Mark Rutherford's Deliverance by Mark Rutherford

I suppose that the reason why in novels the story ends with a marriage is partly that the excitement of the tale ceases then, and partly also because of a theory that marriage is an epoch, determining the career of life after it. The epoch once announced, nothing more need be explained; everything else follows as a matter of course. These notes of mine are autobiographical, and not a romance. I have never known much about epochs. I have had one or two, one specially when I first began to read and think; but after that, if I have changed, it has been slowly and imperceptibly. My life, therefore, is totally unfitted to be the basis of fiction. My return to Ellen, and our subsequent marriage, were only partially an epoch. A change had come, but it was one which had long been preparing. Ellen's experiences had altered her position, and mine too was altered. She had been driven into religion by trouble, and knowing nothing of criticism or philosophy, retained the old forms for her religious feeling. But the very quickness of her emotion caused her to welcome all new and living modes of expressing it. It is only when feeling has ceased to accompany a creed that it becomes fixed, and verbal departures from it are counted heresy. I too cared less for argument, and it even gave me pleasure to talk in her dialect, so familiar to me, but for so many years unused.

It was now necessary for me to add to my income. I had nothing upon which to depend save my newspaper, which was obviously insufficient. At last, I succeeded in obtaining some clerical employment. For no other work was I fit, for my training had not been special in any one direction. My hours were long, from ten in the morning till seven in the evening, and as I was three miles distant from the office, I was really away from home for eleven hours every day, excepting on Sundays. I began to calculate that my life consisted of nothing but the brief spaces allowed to me for rest, and these brief spaces I could not enjoy because I dwelt upon their brevity. There was some excuse for me. Never could there be any duty incumbent upon man much more inhuman and devoid of interest than my own. How often I thought about my friend Clark, and his experiences became mine. The whole day I did nothing but write, and what I wrote called forth no single faculty of the mind. Nobody who has not tried such an occupation can possibly forecast the strange habits, humours, fancies, and diseases which after a time it breeds. I was shut up in a room half below the ground. In this room were three other men besides myself, two of them between fifty and sixty, and one about three or four-and-twenty. All four of us kept books or copied letters from ten to seven, with an interval of three-quarters of an hour for dinner. In all three of these men, as in the case of Clark's companions, there had been developed, partly I suppose by the circumstance of enforced idleness of brain, the most loathsome tendency to obscenity. This was the one subject which was common ground, and upon which they could talk. It was fostered too by a passion for beer, which was supplied by the publican across the way, who was perpetually travelling to and fro with cans. My horror when I first found out into what society I was thrust was unspeakable. There was a clock within a hundred yards of my window which struck the hours and quarters. How I watched that clock! My spirits rose or fell with each division of the day. From ten to twelve there was nothing but gloom. By half-past twelve I began to discern dinner time, and the prospect was brighter. After dinner there was nothing to be done but doggedly to endure until five, and at five I was able to see over the distance from five to seven. My disgust at my companions, however, came to be mixed with pity. I found none of them cruel, and I received many little kindnesses from them. I discovered that their trade was largely answerable for the impurity of thought and speech which so shocked me. Its monotony compelled some countervailing stimulus, and as they had never been educated to care for anything in particular, they found the necessary relief in sensuality. At first they "chaffed" and worried me a good deal because of my silence, but at last they began to think I was "religious," and then they ceased to torment me. I rather encouraged them in the belief that I had a right to exemption from their conversation, and I passed, I believe, for a Plymouth brother. The only thing which they could not comprehend was that I made no attempt to convert them.