOW THE RENAISSANCE CAME IN PERSON TO NEW ZION

The winter months had gone by; all but one of those incendiary lectures had been given, not without storm and tempest; "The Dawn" still came up each week with anger and singing, and the first year of Londonderry's ministry at New Zion neared its close. The lecture season was presently to end, on the last Friday in March, with a concert which was to include a series of recitations by a lady-reciter from London. Londonderry had written to a lecture agency for the name of a likely reciter, man or woman, and they had sent him the name of Isabel Strange.

On the occasion of the last lecture, Mr. Moggridge had not been satisfied with the colour of the platform. It wanted repainting, and I think it very likely that it was a strain of that boyishness which I hope survives in us all, and one of whose quaint fancies is an envy of house-painters, so happy all day with paint-pot and brush and great smooth boards to dab and smooth, that decided him to do the job himself. Mr. Moggridge had this great element of refinement, that he thought nothing honest beneath him.

It was the Friday of the entertainment, about one o'clock, and though Mr. Moggridge had practically finished the work the day before, he had slipped in during his lunch-hour to give it a final touch or two. He had brought his lunch in the form of a pork-pie, and while with one hand he plunged the pie occasionally among his red whiskers, with the other he would lean forward and touch up a knot or a nail-hole that needed a little more paint. And he was proud as a boy of the simple bit of slap-dashing, and entirely absorbed in it and the pork-pie.

Presently he became aware that he was not alone. Someone had entered the schoolroom at the far end. He turned round, with the paint-brush in one hand and the pork-pie in the other, and became abashed, for a beautiful lady had entered the room and was evidently about to make an enquiry. The surreptitiousness that seems to inhere in pork-pies prompted Mr. Moggridge to slip the pie into his trousers' pocket--for his coat was off, and a white apron had taken its place.

"Just doing a little bit of amateur painting," he explained rather awkwardly, advancing to the lady.

"So I see," said the lady, with a pleasant smile. "This, I believe, is Zion Chapel--and I suppose this is the room where I am to recite. My name is Isabel Strange, and I have come a little earlier, I daresay, than you expected; but I always like to see the room I'm to recite in--just to try my voice in and run over my pieces."

"Certainly, of course," said Mr. Moggridge; "but you have come all the way from London and so early. You will have some refreshment first, and if you'll honour Mrs. Moggridge and me--I may as well explain that I am the chief deacon," said Mr. Moggridge, dexterously slipping off his painter's apron and getting into his coat. So, with a wistful glance at his work of art, Mr. Moggridge carried off the beautiful London lady to Zion View.

But was Isabel Strange beautiful? It was a new sort of beauty if she was--or perhaps a very old sort. Yet beautiful was the first word that had sprung into Mr. Moggridge's mind as she had surprised him in the schoolroom. Perhaps wonderful was the exacter word, wonderful in a way that included beauty,--wonderful, and with a strange air about her that suggested exceptional refinement, exquisite sensitiveness to refined things.

"Beautiful, O dear no!" said Mrs. Moggridge, to whom feminine beauty did not appeal, as the young lady freshened herself up after her travel in Mrs. Moggridge's best bedroom. "Why! she hasn't a regular feature in her face!"

Mrs. Moggridge herself had neat little pretty features set in fat.

"Look at that long upper lip and her nose!"

Mrs. Moggridge omitted mention of eyes singularly powerful and very true and sweet, as also of a long lithe mouth that reminded you of a beautiful serpent, a serpent which the true eyes plainly said would do you no harm.

Presently, however, Mrs. Moggridge had to admit that she was very attractive. She knew she meant fascinating, but she wouldn't admit that to Mr. Moggridge, who had dropped the subject; though a mind which again had asserted its dim preference for new fashions was perhaps groping after expression of some such perplexity as this: why, if a face has the same effect upon you as beauty, may it not be described as beautiful? If Mr. Moggridge really got so far even as cloudily to ponder that, it is evident that he was not far from the kingdom of beauty.

It is, of course, true enough that some faces are spoilt by flaws such as every Mrs. Moggridge can point out,--faces that begin in one style and end in another, half Greek perhaps and half Gothic; yet even such faces, if their individuality is strong enough, have their own rococo charm. For all but supremely great faces, of which perhaps the world has not seen half-a-dozen, absolute regularity, so-called correctness, of features is a calamity, and regular beauty on the ordinary human levels is only another form of mediocrity.

Wonderful English girls! face after face indistinguishable from each other as rose after rose. How sweet you are! how fragrant! what a bloom! It is a wonderful rose-girl-farm from which you come. How pretty you look laced up one after another on your standards, and how skilfully you are guarded against any form of variation! Perhaps no women potteries in the world produce so exquisite a surface, delicate as a lily and strong as marble. Indeed you are wonderful porcelain, you fair English girls, wonderful porcelain; but where are the stars?

Mrs. Moggridge had also remarked that Miss Strange was "very easy in her manners." This was not always the case with ladies in Coalchester, and Mrs. Moggridge did not mean the remark as an unreserved compliment. She liked a certain stiffness in strangers. It was not, however, in Isabel Strange's nature to oblige her in that particular. Her way of pouring her grace into Mrs. Moggridge's great arm-chair suggested at once that she had lived there for ever so long, and to him particularly she chatted as with an old acquaintance. You could not make a stranger of her. She ate some cold fowl which presently appeared, entirely without embarrassment, though two Miss Moggridges sat like dummies and watched her.

"That's an interesting face!" she said presently, pointing to a conspicuous portrait of a young man on the mantelpiece.

"That's Mr. Londonderry," said Mr. Moggridge.

"O! that's Mr. Londonderry, is it?" she said. "H'm,... I hadn't expected him to be so young."

"Yes! He's a wonderful young man for his position," said Mr. Moggridge, started on what was now his favourite topic. "He'll be a great man some day, will Mr. Londonderry."

Isabel looked up at Mr. Moggridge with added interest. Such a genuine interest in great men as his voice betokened was a surprise in him.

Then Mr. Moggridge proceeded to narrate the history of New Zion, told of its former desolation, his lucky advertisement, and its present prosperity.

"Yes, it was a dead-and-alive place was New Zion when we moved in here, wasn't it, missus?" turning to his wife; "but now, since Mr. Londonderry came, there is always something moving. Yes, there's always something going on at New Zion," he repeated, rubbing his hands gleefully. Mr. Moggridge did so love anything that was alive.

Mr. Moggridge also told the story of "The Dawn," and generally, as he would have said, posted her up in the position of things at New Zion. At the end she found herself generally looking forward to meeting this young minister and his friends, who were evidently a little nest of surprise-people in what had indeed seemed a most unpromising corner of the world,--perhaps the most unpromising corner that her nomadic wandering minstrel existence had brought her to.

Isabel Strange, according to old-fashioned reckoning, was not a very young woman. That is, she was already twenty-eight, though, having to fight a silly world with its own silly weapons, she called herself twenty-five, which it was still quite safe for her to do; and though the nerve-intensity of her face was the worst thing in the world for wrinkles, they would when they came be very interesting wrinkles, and her eyes and mouth would keep the world from looking at the rest of her features for a long time to come. A face so full of the mystery of light could only be eclipsed by one darkness, and even in that those magnetic eyes would shine through the cold closed lids.

Surprises were welcome to her, for she got few. Her life was rather a dreary one, as the life of an elocution teacher may well be. At one time she had dreamed of the stage, but her voice was not quite big enough for that, some managers had said, and indeed her mettle was perhaps a little too fine for the stage. The positive and enduring joys of her life were that she lived in London--for which she had the kind of passion that some people have for the Earth-Mother--and loved beauty as some women love religion. She had been loved many times, but never quite as she needed, as she demanded, to be loved. Vivid, passionate, and exquisite, she was what we call "modern" to the tips of her beautiful fingers; that is, she united the newest opinions on all things with many ancient charms. At the same time she was a good woman, though very wonderful and highly dangerous.

Presently Mr. Moggridge, who from where he sat commanded a view of the street, exclaimed, "Why, here is Mr. Londonderry himself!" rising as he spoke and passing into the hall, where he was met by a curiously rich and mellow voice, which Isabel Strange thus heard for the first time; and then the glorified original of the photograph entered the room.

As her eyes and hands met his, her soul gave a little half-humorous "Oh!" of surprise; for photography, which seems to have been invented to flatter the mediocre and belittle the exceptional, had indeed given Londonderry an "interesting face," as we have heard, but missed all the rest--"all the rest" of a large, mobile, talking face, not exactly handsome perhaps, but decidedly good-looking and full of various commands and appeals, thought on the brow and laughter in the eyes, humour and eloquence all along the large and somewhat loose mouth, with plenty of go in the powerful but not anxiously determined chin. These were the moral qualities of the face, which Isabel Strange did not miss; but it was the fascination of its general vitality that struck her most, as an important introduction was made, to the usual fantastic accompaniment of small talk.

Let us not prolong the small-talk of the situation further, but introduce Miss Strange as speedily as possible to Jenny also and to the little study in 3 Zion Place.

Here her eager examination of the shelves was one succession of cries of sympathetic delight. "Why, you have got all the books I ever want to read again!" she exclaimed. "What wonderful people you are! How have you done it--in Zion Place?"

"I suppose the books must have been blown here," answered Theophil, gaily, "on the same fair wind that blew Miss Isabel Strange."

"Yes," said little Jenny, affectionately pressing her shoulder as the three leaned forward looking at the shelves, "for if we seem wonderful people to you, what must you seem to us--here, as you may well say, in Zion Place?"

"What does she remind you of?" said Jenny presently, with candid admiration. "I know! Why, of course, she just is the very woman. Wait--I'll go and fetch it;" and Theophil and Isabel were thus left for a moment or two alone,--a fact of no importance beyond this, that it was the first moment in their lives that they had ever been together alone.

Jenny returned presently with a small copy of Botticelli's "Primavera," which hung in her bedroom; and it was undoubtedly true that the figure of Flora might well have passed for a portrait of Isabel. The nose was a little longer, that was all; but the rest of the face--particularly the eyes and mouth--was all but exact, and the general correspondence between the two faces in subtlety, strangeness, and, so to say, determined refinement, was complete.

"It is strange that I should have loved that face so," said Jenny.

"It is very sweet of you,--Jenny, I had almost said,--but you are too kind to me, and a little selfish too--you give me no time to admire you. I wonder if Mr. Londonderry is modern enough to allow ladies to smoke in his study."

And thus it comes out that Jenny often smoked there!

The smoking-sister is now almost as common as a taste for Botticelli, and perhaps equally insincere; but in 1886 there still remained that sense of contrast in both which we have declared the essence of romance. At present those curious people who resent the popular acceptance of an ideal of beauty which they have done their best to popularise are beginning to affect that a taste for Botticelli is a mark of the bourgeoisie. So does the whirligig of time bring in the paradoxer.

A new kind of woman, while she is always the despairing hope of men, is seldom acceptable to women; yet when the evening came and Isabel stood up to recite in New Zion schoolroom, women as well as men were instantaneously attracted. She stood very simply, with one hand lightly touching the table at which Londonderry sat as chairman, and the other at her side; and before she began her first recitation she glanced quietly over the audience, as though her eyes were thus preparing the proper magnetic atmosphere for her voice.

She began with some simple Longfellow poem, that New Zion might feel at home; then she recited a fairy poem called "The Forsaken Merman," which, of course, was only a fairy tale, and yet somehow was so full of human pathos that it was more real than if it had been really "real," that is, prosaic.

For impressing the imagination of her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play of features, but a play of lights and shadows and nerves, a flow or an ebb of radiance in the eyes, a subtle sensitiveness of the lips and nerves; and her effect was mainly produced by her voice, over which she wielded indescribable powers of modulation. It was a voice so sympathetic, so intimate, that it almost seemed too intimate, too appealingly sympathetic. It was so a woman might recite to a man she loved, but you almost felt as though the voice were too personal a revelation for an audience,--felt an impulse, so to say, to throw a veil over it, though you were glad from your soul that no one threw it. And the voice was a wonderful actor too. It could act the scenery as well. You saw it all, you heard it all, you felt it all, in the voice:--the great winds blowing shorewards, the wild white horses in the spray,

"The white-walled town,
And the little gray church on the windy shore;"

and when she said, "Down, down, down!" you were indeed in the very depths of the sea--and were all sitting, Mr. Moggridge with the rest, amid coral caves and seaweed, and in a curious green and shimmering light.

But what a world of heart-break there was in her "Come, dear children, come away!" You felt you simply couldn't bear her to say it again. Next time you'd have to cry, and cry you did, and you weren't ashamed, for suddenly when you came out of the trance of the voice you found that every one else was crying too, and Mr. Londonderry had quite forgotten that he was a chairman, and had to be nudged to announce the next piece.

This was a very strange poem, and made you feel like a stained-glass window; it was full of incense, but it was full of something else too. It began

"The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven" ...

and there was something in the voice that suggested such a height up above the world that you drew your breath lest she should fall over. And there was a lover crying in the poem, you could hear him crying far away down on the earth, and there were some lines which went:

"We two will lie i' the shadow of
That mystic living tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be" ...

that made you feel what a strange holy thing love was, after all; and then there was a curious verse with nothing but women's names in it, yet somehow it seemed the loveliest of all; and when again you came out of the voice, you were not crying but feeling wonderfully blest somehow and rather frightened. Jenny sent a wonderful look to Theophil--it was so they should bathe together in God's sight--and Theophil sent back as wonderful a look as a chairman dare venture on. Otherwise, of course, it would have been as wonderful as Jenny's.

Thus did Isabel Strange recite at New Zion; and perhaps one can best judge of the impression she made, from the fact that the little boys at the back, who during the last lecture on "Henrik Ibsen" had discovered a most exciting new way of making continued existence possible, quite forgot it and would have to keep it for Sunday afternoon Sunday-school.

Everyone went home in a dream, and little Jenny shone like a light with the excitement and wonder of it all.

"How wonderful you are! Doesn't it seem strange to be so wonderful?" said Jenny afterwards, as the two girls took off their outdoor things in Jenny's room.

"Dear child!" said Isabel, kissing Jenny on her brow, "it is you that are wonderful."

There is no joy in the world better worth seeing, better worth living, than the joy of young people with the same dreams, the same thoughts, and--so important--the same words for them, blown together by some unexpected conjunction of the four winds, met by some blissful dispensation of the planets of youth.

There have been periods in history especially favourable for the ecstasy of such meetings, early mornings of the human spirit, when lovely new truth and lovely new beauty were dawning wild and dewy in the strange east, and while the deep breathing of the older generations still asleep made a more wonderful loneliness of dawn, for the hushed and happy bands of young people holding each other's hands and watching in the magic twilight.

To have been young in Italy in the time of Dante, in England in the time of Shakespeare, and to have met in such a mighty morning--with danger too to keep us grateful. Ah, we have missed those dawns; and yet I doubt if the whole recovered beauty of Greece and Rome, or the thrilling new fashions in romance and poetry wafted across the seas from Italy to help make Shakespeare, ever gave young people a keener thrill of newness and mystery than the books and pictures so eagerly discussed by the little group that gathered over supper that night in 3 Zion Place.

To have read "The House of Life!"--to have seen the "Venus Verticordia"! Ah! that was life! And Isabel had actually been to Mr. G.F. Watts's studio--walked about there a whole afternoon. The young New Zioners looked at her.

"O Theophil, we must go to London," cried Jenny. She meant when they were married.

Theophil pressed her hand tenderly, as she impulsively sought his for sympathy, and his eyes left Isabel's face a moment to smile a true "yes" into Jenny's.

Of course no one had eyes for anyone but Isabel that night. Was she not, as the announcements had said, "of London," an ambassadress of beauty from the capital of the great queen? There was really little she could tell these clever young people, who amazed and attracted her by their reality,--the unrealities of "intensity" and "modernity" and the rest had, of course, already begun in London,--but she represented to them the sparkle of the new beauty and truth they loved. She knew little intimate anecdotes of the poets and painters they loved, piquant gossip and brilliant mots; and then she was one of those women who are like incense in a room, enriching by her very presence, exhaling mystery and distinction, like a pomander of strange spices.

You might love her for a long time or a little, but love her you were obliged to while you were with her, whoever else you loved too. There was no other word for it. Even little James Whalley had conscience-pangs as he looked at Isabel, for he had been engaged for five years; but the poet's heart, that is, all the combustible portion of it, was already burnt to a cinder. Poets' hearts, however, are used to burning. The inflammable air of sighs about them is ever in a perpetual state of ignition; so it has come, no doubt, from long custom, that nature has made them at their centre as fireproof as the phoenix. Otherwise, indeed, the poetic life would be impossible to live; poets could not go on maintaining the deadly fire of love, to which it is one of the conditions of their precarious art that they must daily expose themselves. Sometimes, indeed, as we know, even these firemen of the emotions dare the burning house once too often, and we hear their death-song amid the flames.

Theophil?

Well, we can talk of Theophil again. Meanwhile Jenny was as much in love with her herself, and he held Jenny's hand and loved her, O yes, so dearly--and was quite safe. Fear not, little Jenny; it was only death, you remember, that was to separate Jenny and Theophil.

Mrs. Talbot--if she won't bore you--had made an interesting remark. She had not escaped Isabel's charm, but there was "something," something a little alarming about her,--a little like that wicked wall-paper.

Jenny divulged this criticism over supper when her mother was out of ear-shot.

"How very clever of her!" exclaimed Isabel.

"She said the same of Dvorak's music," said Jenny.

"Good again," said Isabel. "How clever of her! Don't you feel how right she is? We are all like that wall-paper, and everything we care about is like it. The New Spirit--that is, the devil--is in that wall-paper. A psychometrist could detect Wagner and Keats, and Schopenhauer, and Rossetti and Swinburne, and all the rest of them in that wall-paper, just as surely as he could have detected Tupper and Eliza Cook in the wall-papers of 1851. Am I not right?"

"If we could only paper New Zion like this!" exclaimed Theophil, a curious new feeling of joy and pain shooting through him to hear a woman thus expressing herself as an independent brain.

"Yes! New Zion! I'd quite forgotten all about New Zion. It seems impossible to think of you together."

"And a little absurd, I suppose," said Theophil.

"It is uncouth material, I admit," he continued, "and yet somehow it amuses us to mould it all the more; and then you mustn't forget that we had been given no other--but I don't suppose you can understand?" (Theophil often used "we" in this imperatorial sense, meaning himself, as of course he had every right to mean.)

"O yes, but I can," Isabel hastened to correct. "I understand power."

"Beauty always does," was the young minister's reply.

"Besides," he presently resumed, "we are glad to have been Nonconformists--once. A Puritan training is a good thing--to look back upon. You are all the more thorough in your pleasures, the truer humanist, for something of it still lurking in your blood."

"Yes, of course you're right. I don't like the word 'pagan'; but for want of a better, we might say that the best pagans have come of Puritan stock. Besides, it is half the romance of life to have something to escape from, isn't it?"

"And someone to escape with the other half," responded Theophil, nimble as a real town wit.

O it was a wonderful night. Let us build five tabernacles!

"Good-night, dear Jenny."

"Good-night, dear wonderful Isabel."

So at last the two girls bade each other good-night at the door of Jenny's bedroom, where Isabel was to sleep.

Masterful youth! So wild to take, so eager to surrender, the Christian name. Strange, what passion sometimes can be put into a Christian name!

When the door was shut on Isabel, she made no haste to undress. Indeed, she sat down on the side of the bed as though she had been waiting to sit down for ever so long, sat very still as in a dream, and an hour went by and she was still sitting and gazing in front of her.

And downstairs in the study, where the lamps were still burning, Theophil was sitting by the fire in just the same curiously wrought and withdrawn way, with just the same eyes.

Isabel's room was over his. Presently she heard him moving about; then she heard him coming upstairs. For a moment the air seemed to grow warm, as she heard him softly pass her room; then she heard him close his door.

She shook her reverie from her, as though it had been a black veil full of stars, and began to undress. Presently her eyes fell on a little pile of handkerchiefs, with needle and cotton, and little letters printed on dainty tapes, beside it. Jenny had forgotten to put away her sewing.

Isabel took up one of the handkerchiefs, to which the needle and thread were still attached, and read "Jenny Lond ..." (Don't you know that's bad luck, Jenny?)

"So soon as that! Is it so soon as that?" she sighed.

Happy Jenny!