And now, when the question of voting had come, this repulsive fact told
more strongly against Mr. Farebrother than it had done before. One
would know much better what to do if men's characters were more
consistent, and especially if one's friends were invariably fit for any
function they desired to undertake! Lydgate was convinced that if
there had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would have
voted for him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on the subject: he
did not intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode's. On the other hand, there
was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply
curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for
extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that
they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant. Really, from his
point of view, Bulstrode was thoroughly justified.
But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something to make
him wince; and being a proud man, he was a little exasperated at being
obliged to wince. He did not like frustrating his own best purposes by
getting on bad terms with Bulstrode; he did not like voting against
Farebrother, and helping to deprive him of function and salary; and the
question occurred whether the additional forty pounds might not leave
the Vicar free from that ignoble care about winning at cards.
Moreover, Lydgate did not like the consciousness that in voting for
Tyke he should be voting on the side obviously convenient for himself.
But would the end really be his own convenience? Other people would
say so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for
the sake of making himself important and getting on in the world. What
then? He for his own part knew that if his personal prospects simply
had been concerned, he would not have cared a rotten nut for the
banker's friendship or enmity. What he really cared for was a medium
for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was he not bound
to prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could
demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and test therapeutic
results, before anything else connected with this chaplaincy? For the
first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of
small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity. At the end
of his inward debate, when he set out for the hospital, his hope was
really in the chance that discussion might somehow give a new aspect to
the question, and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for
voting. I think he trusted a little also to the energy which is
begotten by circumstances--some feeling rushing warmly and making
resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had only made it more
difficult. However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on
which side he would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting
the subjection which had been forced upon him. It would have seemed
beforehand like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his
unmixed resolutions of independence and his select purposes, would find
himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of
which was repugnant to him. In his student's chambers, he had
prearranged his social action quite differently.