Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers by Mark Rutherford

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"Really, James," said Mrs. Bullen one morning to Mr. Armstrong's
gardener and general man-of-all-work as he was carrying a chair from
the house into the tower, "do you think this is quite right? Do you
think our Saviour would have sanctioned the erection of a profane
instrument over the house of prayer?"

James was very thick-headed, and hardly knew the meaning of these long
words, bat he did not like Mrs. Bullen, and he resented her talking to
him, a servant, in that strain about his master.

"Ah! Mrs. Bullen, you needn't bother yourself. He's all right with
the Saviour,--more so nor many other people, maybe."

"Well, but, James, this is a church consecrated to the service of God."

"Ah! how do you know? Very likely o' nights--for he's up there when
you're abed and asleep--he's a looking into heaven through that there
glass, and, sees God and the blessed angels."

"Really, James, can you be so ignorant as not to know that God is a
Spirit? I am astonished at you." And Mrs. Bullen passed on without a
single doubt in her mind that there was a single weak spot in her
creed, or that anybody could question its intelligibility and coherence
who would not also question the multiplication-table. She told her
husband when she got home that it was really dreadful to think that the
poor had such low views of the Divine Being. How degraded! No wonder
they were so immoral. Bullen, however, did not trouble himself much
about these matters. He assented to what his wife said, but then he
called "spirit" "sperrit," to her annoyance, and she could not get him
to comprehend what she meant by "entirely immaterial," although it was
so plain.

Mr. Armstrong, as we have said, was in front of Miriam. He had brought
a small telescope to that point to be tested, for exactly eight miles
away was a church-tower with a clock, and he wished to see if he could
tell the time by it. Miriam was about to avoid him, but he recognised
her and beckoned to her.

"Ah! Mrs. Farrow, is it you? Would yon like to look through my glass?"

He adjusted it for her, and she saw the hour quite plainly.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "that is wonderful!"

"Yes, it is pretty well. We will now put him in his box. For the box
I have to thank Mr. Farrow. He is one of the neatest hands at that
kind of work I know, although it is not exactly his trade. I never was
much of a joiner."

Miriam was a little surprised. She knew that her husband was clever
with his tools, but she had never set any value on his labours. Now,
however, she was really struck with the well-polished mahogany and the
piece of brass neatly let into the lid, and when she heard Mr.
Armstrong's praises she began to think a little differently.

"Ah!" he continued, "it is so difficult now to get anybody to take any
interest in such a job as that. I have got another box at home made by
a professed cabinetmaker, and it is really disgraceful. It will never
be right, although I have had it altered two or three times. When it
was shut it caught the object-glass inside. I remedied that defect,
but only to create a worse, for then the instrument shook about. So it
is, when once a thing is badly done, you had better get rid of it; it
is of no use to bother with it. You may depend upon it, it is not bad
just here or there, but is bad all through, and the attempt to mend it
serves no other purpose than to bring to light hidden weakness. On the
other hand, if you are fortunate enough to have work done like Mr.
Farrow's, it is perfect all through. You can never surprise it, so to
speak. Just look at it. Look at that green baize rest. There is not
the thirty-second part of an inch to spare on either side, and the lid
comes down so evenly that you can hardly see where the edge is. Shake
the box, and you will not feel a single movement. You have never seen
my big telescope at Marston?"

"No."

"Well, if you like, you can come over with your husband any bright
night, and I shall be happy to show it to you."

Miriam thanked him, and they parted.

A few days afterwards Mrs. and Mr. Farrow presented themselves at the
vicarage. It was a lovely evening, and so clear that the outline of
the constellations was obscured by the multitude of small stars, which
usually are not seen, or seen but imperfectly. In the south was
Jupiter, mild, magnificent, like a god amongst the crowd of lesser
divinities.

Mr. Armstrong, with all the ardour of an enthusiast for his science,
began a little preliminary lecture.

"I am not going to let you peep simply in order to astonish you. I
abominate what are called popular lectures for that very reason. If
you can be made to understand the apparent revolution of the heavens,
that is better than all speculation. To understand is the great thing,
not to gape. Now I assume you know that the earth goes round on its
axis, and that consequently the stars seem to revolve round the earth.
But the great difficulty is to realise _how_ they go round, because the
axis is not upright, nor yet horizontal, but inclined, and points to
that star up there, the pole-star. Consequently the stars describe
circles which are not at right angles with the horizon, nor yet
parallel to it. That is my first lesson."

Mr. Farrow comprehended without the slightest difficulty, but Miriam
could not. She had noticed that some of the stars appear in the east
and disappear in the west, but beyond that she had not gone. Mr.
Armstrong continued--

"The next thing you have to bear in mind is that the planets move about
amongst the stars. Just think! They go round the sun, and so do we.
The times of their revolution are not coincident with ours, and their
path is sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards. Suppose we were in
the centre of the planetary system, all these irregularities would
disappear; but we are outside, and therefore it looks so complicated."

Again Mr. Farrow comprehended, but to Miriam it was all dark.

"Now," continued Mr. Armstrong, "these are the two great truths which I
wish you not simply to acknowledge, but to _feel_. If you can once
from your own observation _realise_ the way the stars revolve--why some
near the pole never set--why some never rise, and why Venus is seen
both before the sun and after it--you will have done yourselves more
real good than if you were to dream for years of immeasurable
distances, and what is beyond and beyond and beyond, and all that
nonsense. The great beauty of astronomy is not what is
incomprehensible in it, but its comprehensibility--its geometrical
exactitude. Now you may look."

Miriam looked first. Jupiter was in the field. She could not suppress
a momentary exclamation of astonished ecstasy at the spectacle. While
she watched, Mr. Armstrong told her something about the mighty orb. He
pointed out the satellites, contrasted the size of Jupiter with that of
the earth, and explained to her the distances at which parts of the
planet are from each other as compared with those of New Zealand and
America from London. But what affected her most was to see Jupiter's
solemn, still movement, and she gazed and gazed, utterly absorbed,
until at last he had disappeared. The stars had passed thus before her
eyes ever since she had been born, but what was so familiar had never
before been emphasised or put in a frame, and consequently had never
produced its due effect.

Afterwards Mr. Farrow had his turn, and Mr. Armstrong then observed
that they had had enough; that it was getting late, but that he hoped
they would come again. They started homewards, but their teacher
remained solitary till far beyond midnight at his lonely post. The
hamlet lay asleep beneath him in profoundest peace. His study had a
strange fascination for him. He never wrote anything about it; he
never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much
about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at
Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary. It was for
some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind
needed. It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with
his lot.

On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.

"You didn't quite understand Mr. Armstrong, Miriam?"

"No, not quite."

"Ah! it is not easy; it all lies in the axis not being perpendicular,
and in our not being in the middle. Now look here!"

He took a long string; tied one end to the curtain-rod over the window,
and brought the other down to the floor. He then took Miriam, placed
her underneath it in the middle with her face to the window.

"Now, that is the north, and the top of the string is the pole star.
Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars
are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left."
But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was
unimaginable. It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with
such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple
feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an inclined
sphere.

Mr. Farrow was not disappointed.

"It will be all right," he said, and the next morning he was busy in
the shed in the bottom of the garden. He came to his afternoon meal
with glee, and directly it was over, took his wife away to see what he
had been doing. The shed had two floors, with a trap-door in the
middle. To the topmost corner of the upper story he had fixed a pole
which descended obliquely through a hole in the floor. This was the
axis, and the floor was the horizon. He had also, by the help of some
stoutish wire and some of his withies, fairly improvised a few
meridians, so that when Miriam put her head through the trap-door, she
seemed to be in the centre of a half globe.

"Now, my dear, it will all be plain. I cannot make the thing turn, but
you can fancy a star fixed down there in the east at the end of that
withy, and if the withy were to go round, or if the star were to climb
up it, it would just go so," tracing its course with his finger, "and
set there. Now, those stars near the pole, you see, would never set,
and that is why we see them all night long."

It all came to her in an instant.

"Really, how clever you are!" she said.

"Do you think so?" and there was a trace of something serious,
something of a surprise on his countenance.

"I have heard Mr. Armstrong talk about the stars before, although never
so much as he did that night, and then I've watched them a good bit,
and noticed the way they go. As for the planets, they are not so easy,
but I think I have got hold of it all."

Miriam looked out of window when she went to bed, and felt a new
pleasure. The firmament, instead of being a mere muddle--beautiful,
indeed, she had always thought it--had a plan in it. She marked where
one particularly bright star was showing itself in the south-east--it
was Sirius; and in the night she rose softly, drew aside the blind, saw
him again due south, and recognised the similarity of the arc with that
which her husband had constructed with his withies and wire. She lay
down again, thinking, as she went off to sleep, that still that silent,
eternal march went on. At four she again awoke from light slumber, and
crept to the blind again. Another portion of the same arc had been
traversed, and Sirius with his jewelled flashes was beginning to
descend. She thought she should like to see him actually sink, and she
waited and waited till he had disappeared, till the first tint of dawn
was discernible in the east, and that almost indistinguishable murmur
was heard which precedes the day. She then once more lay down, and
when she rose, she was richer by a very simple conception, but still
richer. She felt as a novice might feel who had been initiated, and
had been intrusted at least with the preliminary secrets of her
community. She owed her initiation to Mr. Armstrong, but also to her
husband. Experts no doubt may smile, and so may the young people who,
in these days of universal knowledge, have got up astronomy for
examinations, but nevertheless, in the profounder study of the science
there is perhaps no pleasure so sweet and so awful as that which
arises, not when books are read about it, but when the heavens are
first actually watched, when the movement of the Bear is first actually
seen for ourselves, and with the morning Arcturus is discerned
punctually over the eastern horizon; when the advance of the stars
westwards through the year, marking the path of the earth in its orbit,
is noted, and the moon's path also becomes intelligible.

Mr. Armstrong had long desired to make an orrery for the purpose of
instructing a few children and friends, but had never done anything
towards it, partly for lack of time, and partly for lack of skill with
joinery tools. He now, however, had in Farrow at once a willing pupil
and an artist, and the work went forward in Farrow's house, Miriam
watching its progress with great interest. She could even contribute
her share, and the graduation of the rim was left to her, a task she
performed with accuracy after a few failures in pencil. It was a
handsome instrument when it was completed. The relative distances of
the planets from the sun could not be preserved, nor their relative
magnitudes; but what was of more importance, their relative velocities
in their orbits were maintained. The day came when the machine was to
be first used. Miriam insisted that there should be no experiments
with it beforehand. She desired, even at the risk of disappointment,
to see a dramatic start into existence. She did not wish her pleasure
to be spoiled and her excitement to be diminished by trials. Her
husband humoured her, but secretly he took care that every preventible
chance of a breakdown should be removed. When she was absent, he
tested every pinion and every cog, eased a wheel here and an axle
there, and in truth what he had to do in this way with file and
sandpaper was almost equal to the labour spent upon saw and chisel.
Infinite adjustment was necessary to make the idea a noiseless, smooth
practical success, and infinite precautions had to be taken and devices
invented which were not foreseen when the drawing first appeared on
paper. With some of these difficulties Miriam, of course, was
acquainted. They would not probably have been so great to a
professional instrument-maker, but they were very considerable to an
amateur. Farrow selected the best-seasoned wood he could find, but it
frequently happened that after it was cut it warped a little, and the
slightest want of truth threw all the connected part out of gear.
Miriam learned something when she saw that a wheel whose revolution was
not in a perfect plane could give rise to so much annoyance, and she
learned something also when she saw how her husband, in the true spirit
of a genuine craftsman, remained discontented if there was the
slightest looseness in a bearing.

"Do you think it matters?" said she.

"Matters! Don't you see that if it goes on it gets worse? Every
wobble increases the next, and not only so, it sets the whole thing
wobbling."

"Couldn't you manage to put a piece on? Suppose you lined that hole
with something."

"Oh, no! Not the slightest use; out it must come, and a new one must
be put in."

At length the day came for the start. Farrow had made a trial by
himself the night before, and nothing could be better. Mr. Armstrong
came over, and after tea they all three went upstairs into the large
garret which had been used as a workshop. The great handle was taken
down and fitted into its place, Mr. Armstrong standing at one end and
Miriam and her husband at the other. Obedient to the impulse, every
planet at once answered; Mercury with haste, and Saturn with such
deliberation that scarcely any motion was perceptible. The Earth spun
its diurnal round, the Moon went forward in her monthly orbit. The
lighted ground-glass globe which did duty for the sun showed night and
day and the seasons. Miriam was transported, when suddenly there was a
jerk and a stop. Something was wrong, and Farrow, who was fortunately
turning with great caution, gave a cry such as a man might utter who
was suddenly struck a heavy blow. He recovered himself instantly, and
luckily at the very first glance saw what was the matter. The nicety
of his own handicraft was the cause of the disaster. A shaving not
much thicker than a piece of writing-paper had dropped between two
cogs. A gentle touch of a quarter of an inch backwards released it.

"Hooray!" he cried in his mad delight, and the mimic planets
recommenced their journeys as silently almost as their great archetypes
outside.

"Strange," he said with a smile, "that such a chip as that should upset
the whole solar system."

Miriam looked at him for a moment inquiringly, and then fell to
watching the orrery again. Slowly the moon waxed and waned. Slowly
the winter departed from our latitude on the little ball representing
our dwelling-place, and the summer came; and as she still watched,
slowly and almost unconsciously her arms crept round her husband's
waist.

"That is a fair representation," said Mr. Armstrong, "of all that is
directly connected with us, excepting, of course, as I have told you,
that we could not keep the distances." A little later on, although he
disapproved of "gaping," as he called it, he taught Miriam so much of
geometry as was sufficient to make her understand what he meant when he
told her that a fixed star yielded no parallax, and that the earth was
consequently the merest speck of dust in the universe. She found his
simple trigonometry very, very hard, but to her husband it was easy,
and with his help she succeeded.

One afternoon, wet and dreary, Miriam had taken up her book. There was
nothing to do in the shop, and Mr. Farrow entered the parlour in one of
his idle moods, repeating the same behaviour which had so often
distressed Miriam when she was reading anything for which he did not
care. She had recovered from the dust upstairs a ragged volume in
paper boards, and she was musing over the lines--

"But bound and fixed in fettered solitude
To pine, the prey of every changing mood."

The poem was about as remote in its whole conception and treatment from
Mr. Farrow as it could well be, and his monkey-tricks exasperated her.
She shut her book in wrath and misery, left the room, dressed, and went
out. The sky had cleared, and just after the sunset there lay a long
lake of tenderest bluish-green above the horizon in the west, bounded
on its upper coast by the dark grey cloud which the wind was slowly
bearing eastward. In the midst of that lake of bluish-green lay Venus,
glittering like molten silver. Miriam's first thought was her husband.
She always thought of him when she looked at planets or stars, because
he was so intimately connected with them in her mind. She waited till
it was late and she then turned homewards. A man overtook her whom she
recognised at once as Fitchew the jobbing gardener, porter, rough
carpenter, creature of all work in Cowfold, one of the honestest souls
in the place. He had his never-failing black pipe in his mouth, which
he removed for a moment in order to bid her good-night. She kept up
with him, for it was dusk, and she was glad to walk by his side.
Fitchews had lived in Cowfold for centuries. An old parson always
maintained that the name was originally Fitz-Hugh, but this particular
representative of the family was certainly not a Fitz-Hugh but a
Fitchew, save that he was as independent as a baron, and,
notwithstanding his poverty, cared little or nothing what people
thought about him. He could neither read nor write, and was full of
the most obstinate and absurd prejudices. He was incredulous of
everything which was said to him by people with any education, but what
he had heard from those who were as uneducated as himself, or the
beliefs, if such they can be called, which grew in his skull
mysteriously, by spontaneous generation, he held most tenaciously. His
literature was Cowfold, the people, the animals, the inanimate objects
of which it was made up, and his criticism on these was often just. He
never could be persuaded to enter either church or chapel. Of the
arguments for Christianity, of the undesigned coincidences in the
Bible, of the evidence from prophecy, of the metaphysical necessity for
an incarnation and atonement, he knew nothing, and it was a marvel to
all respectable young persons how Fitchew, whose ignorance would
disgrace a charity child, and who did not know that the world was
round, or the date of the battle of Hastings, should set himself up
against those who were so superior to him.

"What should we say," observed the superintendent of the Dissenting
Sunday-school one day to one of his classes, having Fitchew in his
mind, "of a man who, if he was on a voyage in a ship commanded by a
captain with a knowledge of navigation, should refuse in a storm to
obey orders, affirming that they were all of no use, and should betake
himself to his own little raft?"

Curiously enough, the Sunday before, the vicar, having the Dissenter in
his mind, had said just the same of "unlettered schismatics," as he
called them.

Fitchew always had one argument for those friends who strove to convert
him. "I don't see as them that goes to church are any better than them
as don't. What's he know about it?" meaning the parson or the
minister, as the case might be.

Fitchew was very rough and coarse, and rather grasping in his dealings
with those who employed him, not so much because he was naturally mean,
but because he was always determined that well-dressed folk should not
"put on him." Nevertheless, he was in his way sympathetic and even
tender, particularly to those persons who suffered as he did, for he
was afflicted with a kind of nervous dyspepsia, not infrequent even
amongst the poor, and it kept him awake at night and gave him the
"horrors."

"Well, Fitchew, are you any better?" said Miriam.

"Bad just now. Ain't had no regular sleep for a fortnight. Last night
it was awful. I kicked about and sat up; the noise in my ears was
something, I can tell you; and then the wind in me! It's my belief
that that there noise in my ears is the wind a coming out through them.
I couldn't stand it any longer, and I got up and walked up and down the
road. Would you believe it, the missus never stirred; there she lay
like a stone, and when I came in she says to me, 'Wot's the matter with
you?' That's just like her. She goes to bed, turns round, and never
knows nothing of anything till the morning. I could, have druv my head
agin the door-post."

"Well, she cannot help sleeping."

"No," after a long pause, "that's true enough. I tell you what it
is--_I_ don't want to live for ever."

"Cannot you do anything to help yourself? Have you seen the doctor?"

"Doctor!" in great scorn. "He's no more use than that there dog behind
me, nor yet half so much. I am better when I am at work, that's all as
I can tell."

"Have you had plenty to do lately?"

"No, not much. Folk are allers after me in the summer-time, but in the
winter, when their gardens don't want doing, they never have nothing to
say to me. There's one thing about my missus, though. She's precious
careful. I never touches the money part of the business. So we get's
along."

Miriam knew the "missus" well. She was a little thin-lipped woman,
who, notwithstanding her poverty, was most particularly clean. No
speck of dirt was to be seen on her person or in her cottage, but she
was as hard as flint. She never showed the least affection for her
husband. They had married late in life--why, nobody could tell--and
had one child, a girl, whom the mother seemed to disregard just as she
did her husband, saving that she dressed her and washed her with the
same care which she bestowed on her kettle and candlesticks.

"It's a good thing for you, Fitchew, that she is what she is."

Fitchew hesitated for some time.

"Yes, well, I said to myself, after I'd had a cup of tea and something
to eat this morning--I didn't say it afore then, though--that it might
be wuss. If she was allus a slaverin' on me and a pityin' me, it
wouldn't do me no good; and then we are as we are, and we must make the
best of it."

When Miriam parted from Fitchew she had still ten minutes' walk.
Before the ten minutes had expired the black veil of rain-cloud was
rolled still farther to the east, and the crescent of the young moon
gleamed in the dying twilight.

It poured with rain nevertheless during the night Miriam lay and
listened, thinking it would be wet and miserable on the following day.
She dropped off to sleep, and at four she rose and went to the window
and opened it wide. In streamed the fresh south-west morning air,
pure, delicious, scented with all that was sweet from fields and woods,
and the bearer inland even as far as Cowfold of Atlantic vitality,
dissipating fogs, disinfecting poisons--the Life-Giver.

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