My father thought the world of him
and loved to play golf with him.... He was completely happy and
successful and popular. Then there was another man, an old canon who
taught me Latin before I went to Rugby, an old, untidy, dirty man,
whose sermons were dull and his manners bad. He was a failure in
life--and he was a failure to himself; dissatisfied with what he used
to call his 'bundle of rotten twigs,' his life and habits and
thoughts. But he thought that somewhere there was something he would
find that would save him--somewhere, sometime ... not God
merely--'like a key that will open all the doors in the house.' To me
he was fascinating. He knew so much, he was so humble, so kind, so
amusing. Nobody liked him, of course. They tried to turn him out of
the place, gave him a little living at last, and he married his cook.
Was she his key? She may have been ... I never saw him again. But I
used to wonder. Why was the doctor so happy and the little canon so
unhappy, the doctor so successful, the canon so unsuccessful? I
decided that the great thing was to be satisfied with oneself.
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