This book is the first part of a study of middle-class Non-conformist life during the last forty years, its geography and incidents neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction but built up of both. Like Bunyan, ‘think I may truly say that, to the best of my remembrance, all the things that here I discourse of, I mean as to matter of fact, have been acted upon the stage of this world, even many times before mine eyes.’

Prelude — Trevanion

Chapter I

Uncle Nather

1

Cornwall enjoys its funerals; and Providence had provided an excellent day for this one. A spring breeze blew aside the rain and ran over the April cornfields, like a hand stroking their greenness into warmer colour.

Trevanion Methodism was laying its pastor to rest. And certainly it was time that the Reverend Matthew Arnison knew some rest. His ministry here had been brief, less than two years. But it had been crowded with the busyness which in religious circles passes for work. He had run bazaars and jumble sales—had built a new church in a village adjacent—had cleared, by efforts more sapping than the writing of a great book or the exploration of a wild country, debts on several village causes. He had conducted a fiery evangelical campaign, for when its terrors did not lie too sternly on his spirit he was deeply in love with the Gospel. The last of his seven children (of whom the two eldest had died in Ceylon) had been born in Trevanion. And now, while still short of his fortieth year, after long struggling with what was more exhaustion than the influenza epidemic, in April 1897 Matthew Arnison was laid out for burial.

His eldest son, John, aged eight, was watching the congregation gather for the last occasion on which his father would matter to anybody. He was clad in new-purchased black of a gloomy hue which it is severely accurate, as well as conventional, to call Victorian. Not the least of death’s terrors for the genteel poor was the necessity laid on them by society, as rigorously as any ceremonial feast enjoined by Hinduism on its priest-pillaged votaries, to run into mourning which ravaged their mean resources. The Reverend Matthew Arnison’s prolonged illness had sunk these to almost nothing. But his widow would have died rather than fail in proper respect to her loss.

John, a grim little figure, was mildly shocked, and more surprised than shocked, to see his father’s eldest brother, Uncle Nathaniel, seated on the wall of the manse garden, above the bed of gold-flowering barberry. Uncle Nather also was watching the church fill up. He was smoking a black pipe, and was in reverie, broken by curiosity as to the ways and appearance of these outlandish southern folk. He was thinking of Matthew, who was lying dead inside that church.

Slowly drawing at his twist as he eyed the sombre gathering, Nather tried to fit into Arnisonian philosophy and perspective the years that had suddenly snapped. A mind tenacious (but slow to lay hands on what it sought) laboriously recovered a long-hidden past. Matthew he hardly remembered, and remembered most as a boy still going to school when he, Nather, had already been for years the mainstay of the Westmorland farm. Through what followed, Nather, tolerant and easy-going, had been largely neutral. Matthew, after absorbing the local schoolmaster’s lore at a rate which soon caused that learned but honest man to confess that he could teach him no jot or tittle more, had gone as apprentice to a godly draper in Carlisle; and the farm had scarcely seen him again.

Yet the little that Nather remembered had been distinctly promising; Matthew would have grown into an adequate enough Arnison. He had had a way with sheep and horses. The fells never tired him. He had been handy with a gun, even for a Westmorlander. In harvest, when everyone ran about trying to make sure of a cushat pie, Matthew had always been able to make sure of almost more pies than family and farm-hands together could account for in a month of concentrated field-labour; and this says a great deal, for mountain folk have mountain appetites, and cushat pie is very good. He would clearly have made a fine farmer. But instead, thanks to his employer’s influence, he had had the misfortune to be what they called converted, at the hands of the people called Methodists; had developed a wonderful gift of speaking, and entered on a brief course of glory as ‘the boy preacher,’ passing thence into the ministry. Then he had gone abroad, and his gifts had been wasted in a place called Ceylon, which had something to do with icy mountains and heathen with silly customs; Nather had never heard tell of cushats or sheep or rabbits there. And he had completed the offence (as they say in legal circles) by marrying this foreign woman, whose parents lived in Derbyshire.

He had reappeared, after an immense interval changed to sallow from ruddy—almost ghostly thin, tenuously frail. He had had much sickness in Ceylon apparently; it was very hot there. He had had a powerful lot of work too, though Nather never managed to find out what manner of work it was or how it came to be so exhausting. Not that he tried very desperately; for the most part he merely accepted Matthew, when he turned up again, with the awkward kindness of an elder brother who was almost a generation removed and was now doubly separated by these incredible changes of place and circumstance. Matthew on his visit preached in the Scarghyll Methodist chapel, a place which all true Arnisons felt ought not to be countenanced. The rest had said it was a sin to hear the apostate. But Nather had risked it, and it had seemed to him that Matthew spoke well. A bit too earnestly, perhaps—religion never seemed to the Arnisons a matter for such excitement. But, on the whole, sensibly and well, making some good points.

His wife, too—Martha and Peter never tired of running her down, but when at last she appeared she seemed a nice body, gentle and anxious to please. Martha affirmed that she was unbearably stuck-up—at this point Uncle Nather felt so perplexed that he sought external stimulus, and scratched his head hard with his pipe. But no, he could not see it; could not see that Madge was stuck-up. She was different, of course; she spoke differently, and she knew nothing about sheep and seemed outlandishly soft-mannered and soft-voiced. But she had not been stuck-up, she had seemed only to want to be accepted as an Arnison, an ambition which Martha and Peter had sternly frustrated. She had been sent back a stranger, as she had come to them. No doubt deservedly. It had been a bad business (the best Arnisonian opinion concurred) from start to finish. All very perplexing, wrong and strange. Now it had ended.

2

It had been perplexing, wrong and strange—from start to finish, unArnisonian.

Take first that matter of turning Methodist. While a purist might cavil at the application of the adjective ‘religious’ to the Arnison clan, he could not deny their sullenly fierce adherence to the Established Church. And to established everything else. Their world was as massively sound and immovable as the mountains which overlooked them. In these days when so many satirists are about, with their needles ready for the Starkadder school of fiction which has succeeded the Kailyard school of blessed memory, it is wiser not to set down the Arnisons as they were, but to shade down the almost incredible outlines of truth. They shall be shaded down accordingly.

The Arnisons of Scarghyll Farm had lived on their ridge midway between the Cumbrian hills and the hardly less impressive line of the Pennines, at least since Harold Arnison had been killed fighting against his King, at Lewes in Sussex. What had he been doing in a foreign land? and one so distant? and against his lawful King? Part explanation (but as an excuse unsatisfactory) was that he had gone in the following of John de Lancaster, Baron of Kendal. His conduct showed an un-Arnisonian streak, which after the lapse of centuries reappeared in Captain James Arnison, who fought (again in opposition to his rightful King) under Cromwell, and in the intervals of fighting exhorted his men to look for that Fifth Monarchy which was about to supplant all earthly monarchies. And the same streak reappeared in Matthew, who had also preached in the same non-conforming fashion, who had also gone to foreign parts; who had married Marjorie Hendred of Derbyshire, instead of the girl the Arnisons held he should have married. If he had married Fanny Thwaites, he would in due season have taken over Kirkby Odin Farm, which nestles under Crossfell. He would have made one more knot in the network of Arnisons and semi-Arnisons who made this region an Isle of Arnisonia, set in an alien world.

His conduct had so estranged and angered his family, that his own father cut him off with twenty pounds (Matthew, who felt this deeply, always wondered why he had gone above the usual shilling; it was un-Arnisonian to spend a penny above necessity), and his wealthy uncle Paul cut him off with nothing and with the observation, duly written in his will, that ‘no money of mine is to go into foreign parts’.

This account, of staunchness from generation to generation (except for the three deplorable apostates cited) for King and Westmorland and Established Church, will serve for the Arnison story if it is added that, from generation to generation also, they were queerly compounded of celibacy and far-from-celibacy. Matthew, for example, was the youngest of a family of no less than nine, of whom he was the only one who married. And this was the Arnison habit, either to marry thoroughly or not at all.

3

Nather himself, gentlest of a dour clan, though he accepted the family decision to treat the rebel as a stranger, had resented his youngest brother’s vagaries least of anyone. Had he known how Matthew, whether in his dusty mission station in Ceylon or the warm moisture-laden airs of his Cornish circuit, felt sick for the bleakness of his own Westmorland—how the winter vision of that line of snows, Blencathra, Helvellyn, Scafell, and eastward the immense length of Crossfell (whence the ravens came flying solitary in the deep blue bell of heaven), would suddenly blot out the present with a nostalgia which only recollection of ‘the will of God’ could banish again—his heart would have softened still further. It was far from hard as he sat on that wall, smoking his black pipe, and watching the gathering of these people who had asked Matthew to talk to them and had actually paid him for doing it. That paying Matthew, the youngest and least deserving of consideration of all of them, had deeply impressed the Arnisons—not with any esteem for their brother, but as one more proof, and surely the most astounding of all, of the well-known daftness of foreigners. A fool and his money are soon parted, particularly a foreign fool.

The church was filling up. Methodism was strong in Trevanion, and Cornish people appreciate a good preacher, such as the one they had lost. Uncle Nather, cross-legged (an old shepherd’s trick) on the top of his low stone wall, where all the mourners could see him and wonder at the impassive face with its grizzled hair and storm-beaten features, had passed into a Norseman’s reverie. Staring as at a dream, he sat there in a numb winter’s mood, feeling for his slow groping thoughts—as on bleak January nights, on the fells in lambing-time, he had often felt for tobacco and matches, left under some stone. The brain, by a process of shifting here and there, recovered them. Then they were blurring out again, just as the scrap of hillside earth seen in some momentary lifting of the mist blurs out again into one chill indistinguishable blanket of fog. He was content to sit on and on, endlessly, now wondering, now merely watching, now neither wondering nor watching but just rubbing tobacco together in his palm. There is no telling how long he might have stayed there if he had not been confronted by a small tear-stained face.

‘Mother says she thinks the service is ready to begin now,’ said John. ‘So can you come, please, Uncle Nather.’

Uncle Nather smiled down at him, a kindly smile. ‘All right, lad,’ he said. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and went into the church.

Chapter II

Aunt Martha

1

The funeral was over, and its pressed-down misery would presently have a chance to lift from the spirit. The weeping faces, the black coats and gowns, the almost unbearable oppression of the terrible passages from St. Paul and of the Dead March afterwards, would mercifully fade into memory. And the three Arnisons who had made the unprecedented journey from Scarghyll to Cornwall were anxious to close this chapter of their lives, and to get back.

Nather had wondered, with a pricking of conscience, whether they ought not to do something for their brother’s children, now left in poverty. But his brother Peter had vetoed this savagely. Peter carried grievances against life, which made him oppose an uncompromising negative to all it brought him. A man of low tastes and desires, unworthy of an Arnison, he had wanted to be a blacksmith, which the family forbade as too degraded a calling, every other Arnison having been a farmer. He had also wanted to marry a blacksmith’s daughter, which again had been forbidden. He had consented, compulsorily, to be a farmer; and, since he could not marry the blacksmith’s daughter, had fallen back on the Arnison alternative of refusing to marry at all. He had cherished a special and individual wrath at Matthew, who had declined to become a farmer and had married where he would. Matthew had had his fun in life: he should not have Arnison money as well, nor should the partner in his guilt profit by her Arnison connection.

Martha had vetoed Nather’s timid suggestion most emphatically of all. She considered she had done a great deal for her brother’s family by coming down to see him die. They had borne the outrageous expense of their own fares for this monstrous journey, and she felt secretly resentful that her sister-in-law, of whose opulence she enviously noted the signs, had not offered to meet it. She herself had done much more than merely come down. She had taken a load of responsibility off her brother’s wife, in this last trying week. Only two days before the end, annoyed by hearing one of the children laugh while she was trying to ‘read the pa-aper,’ she had called them together and lectured them on the fact that their father was dying and alleged that this was because his own children were so unfeeling as to romp and make a continual noise, thereby preventing his getting better. She had reduced them to an ecstasy of wretchedness whose impression was to remain, whatever other experiences dropped into depths too far for memory’s plummet to reach them. She felt she had done her duty by her brother very efficiently.

Her veto alone, or even when reinforced by Peter’s, might not have overborne Nather’s uneasy conscience, much as the bachelor brothers stood in awe of their bachelor sisters. But Martha had been with her brother on the last day when his mind had been on earthly things. That day he had awakened to the realisation that he was leaving a widow and five children all but penniless; and the knowledge had been an agony to the dying man. Then by chance he had received by the morning mail circulars holding out the certain fortune that would come by investment in a number of South American mines. He had demanded pen and paper, and had written letters buying on his wife’s behalf enough shares to bring her in an income of a hundred pounds. This, added to her small allowance as a minister’s widow and the allowances for a minister’s children, used with extreme economy would (he reckoned) enable her to pay her way without having to take in washing or do anything else degrading and distressing to her husband to contemplate in his last hours of life. His failing mind had availed so far as to make these financial calculations and to write these letters, but had not been able to go the little further which would have told him that he could not pay for the shares he was buying. He had called in his wife, and with solemn urgency bidden her post the letters immediately. Then he had said contentedly, ‘My mind is at rest. You are all provided for,’ and had gathered his spirit together to pass away. His sister Martha had been a witness of the making of this provision for his family, and she had envied them. The Arnisons, whose living cost them nothing, coming out of a large farm’s abundance, did not dispense such large sums as a hundred pounds annually to the unmarried sister who ran their dairying. It seemed to her a very generous sum, and she could not readily see how her sister-in-law could possibly spend it all.

That sister-in-law, knowing the state of her husband’s finances, had sadly put the letters away unposted. Luckily, Matthew, accustomed to unquestioning obedience, had not even thought of asking her if she had done what he bade. He had been enabled to pass away untroubled by knowledge of her subterfuge.

2

After the burial, the family mourners assembled for midday dinner. Aunt Martha, with the ubiquitous efficiency of eyes accustomed to feeding chickens and counting them simultaneously (while also watching what the kitchen hands and the boy dunging the orchard were doing or omitting to do), inwardly summed up the evidences of prosperity. Their abundance and their quality aroused resentment, and reinforced the decision she had already taken on principle. This roomy manse and its furniture—they had no such splendour at Scarghyll, as was made by these plush chairs and the red plush couch! Madge had two servants, a cook and nurse-housemaid. Their very kindness was an offence, suggesting the butler-buttressed luxuriousness of this easy self-indulgent South, which had no idea what it was to have to work. All her brother Matthew had had to do was to talk; and anyone could do that. And all that Madge had had to do was to see to these children occasionally. She herself was busy about the kitchen or the parlour or the farm all day long. Why, she often drove the horse and trap into Pe’rith (Penrith), to market the eggs and poultry which she, admirable and untiring worker, took on, in addition to everything else, as her own special care. She felt again that Madge, who had so much money to squander, ought really to have offered at least to pay the railway fares of Nather and Peter and herself. These two servants now—compared with the rough girls she hired at Penrith!

Westmorland is a wild lovely country. But mountains are a soporific. They lie about you like vast soothing nurses—or kindly watch-dogs—or big delicious bears. And they shut you from all knowledge of what is happening on their barrier’s other side, where Sheffield and Barrow and Manchester fester in squalor and racking anxiety. They keep your mind in a nursery; youth to extreme age spent among the eternal hills is happiness, but it hides from you a world where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs. You are in danger of dreaming life away in a peaceful conviction that all that you behold is full of blessings, particularly if you behold it in someone else’s lot.

That Matthew’s death had instantaneously made his wife and children homeless—that his widow’s mind in its numb distress was already wondering where she was to settle a home for her baby family, with the few sticks that out of all this plush splendour and solid comfort were the only bit that was hers—this never occurred to Miss Martha Arnison. The manse and its appurtenances were needed for a new pastor. The neat-handed hovering consideration of the housemaid, assisted by the cook, was not the suppressed obsequiousness of luxury’s minions, but the heart-broken kindness of Cornish girls, distressed in their mistress’s patiently borne bereavement and misery. All this was hidden from Northern eyes.

3

The Arnisonian visitation closed that afternoon, when the two brothers and their sister caught a train back to the North. At the station Aunt Martha’s grimness softened into a smile of wintry encouragement. She drew the children together, and told them, jointly and severally, ‘You must think of your poor dead father. You must always remember your father, and try to be like him.’ Which was illogical, when we reflect how she had spoken of that father when he was alive. When he had left his draping to become a Methodist minister, it was she who felicitously voiced the clan judgment. It was ‘a rare silly trick.’ It had been a still rarer and sillier when he had gone abroad as a missionary. So Aunt Martha’s exhortation may seem unexpected. But how right and fitting it was, at such a moment!

‘Always remember your father!’ she said severely.

‘There, you’re not to start crying and vexing your mother!’

She singled out John, as the point where these dratted infants’ wickedness drew to a head. ‘Remember that you are the oldest and are not to play about and make a noise and aggravate your poor mother and older people. You have to begin to try to be a good boy, and I hope your mother’ll send you to some school where you’ll be larned some manners. So always remember your father.’

She dismissed him with a kiss that was like a slap, and proceeded to deal with the others similarly. She was helping her sister-in-law to the last.

Nather’s eyes were moist and he had cleared his throat several times in a way that aroused her suspicions. She caught him buying some goodies—‘For the vera la’al one,’ he explained in extenuation, pointing to five-year-old Trixie (Harold and baby Peter were not seeing them off). She detected other, more dangerous symptoms of weakness, so shepherded both brothers into their railway carriage, and addressed a last word of comfort to the widow. ‘You have a hundred a year, a hundred a year,’ she reminded her. ‘Matthew told me so. I wish I had a hundred a year.’

And with these reassuring words the children of Matthew Arnison were waved out of the horizon of their father’s family, into which they had been brought for one most uncomfortable week.

Chapter III

John

1

That night, early, the children passed swiftly into sleep, with the exhaustion of frames that have been shaken by hysteria. All except John, who lay awake, thinking of what people had told him, that he would never see his father again. But he was not really thinking of this, for as yet he did not know what it meant, and had not the dimmest conception of the stark huddled years that lay ahead. He was merely wretched, and too excited to be tired—yet. Miserable in himself and in the misery induced by what he had been told.

Everyone had been talking of his father; and Aunt Martha had told him he must always remember him. He tried, dutifully, to do it, as he lay there, very still and solemn. At the back of the vivid memories of this brief Cornish sojourn which (though he did not know it) was almost over, were other memories, equally vivid but fewer, of a country of tropical storms and dazzling sunshine, and of a father not always on a sick-bed but a perpetual marvel to those whose youth had not been spent among Westmorland fells. Excursions with that father, who in his home was a disciplinarian who might have shocked Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street, were particularly joyous, for on these he relaxed into a comrade. John remembered paddling across shallow streams, and being carried shoulder-high across those that were not so shallow. Some of the experiences had been wildly exciting. That time, for example, when a cobra had been located under the Girls’ School, and a punitive expedition had smoked him out and slain him. His father had headed it, carrying a gun (he always took a gun to cobras—he used to say that they could strike as quick as lightning); and a small boy had brought up the rear, very awed and afraid, armed with a tree-branch in case the cobra came rushing at him as quick as lightning.

But his father mingled very little, on the whole, with the cloudy mass of pictures which made up John’s brain. They were nearly all pictures suffused with the stillness of intense loneliness. Sunsets flashed and disappeared, thrust across the west like a red dagger of blood and flame. In the eve-spangled boughs of the simul under which he was playing, a squabble of parakeets collected before flying off to roost. Scarlet and emerald flitted in and out of the boughs far overhead of a small boy who was gathering dazzling feathers that fell from the quarrellers. A hoopoe strutted on a sunlit patch.

The badminton court had known what seemed a deliberate defiance dance one Sunday: covies of crows and vultures, bevies of jackals, had paraded there for hours, as if they knew that the missionary never shot on Sundays. (On week-days, like other Englishmen, he shot most things.) John remembered his father’s itching fingers and his glances towards his gun. But he had nobly refrained. He was not going to imperil his eternal salvation, even for a bit of killing. Why, he kept the Sabbath so strictly that once, when a Government official had driven over on urgent business, he had refused to see him, though his wife had broken through the submissive habit of years and dared to beg him to break his rule, just for this once.

Thought of Ceylon brought back also aromatic bazaar memories: the booths and their spices: the potters and their delightful wares, tiny earthen cups and platters: flickering saucer-lamps: and all the racial miscellany of that island town.

But the Ceylon memories faded out. The last two years took possession. They had been full and eager, and happy. Seeing little of their mother, who was occupied with a dying man, the children had run wild by necessity and with little loss, rambling in a garden which seemed immense though it was only a smallish shrubbery with flower-beds. John, with the widest freedom of all, had searched the renowned Trevanion sands, shell-collecting: had gone off for hours on the moors. And if the Demiurge, as in T. E. Brown’s great poem, had taken him and laid him on his table, and opened up his mind with his scalpel, he would have cried, ‘Why, bless me! this brain is packed with nonsense and hotchpotch! sunsets— hawthorn blossom—enormous stretches of bog and heather—creaking of corncrakes—tags of imperfectly apprehended popular song! then, again, stuff from some Eastern country—oh, I can’t be bothered to examine it further! Take it, some of you pupil-angels, and see if you can make anything of it. It isn’t worth a master analyst’s time.’

The sunsets were there all right; not only Eastern ones, but vast wings of terrible brightness, seen evening by evening from a bedroom window that looked towards the Cornish sea—frightening him almost to death, with their menace of blazing dying worlds. They linked directly up with that fact of religion which had been inculcated so much more deeply than any other, the appalling certainty of Judgment and the almost certainty of everlasting punishment in Hell. Night after night he had prayed, ‘Oh God, please put your Judgment Day further off,’ until one time when his father, passing his door, had heard him sobbing and had come in to ask why. When he learnt, Matthew had been very gentle and very tender, and had told John, first of all, that it was no use praying such a prayer, for the Day of Judgment was fixed irrevocably and God would under no circumstances consent to change it; and secondly, that he must lie down to sleep in peace, for God would never send a little child to Hell. Hell was only for incorrigible grown-up sinners. It is doubtful if this was sound Methodist doctrine, as Matthew had learnt and understood sound Methodist doctrine. But in that hour Matthew learnt that some of the nonsense which had come to him inextricably mingled with truth was nonsense; and nonsense that he flatly refused to believe, when it was applied, not to that vague vast abstraction, ‘sinners’ in general, but to his own child. It was a pity that he never lived to work out the implications of this discovery, and to put them into his preaching.

2

His mother came in and found John still awake, though growing drowsy. He summoned full consciousness and turned towards her. Her face was as he had never seen it. The ghost of new beginnings was there; it was the face of one who is looking into a foreground filled with shadows. He had seen her crying during the service and at the grave-side, and knew she had been crying now.

She lingered, after kissing him again good night, caressing his hair as he lay there very still and quiet. Then she said, ‘You’d better get to sleep now, John. You must be very tired.’

He was; and after she left him he was able to sleep. Presently he half heard her, in a subdued softened manner, playing hymns to herself, in the drawing-room downstairs. The hymns soothed him, as he snuggled into the pillows. They completed the feeling that the day had been Sunday, though a more awful dreadful Sunday than he had ever known. Hymns always ended the Day of Rest. They were generally terrifying hymns, for his father’s mood had been fiercely Apocalyptic, running much on the doom which awaited those who did not snatch their fleeting chance of safety, in a world on whose dissolution Hell and Satan waited impatiently. Hymns stormy with a kind of sullen menace, as though the Universe were very very angry and angry always (which, indeed, is what a large school of Christian thought has consistently held), but might, if placated, be content for the present to buzz about without actually stinging. The best of them, however, sank into minor keys, comforting and not shaking you. He knew that these were the ones his mother preferred, and it was these that she was playing now. ‘The sands of Time are sinking’; they were sinking round his head now, in delicious encircling subsidence of sleep, falling, falling . . . falling.

Once he had mysteriously escaped from the actual singing of the Sunday evening hymns, and had been able to read to music, a deep enthralling pleasure, by an open window in summer dusk, with a lamp and screened nook to himself. The book had been a Life of Oliver Cromwell (passed, after hesitation, as fit for Sabbath study), open at a chapter entitled ‘The Martyrdom of Sir Harry Vane’; and the music had been

In the shadow of His wings
there is rest. . . sweet rest.

Music and reading had gone wonderfully together—a tune lingering, insidious, soothingly mournful, and a death about which there was nothing for tears, nothing but well and fair, nothing of hideous mind-torturing agony (such as came from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, whose perusal stabbed imagination to such vivid misery). His mother was playing it now; and the shadow of His wings closed round on the boy’s tired brain and bade it rest.

And in the utter release of sleep it escaped into a world which, when not actually forbidden ground, lay at least under grave suspicion.

3

In each of us ‘spirits of a diverse mood’ contend for masterdom. The spirits which spoke of an earth in sin and under condemnation’s dark cloud so far had won the victory—officially. They occupied the boy’s mind, and he knew far too many hours of anguish, as he thought about Hell and imagined its miseries for himself, and also the appalling wretchedness of being saved but—parted for ever—and ever—that dreadful shaking word!—from some loved brother or sister. How did time begin? How could it end? What was eternity? What would eternal damnation be like?

Day after day, night after agonising night; and the end still as far off as when your doom began! It was hard to reconcile with the sad kind eyes of the Saviour. But then, he too was the fellow-victim of a Power so hard and implacable that only by a shirking of logic could it be held to be even sentient, far less all-wise and all-merciful (as of course John knew it was).

But other spirits—of the ‘world,’ that was so ‘worldly’ and so wicked in that worldliness—in their own way and their own time were paying some attention to the boy. Not laying serious siege to his allegiance yet, they were content to leave him acquiescingly Methodist. But their activities were all about him, and shafts and sallies broke in on what had been guarded by so many prayers and precepts. When the fishing-boats came in by Trevanion pier, a human excited group (of which the screaming gulls made themselves an almost human part) gathered, not bothering much about hell-fire, but only about pilchards and pollack and herrings. John, sadly neglected in his father’s long illness, was in it. He was there when it crowded, awed and delighted, about a shark that had been caught and hung up as a trophy. He saw the ‘world’ strut along Trevanion promenade, hardly older than himself—bold-eyed boys and girls lustily singing ‘O Dorothy, Dorothy Dean,’ a chant celebrating a dashing lady who had

suddenly flown
To regions unknown,
With a man in a flying machine!

Sometimes this was wittily emended to

With a man in a sausage-machine.

Another song, carrying a still worse suggestion of entrancing swank and swagger (you evidently had to sing it so, with a throwing out of limbs and shoulders), began with the assertion that you meant

To walk along the Balla-bal-la,
With an independent air,

arousing admiration in the female populace; and it ended with the claim that you were

The man that broke the bank at Monte Car-lo!

These were among the joys of the Atlantic seaboard, which had its ravishing terrors also, fiercest in the storms of winter. And behind the manse were Trevanion woods, in which there was said to lurk a ‘badger-bear’ and once even a wolf (rumours which kept one small boy very closely inside a garden); and the stretching heathery wilderness which went on without border or finish. They had made their contribution (these spirits of unbaptized dread and happiness) to the education of a person whose formal education had included so much that was far more important; and they jostled now, beside hymns and ‘Scripture portions’ and desultory lessons at a dame’s school, inside his head.

When his mother came in later, she kissed him, and in her loneliness was solaced to see that he was soundly and quietly asleep. He had escaped from the day’s grimness at last. He had escaped from it so completely, that he was confronting the denizens of Trevanion’s wooded terrible fastnesses, badger-bears and wolves and worse, with complete coolness and the complete success which the fearless spirit merits. He was no longer moving in the hushed household waiting for a dying man’s passing, nor standing in the last scene by the grave. He was walking along the Balla-bal-la, with an independent air—betwixt heather and sunlit sea. He was breaking the bank at Monte-Car-lo—a high stockaded bank, fearsomely held by giants and Indians and cobras that struck as quick as lightning. The Happy Warrior smiled, as he thought of their foolish laborious inadequacy!

Chapter IV

Mrs. Arnison

1

After saying good-night to John, Mrs. Arnison had played hymns—partly because hymns were a means of grace and she needed grace very greatly, partly because they interposed a barrier between her and thought, and still more, between her and recent memory. For the future she was not troubled as yet.

But the past was still a numbing memory. She thought dutifully of her husband; it was easy to glow with remembrance of his splendid work. Friends had written to her of this: Matthew was ‘in the first rank as preacher, administrator and linguist.’ An old colleague of his, a notorious war-horse, in a letter of comfort and congratulation spoke of ‘a glorious fighting record! How proud—humbly proud—must she be, whose honour and privilege it was to uphold him through it all!’

It was all true. Matthew had been able and masterful. She thought with solemn admiration, of how he had refused to spare himself. Sickness he had thrust remorselessly from him, and flatly denied its presence. Even when he lay on his six months’ death-bed, while his flock, with the inexhaustible kindness of the people called Methodists, ministered to him, mind and body had fought their hopeless rearguard action fiercely. Norse blood had revolted from the notion of ‘a cow’s death.’ He was a Westmorlander, and would go out in battle, as a Viking should—and then out to sea in his blazing war-vessel, whose dragon-front shone towards the sunset and above the hissing waves.

But her own share in all this greatness had included heart-break as well as glory. Two children, her eldest, lay buried in Ceylon; and memory persistently revealed itself as two voices. One somewhat too assertive, like an awkward loud-voiced child who is bidden to show off, reminded her that a great life lived for the sake of the Kingdom had just finished triumphantly. Another voice, a patient persistent speaker, spoke of this or that terrifying detail and incident, which surely in the eternal account were not worthy of being reckoned for even a moment. And this second voice seemed to want to unburden itself of perfectly endless matter. Waiting in numb despair for a child to die: illness in the household almost always, and especially, the illness of poor Robert, whom God had seen fit to afflict so: her husband’s failing health and refusal to care about it, and his fits of black appalling Northern gloom: the servants and the labour of running a vast compound and huge untidy bungalow (built originally for a planter) on a missionary’s income. Her own steady effort to keep alive the illusion that she too, as well as her husband, was a missionary, by her women’s Bible class each week and her class in the Girls’ School. It seemed sometimes as if she were too tired out to be as grief-prostrated as she knew she was, and really was.

2

When she had finished with her hymn-playing and her devotions, and was at last in bed, then the future began to grow insistent. She was not disquieted about it, she told herself, and on the whole this was true. But there was this immediate problem, of where she was to take her family, and it was exceedingly hard. For years she had had to make no decision, except in trivial domestic details. She had been in the position of a subordinate officer, whose commanding general with his chief of staff arranges when and where the battle is to be fought or the advance made. All the subordinate has to do is to see to the mere means and sinews—the men, guns, ammunition, food and transport. The real burden has been already carried by the great minds on top.

Her immediate task was the evacuation of the manse. Even here the burden would be in part carried by others—the last occasion when outside help would be hers. The circuit stewards’ wives, efficient, painstaking, sympathetic, would see to the spring-cleaning and redecorating. She herself, at last able to give some attention to the children’s needs, would darn and mend and overhaul their clothes, and pack and then go. She thought she could do it in a month. Yes, she was sure she could do it in a month.

Suddenly her mind subsided into fright. A sheltered childhood and a married life of complete submergence had left her incapable of planning except in panic—a rabbit’s action of scuttle to the nearest hole. Plans, schemes, foresight—they were only such as emergency, looming always as immediately over her, startled her into forming and accepting. She had told herself that she would wait until to-morrow before deciding where she would go from Trevanion. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ she had reminded herself. It was to become almost her favourite quotation and solace; yet no one ever paid less attention to its implications. It is one of the few sayings of Our Lord which we may be sure were accompanied by a smile; its kindly pitying cynicism is more healing and helpful than the too idyllic (at any rate, too idyllic for our hard rigid industrial civilisation) advice about considering the lilies, who are finely clothed whatever they do or do not do. The words were surely meant for overburdened, forlornly gallant spirits such as Madge Arnison, with her face shining with courage and love and the charming air of worldly wisdom which the whole tenor of her life made provokingly absurd. She quoted them—often. But having quoted them, she ‘had done with that matter’ (like Wordsworth after writing his ‘Ode to Duty’).

It was almost midnight, an hour when no one should take any decision. In a few brief hours more the sun would be shining, the world and its perplexities would come to her unclouded by her own shadows—or at least, not shut in by them as by a dark tent. She could think calmly, could even ask advice. But the moment the problem of where they were to go next came home to her, as it could not come home while Matthew was still alive or waiting for burial, she felt she must settle it—immediately. She sprang out of bed, and knelt in passionate praying. Then she lit a candle, and re-read the letter which had come from her surviving brother Hamlet that morning.

He was living in Oakenshaw, a suburb of Manchester, some ten miles from their childhood’s home in the Derbyshire valley of Goitdale. He urged her to live there too, and his advice was reinforced by her memory of Oakenshaw in the sixties, when it was a place of fields very notable for cowslips. Hamlet said that he would be able to ‘keep in constant touch with her,’ a favourite phrase of his, which his nephews and niece, when they grew up to years of sophistication, found ironically exact. He would ‘look after her,’ and all would be as it was in the days when they lived in Goitdale together. The prospect was idyllic, and her thought ran towards it.

In the shaking candlelight, with a hand trembling with tiredness and emotion, she wrote back, begging him to find them a house in Oakenshaw. She addressed and sealed the envelope. Then, feeling the chillness of early morning in her thin-clad body, as the excitement left her, she got back into bed, released from the day at last, and was able to sleep.

Part I — Oakenshaw

Chapter I

1

Madge Arnison’s childhood had been spent in Derbyshire, in Ufferton, a village on whose deep rusticity the new industrial age began to break in when coal was found on the neighbouring hills. To break in, but not to shatter; the countryside was not gashed and blasted into desolation, as it has been since. The primroses and orchises continued. The coal was mined in desultory (though in those days sufficiently paying) manner. The squire collected his royalties and drew his fees as Director of the Goit Colliery Company; the village and other near-by villages provided miners.

‘Gurt o’ Goit’ was the squire. In later days he was raised to the peerage as Lord Goitdale. But with his own tenants he kept a homelier designation, ever since the year in which Mr. Gladstone made his disgraceful attack on religion, morality and property. It was in that year that Gurt o’ Goit felt the call to step out from his life of unobtrusive usefulness as a fine old country gentleman (the kind of whom the obituary notices observe, that we have far too few of such nowadays). He strode into the battle-line accordingly, and stood for Parliament. Now the Gurt demesnes were (and are) rich in conies; and when the Tory candidate for the suffrages of the free and independent electors who lived on his estates rose majestically at his opening meeting, a voice greeted him as ‘Owd Rabbitmuck.’ It belonged to Charlie Elton, who had been a Chartist and was now a Radical—a sinful and mischievous person, unfortunately not resident where correction could reach him. The North has a coarse sense of humour, and the reference to the appearance of the sloping lawns around Gurt Hall immediately sprang into a territorial title; to this day, Baron Gurt of Goitdale has a name omitted from Debrett, and is known, not altogether unaffectionately, as Lord Rabbitmuck.

Mr. Gurt was nominally Chairman of the Goit Colliery Company. Actually he was the Colliery, as well as its landlord; and between him and the miners was only his factor and steward, James Hendred, Mrs. Arnison’s father. James Hendred was an unusual man, set in a position which called for continual tact. Not a Goitdaler, he had come from a Cheshire town where he had run ‘an academy for young gentlemen.’ Wearying of sub-adolescent minds, he answered an advertisement when the Goit Colliery Company was first formed, interviewed Owd Rabbitmuck and impressed him by his manner of mature intelligence, and was appointed to oversee the new business. As a matter of fact, he made it entirely, from the beginning, for Owd Rabbitmuck’s notion of business was to ride round occasionally on a grey cob, and roar affably at anyone he met. Hendred became more and more trusted, and deserved such trust. He built up a small fortune for his employer and a competence and comfortable home for his own family.

Only once did his wife fear for him, and that was when the Chairman of the Company first stood for Parliament—against that mischievous and wildly subversive politician Mr. Gladstone. Owd Rabbitmuck automatically and without a thought appointed Jimmy Hendred as his election agent, and wasted no more time on that matter. He would ride round and roar as usual (only somewhat more so), he would make speeches when Hendred told him he should, he would sign his name when Hendred had written any letters he ought to write; and in due season he would depart to assist the House of Commons in governing a threatened land.

Now Jimmy Hendred had been a Chartist in the bad time, not twenty years past, when it had seemed as if a slight push might send England (even England) reeling into revolution, radicalism, republicanism, atheism, and one trembles to think what else. Assuredly Mr. Gurt had no suspicion of this, or his factor’s job would have ended. When, therefore, James came home and told her that the Squire had appointed him to do his electioneering for him, as he did everything else, Elizabeth Hendred had said nothing, being a wife with a deep sense of fairness. But she had seen as in vision their comfortable home vanish into dream. She knew her husband’s political convictions were tenaciously held; and she admitted, even in her momentary wretchedness, that he must be honest. James read her thought in her eyes, and answered it immediately. ‘I’ll do the job. There’s nothing to be gained by running your head against a brick wall, once you know it is brick. And old Gurt is honest, anyway—which is more than you can say for the feller they’ve sent against him.’ This statement was strictly true. So little hope had the Liberals of winning Goitdale, that they had sent as their candidate a moneyed rascal whom even his own side would be sorry to see win.

Mr. Gurt was elected, and feasted his tenantry in recognition of his victory and their loyalty. In his speech he had a special word of approval for his factor, and in a gush of enthusiasm announced that as long as he lived he would have no other election agent. His destiny thus settled, James Hendred thereafter styled himself ‘a Liberal Conservative.’ What he meant was that he was close enough to the miners on the Goit estate to know that the contemporary division of society was possible only because man is the silliest of all the animals, and the most patient—and that he knew also that Owd Rabbitmuck, kindly and affable though he was, was incapable of rising to any suspicion of imperfections in the British constitution or the British arrangement of people in classes, and would be cholerically incapable of tolerating that his factor or anyone else in his power should suspect it either.

We may feel to-day entitled to smile at the Semitic belief that the Ten Commandments came down perfect from Sinai, or at the later belief of the Ephesians that their Image of Diana had descended to them similarly perfect. But if our forefathers’ attitude towards the laws and usages of England (which none but Roundheads, Jacobins, Radicals, Socialists, and lastly, Bolshies could possibly want to change) differed in any way from these convictions, the difference is not readily perceptible. James Hendred was a man wiser, better educated, and more civilised than Owd Rabbitmuck, or Young Rabbitmuck who was to succeed him in both Houses of Parliament. But he was not going to starve his wife and children for the sake of ideas he could not help forward. He remained, therefore, a Liberal Conservative, and voted as Owd Rabbitmuck told him, while hoping that someone somehow somewhere would dare to vote and speak and act otherwise than the Owd Rabbitmucks of this world decree. His wife, though equally without illusions as to the current scheme of things, helped to keep him soundly Tory (except in the places of his mind, where unorthodoxy could do no harm). Her stock was Irish, not of the depressed peasant stock, but Anglo-Irish. More rigidly than her husband, she accepted their position in that Derbyshire village, and was greatly respected and a little feared.

2

Marjorie Hendred, their daughter, began life as a darling, and was one of those women whom no amount of suffering and privation can rob of this character. We may, if we please, trace to her Wicklow grandmother the lively quickness of mind and natural ease of manner which gave her seriousness a ‘flitting’ quality, as of a butterfly’s wings fanning and opening and shutting, their owner ready to quiver and swing up into sunlight. As all the world knows, this is not a quality which belongs to Manchester (and Derbyshire is very near to Manchester). Manchester is a place of sombre powerful minds, men and women who build industries and empires and missions—leaders in radicalism and new verse, crusaders against wrong and exploitation, lovers of eternity whose souls relax only into business and drama that is tragic (very) and their great daily paper. Marjorie Hendred’s poetry and lightness must, therefore, have been ‘Celtic.’ We know that, whenever the English are not mere clods, it is because some Irish or Scotch or Welsh admixture has been insinuated into their clay, for the English character by itself is purely stupid (though not without ability in its uninspired fashion). Yet it was her father who had been the gay spirit in her home, and her mother from Ireland the grimly serious and practical, and often disapproving, driving force.

Madge had been won to religion early. As she noted, long after, in her diary, at the age of seven she was ‘brought under deep conviction of sin, and for five years sought the Lord sorrowing.’ John, reading these words after her death, felt bitterness against the Being who inflicted such apparently unjustified distress on a child. But his mother’s generation held implicitly, as the generations before them, that the World’s Maker is not to be judged by His creatures, and no doubt they were right. This baby then, with tears and often despair, sought a God Who, if she did not manage to find Him, was determined to send her to everlasting hell; and in her thirteenth year she found Him, and in the finding thrust the roots of her life into a fountain of never-failing ecstasy and strength.

She was to need it, but not yet. Her father, proud of his Madge, sent her to an academy for young ladies. She rose easily above the intellectual level of the other young ladies there, and became herself a teacher, though for a short time only. God, she had always felt, was calling her to work in perilous places, and at the age of twenty-one she went to take charge of a missionary school in North Ceylon. Happily she did not suspect it, but this was to be the last sun-lightened stretch of her life. She lived as one of a small community whose days were all passed in conscious preparation for eternity, with now a very bright and lovely world about them. There was a long sea-wall built by the Dutch, two centuries before. There was the sea itself, not a hundred yards away, its murmur the never-silent music of existence, its moonlight-flooded sands a patch of paradise to walk on and talk about God and His love and the heathen and their lovableness—which so heightened the appalling pathos of their doom if they did not ‘find’ this inscrutable Spirit who delights in evading those He insists must come to terms with Him or perish in woe eternally. Miss Hendred poured out affection and unselfish service as naturally as the mists go upward. She thought nobly of everyone, and had beauty, vivacity (tempered by Victorian training and much more ancient-than-Victorian religion), intelligence. Then she met the Rev. Matthew Arnison, and he persuaded her that it was God’s will that she should marry him. She did so, and left her sounding seas that whispered of pirates and pioneer traders and legendary folk who had battled for the empire of the East; and lived in a noisome inland city, and looked after a quick succession of tiny children, and tended a sick husband through years of failing strength. And that husband’s people, who had not seen her and did not want to see her, were convinced that Matthew had married beneath him. On Matthew’s one furlough, in 1888, they had seen her, and all her graciousness and lightness had been wasted on them. The world, both New and Old, abounds in these pockets of curmudgeonly folk who know no community but themselves, who feed on their own intolerable follies and stupidities, who trust that they only are righteous, wise, civilised, and as a consequence despise their fellows. There have always been masses of them; that is why Hell has been made so large.

3

After she went to Ceylon, Madge never saw her father again. He died when she was on her way home on furlough, but left for her his message. ‘Tell my dear daughter that I have never for one moment regretted having given her to her glorious work. If it were all to do again I would do it, with all my heart, though no day has passed without longing to see her dear face.’

Her mother, the stern efficient Irishwoman, she found broken down by the desolation of her loss, into sudden and premature old age. At the end of her furlough, they had parted with the quiet heart-break of those who discover their deep tenderness for each other, when they know that the time for showing it is all but over. Mrs. Hendred had died a year later.

Chapter II

1

Three weeks after their father’s funeral, the Matthew Arnisons stood on a railway platform. Their mother was in the widow’s weeds which drove home to herself and blazoned to the world the grimness of a woman’s lot when her bread-winner had gone. Her children clustered about her. John, the serious-faced eldest, was carrying a pot in which was a Jacob’s ladder in luxuriant flower. Robert, a year younger, had a handful of Christmas cards. Trixie, aged five, bore a doll. Harold, aged four, dragged a toy horse. Peter, not yet two, carried nothing but himself, and that none too steadily. A sickly child, born to a worn-out father and overburdened mother, he was gravely sweet and quiet. A glance told that he was what in those days was known as ‘a delicate child.’

Trevanion Methodism might have felt that it had got out of Matthew Arnison’s brief pastorate little but expense and trouble. But to think thus is not the way of the people called Methodists. A congregation not richly endowed with worldly goods, with the help of outside friends and admirers of the dead minister, Trevanion Methodists collected several hundred pounds and invested them for the widow and her children. It was a kindness which cost sacrifice, and its unexpectedness made Mrs. Arnison break down into tears. With this investment and her allowances for children and herself, as a minister’s relict, she had an income amounting to a hundred and twelve pounds annually—twelve pounds more than the sum whose vastness had staggered Aunt Martha.

‘Now, remember, Mrs. Arnison,’ Mrs. Trebethick, wife of one of the very few wealthy Trevanion Methodists, said to her, ‘you are going to find things difficult, with five children dependent on you. And if ever I hear that you are pinching and starving yourself to put one of the boys through the University, I’ll never forgive you!

Mrs. Trebethick was childless. Her remark was meant in kindness, and there was wisdom in it (up to a point, that is). As she said, Mrs. Arnison was going to find things difficult.

2

As they neared their destination, the children’s excitement grew. They passed under the shadow of great hills whose summits were wrapped in weeping cloud—the Derbyshire valleys of which their mother had told them. Then the country seemed to settle down into endless streets and houses, all grim and murky, slate-roofed and drenched with rain. Pynton Heath, Middlecopse, Hurt Edges, Hazelgrove—delicious names! All the poetry and tenderness of Manchester have flowered into them. Yes, the next station was Oakenshaw.

And there was Uncle Hamlet on the platform waiting to receive them. It was raining hard, so Aunt Muriel (who had a cold) had stayed at home, and with her had stayed their two girl cousins. But Uncle Hamlet was there, and they were going to his house for tea, and afterwards to the house he had taken for them.

They had come from the appearance (and some of the reality) of ease and opulence. In Ceylon had been the flock of servants, and a land unhedged and unfenced, outside a compound which to a child was in itself a country. In Cornwall there had been the manse and the sands and the moors—and the sea. There had been the sea. And here, somewhere in this forbidding wilderness, there was a house waiting for them, for which they were to pay seven shillings rent. If it were like these other houses they saw, it would be four shillings too much! Uncle Hamlet, thin, sallow, sandy-haired, nervously pulling at the dreadful moustache on his rabbit face, was fitting porter to such a prison. It was right that it should be raining. A face like his ought to have rain dripping always over its hat and down its cheeks.

3

There had been nothing in her life to prepare Mrs. Arnison for what awaited her. Though she did not know this, and to the day of her death never suspected it, she was singularly ill equipped for a life of real precariousness, such as was now hers. As a minister’s wife her income had been small enough. But she was provided for, after a fashion; there were ‘children’s grants,’ rent-free house, grants for illness, or free treatment by a medical profession which generally observed a magnanimous rule of ‘no charges to the clergy.’ Some sort of cushion had been thrust under every fall. This was as it should be. If beer and skittles were scanty, so were the hard knocks given by despair when all resources have run out and you are alone and have no helper.

Nor had there been very much in literature to prepare her. We know about the life of the lowest and meanest, for, despite the seemingly insuperable barriers which the English class system erects, enough men and women of genius have somehow or other fought through to a hearing, after beginning in society’s humblest strata, for us to know—so far as knowledge from books can tell us—what the life of those strata is like to anyone cursed with any sensitiveness. But there are always people who get the worst of both worlds, and we rarely hear from these. The Arnisons were desperately poor, as poor as any working-class family; and had this added burden to bear, that of gentility. Without it the children, brought up as working-class children, would have had a wider, freer experience and their mother would have been relieved of unending strain. But to assent voluntarily to such a drop in the social scale would have been unthinkable to a gentlewoman of Mrs. Arnison’s class and time. It never occurred to her as even a possibility, nor was it a possibility.

4

‘A bit different from what you expected to see, I dare say,’ said Uncle Hamlet, fingering his moist moustache unhappily. He had caught the desolation in his sister’s face, and partly understood it. He himself had once lived in neighbourhood of the Peak, and known the companionship of the country gods.

‘Oh, well, you’ll all get used to it,’ prophesied his wife Muriel. ‘For my part, me and my girls like it better than we should what they call the country. Don’t we, dearies?’

‘Yes,’ lisped the dearies.

‘It’s all wet and mucky there,’ she added. ‘Hamlet says he often wishes we lived in Goitdale. But there, in Goitdale you haven’t the trams, you have to walk everywhere. Me and my girls hate walking. Don’t we, dearies?’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘You have to live where you can,’ she said cheerfully. ‘And there’s some as likes it and some as dislikes it. Me and my girls like it. Don’t we, dearies?’

‘Yes.’

Uncle Hamlet was apparently not expected to contribute to this symposium. His views were known, and regarded as negligible. As a matter of fact, they were.

Tea over, the family drove to their new home. It was at some distance. Even had their own house contained room to ‘put up’ a child or two temporarily, Uncle Hamlet and Aunt Muriel had no intention of allowing claims on their hospitality to be established. ‘Once these things start . . .’ It would be far kinder to let their sister ‘find her feet,’ and feel independent from the start. To assist the growth of this feeling of healthy independence, they had chosen a house far enough away to ensure that there should be no ‘running in.’

The drive proved a dreadful opiate to torn nerves. One street, another street, another, another, another . . . dark streets, dark pavements, darkly clad bent figures hurrying by in the rain. Then, at last, ‘the street,’ Linden Street, so indistinguishable from the rest, and ‘the house,’ one of a low barrack-line of grey. Did there ever stir in the sodden sour earth that bore this burden of brick and mortar any memory of the cowslips of thirty years ago? Mrs. Arnison and Peter waited for the other children to leave the cab first, and run through the rain to the door where Uncle Hamlet was fumbling with the key. Then they followed and entered. The furniture had already arrived, and boxes lay about the tiny hall, in a series of Mappin terraces. Uncle Hamlet had at any rate seen to it that beds were set up. He promised to return and give further help on the morrow. Then he left them; and with Mrs. Arnison moving silently to and fro, making such rearrangements as were possible, the day finally subsided into the blankness of exhaustion, rather than ended in sleep.

Chapter III

1

It was not Mrs. Arnison who first awakened to the full horror of Oakenshaw. The care of five small children, the unimaginable distraction and labour of settling in, her whole dithered servantless existence, acted as a merciful veil between her and the world she now inhabited. Unassisted in her state of healthy independence, except by one or two friendly neighbours, who came in, half helpful, half curious, she spent the next few weeks in a nightmare region of her own, on which Oakenshaw made hardly any impact.

It was her children, and John especially, who saw what puzzled them, in its contrast to their mother’s glowing assurances when they left their comfortable Cornish manse and wild moors. Oakenshaw—cowslips—a moor of its own, Raymond Moor—the Goit, an infant brook tumbling its laughing way to the Mersey! What grim jest was this, that some unseen joker was playing on them—from which they would be roused by his laughter, as he whisked it away into dreamland!

A dreary industrial plain stretched, without intermission or mitigation, right up to the heart of Cottonopolis. There was nothing within comfortable reach, that could be called country. Even the outlier foot-hills of the Peak, Goitdale where their mother had spent her childhood, were being smirched (as they found later) by Manchester’s fiery breath; the smoke of factories thickened its native mists, slagheaps studded its flanks.

Equally small houses joined the Arnisons’ house on either side, and they in turn were flanked by other small houses interminably. Every now and then came what was called an ‘entry,’ a space which could have held a house but was left open. Here the Arnisons and other small children could play marbles, kitcat, peg-top, cricket. The last game was rarely indulged in, however; broken windows were inevitable, and made it too costly. Between the small strips of garden behind every house was a small brick shed shared by two houses, into whose entrails rubbish was shot; in the ashy debris speckled with gleaming tins grew potato-plants and an occasional carrot. Garbage heaps and gardens together formed an intricate wilderness where disreputable cats prowled and prowled.

Hardly a tree survived. That delight of Trevanion days, to lie along a branch, snapping a cap in your pistol, and cease to be mere John Arnison in the glory of being Dead-Eye Jim, the Prairie’s Terror, was impossible. Blessed, thrice blessed be America! Her gangsters have shown imprisoned youth that even in an Oakenshaw or a Cleveland life may be lived adventurously and lawlessly. But in Victorian England this truth was still unrevealed, and Romance (with a big scarlet R) came only with dreams of tropic seas and trackless forests. A policeman was not then someone you might shoot down. He was an implacable invincible Power, pitiless and irresistible as one of Mr. Wells’s Martians.

Two sickly trees, in a ten-foot square of grass, had somehow escaped the builders and become semi-communal. They were railed round like holy relics. John, with Harold looking on, scaled their ramparts and shinned up one of them. But a horrible old demon with an umbrella leapt out from a house, dancing and yelling like a dervish and shouting that he was going to fetch a policeman immediately and ‘soomoons’ them. He caught Harold and terrified him into wild weeping. And when they reached home, John’s clothes were torn and blackened. One such frightening experience was enough, with that awful word ‘soomoons’ pursuing him. And tree-climbing was strictly forbidden henceforth. For no tree can exist within Manchester’s smoke-range without carrying a coating of soot.

But what had happened to Oakenshaw, to change it so from their mother’s pictures of it? The Burgesses had happened to it.

2

On her one furlough from the East, Mrs. Arnison had not revisited Oakenshaw. When, in 1894, Matthew was invalided home, her mother was dead, and she herself too occupied to come north at all. Her memories of Oakenshaw were all of the place as it had been in the sixties, when it was a mere line of shops established by one Thomas Raymond for the use of stage-coach passengers. It was called Raymond Booth then. And, so far as she had thought about it at all, she had supposed that it was as she had known it. Even had she supposed otherwise, her mind, though imaginative, was not powerful enough to have visualised the reality.

That reality, in its inception and main lines, was the work of genius and executive ability working harmoniously together. The most far-reaching effects are brought about by the masculine and feminine intellect in co-operation, and Oakenshaw had been singularly favoured. Its wasteful moor, in the late seventies and afterwards, was developed by a jerry-builder. His wife was literary, and while her husband changed the face of the land she changed its names. It was she who rejected its ugly unpoetic name for the lovely one that suggested sweeping boughs that held coolness in summer’s sweltering noontide. She named also the streets which stood out in ramrod rightness from the long main road: Linden Street (where the Arnisons now lived), Hawthorn Street, Birk Street, Maple Street. Originally, too, every house had its own separate individual name; for (as the poetess often observed) how can home be home if it is a mere number? Orpheus Villa, Shelley Cottage, Keats Nook—it was her ambition to besprinkle her Arcadia with perpetual reminders of the great and good who have lived before us. It was her whim to refer to Goit always as Ilyssus. But it is not given to mortals to achieve complete success. When the population of Oakenshaw swelled rapidly into thousands, the postal authorities persuaded its civic fathers to give the houses numbers as well as names, and the names had fallen into disuse.

This noble woman, whom no Oakenshavian can recall without an acceleration of his heart-beats, was the author of that fine book (a gilt-edged, morocco-bound copy hangs in the Public Library, chained lest collectors should steal it), Chants to Pan, ‘by a Gentlewoman of Feeling.’ The Chants are all striking, but the first, ‘Oakenshaw, My Oakenshaw,’ is particularly moving:

’Tis merry to be in Oakenshaw
When the lav’rock’s lays are ringing;
When mavis and merle in the morning’s pearl
Their music to man are bringing!
O Oakenshaw! My Oakenshaw!
In my heart is your sweet name written!
’Tis for you that my harp doth its love outpour,
Like Memnon by dawnlight smitten!

No reader of these lines, if he has seen Oakenshaw, can deny their writer the gift of imagination.

In other pieces, a moving abnegation shows, recalling mighty poets who laid aside their grandeur—Shakespeare as Prospero breaking his magic wand. For example, Mrs. Felicity Burgess indicates her intention to leave her path of charming uselessness (so a footnote informs us—but can immortal poetry ever be called that? Can we allow even the poet herself, in her divine modesty, so to misname her exquisite labours?), and to enter that broad road of service to humanity’s ordinary needs where her husband was already toiling:

To Noah Burgess Esq., J.P.

(My Husband)

Burgess, when on my works I look
And turn to gaze on thine,
My fluttering timid spirit weeps
And tears well in my eyne!

I see thee as great Hercules,
Thou selfless friend of man!
While I am but a voice that chants
Of Arcady and Pan!

I sing but as the linnets sing
In time of April showers!
My days are but a useless spring
Decked out with gaudy flowers!

But thou for matron and for maid,
Filled up with social glee,
Art building homes. All! ‘home’! sweet word!
And sweetest most to me!

I Change My Song

Where many a cowslip tricked the green,
I stretched my little wing,
And as myself a nimph had been
In highest Heaven did sing.

From cresty hill to cresty hill
My fickle feet did roam,
And sang by every little rill
That splintered into foam.

But now my Muse, with length of wing
So much the wiser grown,
No more on cloud or hill will sing,
But make the plains her own!

This decision, however we may regret it, was perhaps as well, for within ten years of coming to it with his talented wife Noah transformed the district. The Goit, Felicity’s

O brook which the primroses prank
With beauty on either bank,

became a sluggish ooze, moving as if too depressed with itself to care what happened to it, reluctantly tumbling its tins and cans, and pushing along its newspapers and cigarette-packets. Raymond Moor became a straight vista of houses beside the tramlines between Ackroyd Hill and Farsight (which is undoubted Manchester—a sixpenny fare to Farsight from Ackroyd Hill, and to the midway public-house, ‘The Jolly Shepherdess,’ threepence).

3

Yet how impossible it is to extirpate the signs that genius once walked our humdrum ways! When Venus went to tryst with Anchises, no satyr following with ruthless trowel could eradicate all the lilies that sprang from the print of golden sandals. It was just the same in Oakenshaw. Felicity’s fame, like flowers in an alpine meadow, starred every ward and street, and stars them still. There are the Burgess Higher Grade School, the Burgess Women’s Institute, the Burgess Temperance Society, the Burgess Women’s Temperance Society, the Burgess Tiny Tots’ Temperance Association. Best of all, there is Felicity’s statue in the market-place, chastely robed as a Grecian Muse of Victorian upbringing, lifting skywards a lyre and a book. The sculptor was (like Felicity herself) a Baptist, and he comforted his conscience for having to portray what his fellow-Baptists considered to smack of heathenish unenlightened times, by inscribing under the figure the somewhat improbable assertion, ‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ On market-days the flower-stalls are closest to the plinth, and baskets of pansy and primrose roots rest against it. A pleasant destiny, this! How the poetess would have loved it!

In the editorial room of the Oakenshaw Gazette, on which for so many years she represented Literature, stands a tiny replica of this statue, lest those who have followed her, haltingly and inadequately, should forget the high standard set them. The brows are encircled with a laurel wreath of bronze, bought in accordance with her last will and testament—a slight and lovable vanity, reminding us that greatness is of our own clay, after all, however immeasurably above us its achievements may seem to put it. ‘I will and direct that this statue shall remain for ever as my sentinel—but more than that, as the sentinel of truth. It is thy duty, O Editor, to banish and drive away all heresy and false doctrine—the reckless love of self that masquerades as Independence (forsooth!), the morbid and modern taste for the sensual and ignoble, and all that is subversive of our English and Protestant truth and religion. To all these tempters, let them guise themselves as they will and seek to charm you never so wisely, let Thy Voice, O Oakenshaw, from generation to generation be an Everlasting Nay, uttered unceasingly!’ And the Voice of Oakenshaw has been an Everlasting Nay ever since, uttered unceasingly. Oakenshaw has a record almost uniquely honourable, even in the grand old North of England. When Matthew Arnold was writing his poems filled with corrosive scepticism, and, worse still, his shameless sneers at English Nonconformity and English Bishops and English Business and the English Middle Classes, Felicity withstood him and rebuked him, as her successor withstood and rebuked Mr. Bernard Shaw, and as Oakenshaw to-day withstands and rebukes all such irresponsible flingers of sedition and sinfulness.

And there is also ‘The Jolly Shepherdess’—like every other lovely thing in Oakenshaw, gift of a poetess’s inspiration. When Felicity came to Oakenshaw, it was a mere coaching inn, known simply as ‘Raymond’s.’ Noah, who was brewer as well as jerry-builder, bought it, and renamed it ‘The Burgess Arms.’ But the title fretted Felicity’s modest spirit. She coaxed him (when market-merry, after the Ancient Orders of Buffaloes and Oddfellows of Lancashire had held their united fraternal fête, an exceedingly successful one, under his auspices and catering) to let her suppress their own style from what she charmingly called ‘Ye Olde Inne of Ye Oakenne Shawe,’ and to accept the graceful one which she chose instead. The beautiful lyric which immortalises her victory hangs above the bar, in gilt lettering and inscribed within a floral border;

The Shepherdess Calls to You, Traveller

O Pilgrim, thridding your dusty road,
I prithee, pause and tarry!
Ah, lay aside your weary load,
For here there is sanctuary.

Ah, low and sweet! ah, sweet and low!
What is it? what is it thou’rt hearing?
What melody sweet springs at thy feet,
A music both rapt and cheering!

Is it the bells which the fairies shake
As they walk by the sweet babe slumbering?
Or is it perchance the Angels’ song
As the souls that are saved they are numbering?

Or is it that music of long ago—
Ah, how thy tears come stealing!
The sound of the hymn that thy mother sang,
Like the voice of an Angel pealing?

’Tis none of these. ’Tis I, ’tis I,
As I dance through the oaken shaw!
I sing and I dance in a long sweet trance,
Through the glade with its primrosed floor.

The Shepherdess bids thee dance and sing,
With her face like a bright sweet cherry.
The time is dawn and the season is Spring.
Pilgrim! dear Pilgrim! be merry!

Hardened and cynical spirits (for such have occasionally visited Oakenshaw, cross-grained men from Sheffield and London and Bristol) have been known to dislike the Jolly Shepherdess, just as there have been men impervious to the sweet influences of Pleiades. They say she is out of keeping with the Oakenshaw of to-day. It may be so. Nevertheless look at her (O Pilgrim) with reverence, for she is the last sight that will remind you, even faintly, of anything but muck and money, until you have overpassed Manchester by at least another dozen miles on the other side.

Chapter IV

1

After they had settled in, education was the next consideration. Being gentlefolk, the Arnisons could not go to St. Bartholomew’s board school, a low place frequented by the low offspring of low parents. John, Robert and Trixie therefore went to the Burgess Higher Grade School, where John, who was in quite a high standard, paid no less than fourpence a week. Robert paid threepence, and Trixie, who was in the infant school, paid twopence. Harold and Peter were still at home.

Anglicans in their ignorance lump all ‘Dissenters’ together, little realising what an aristocracy in English Dissent Methodists of the Wesleyan kind used to be. ‘Gaffer Jackson,’ Headmaster of the Burgess Higher Grade School, was a Wesleyan, a Tory of the Tories, rigidly stern towards all subversive tendencies and dissatisfied people. In later days, Lord Loreburn made him a J.P., and he greatly enjoyed his last years. He had high cheek-bones, a fierce eye, and whiskers like a Victorian major’s. Most of his teachers were young women, whom he invariably addressed as ‘My dear,’ and frequently kissed (but only some of them) in public. He used to perambulate his school twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, tossing a cane up and down; he had two canes, one thin and cutting, and one like a short club, bulging into a leaded head. The latter did not hurt so much. ‘Have you anyone you wish me to see, my dear?’ Often the lady teacher would have relented; but even so, there always remained his own privy list of boys who had been sent ‘to the wall’ for offences during the assembling in the playground. One way or another, this good man had to flog two or three scores every day of his long active life.

Occasionally he had to punish a girl. When he did that, he was tenderly fatherly (it was a noble age, the one which has vanished); he would take her hands alternately in his, and give her two trivial taps, then kiss her on both cheeks, and she would burst into tears and go back to her place sobbing. But once there was a bold bad girl, with the same name as his own, though no relationship, who cheeked a lady teacher so hard that she wept. When Gaffer Jackson on his rounds was told this (‘Have you anyone you wish me to see, my dear?’ ‘Yes,’ sobbed Miss Ramsbotham. ‘Maud Jackson.’) he produced his thin cane, the one that hurt, and said ferociously, ‘Since you behave as a boy you shall be punished as a boy.’ Maud accordingly received four vicious cuts, which she took without winking.

Mr. Jackson, in addition to these official visits of correction, did a deal of peripatetic prowling, during which he collected other sinners. He was particularly severe on boys whose clothes were shabby or had rents, and positively tigerish with those who were sent to school in clogs, which brought his establishment down to the level of the board school. ‘I will not have any boy disgracing us by clogs,’ he would shout; and the offender would be thrashed in a way terrible to behold. But he never whipped any who belonged to the semi-gentry. John was in great fear of the Gaffer. But he need not have been. He was never caned; nor was Will Torkington, the doctor’s son, nor Frank Latimer, the Congregational minister’s son. But Jim Adshead, whose father was wretchedly poor, a worker in the factory yards, and who himself had to sell evening papers, was constantly behind in his homework, and was flogged almost daily. Once he gave as excuse that he had had to go to Longsight, the evening before, with a letter and medicine for a dangerously ill sister. ‘I don’t care if you had to go to Cheetham Hill,’ bawled Gaffer Jackson. ‘You are an idle worthless good-for-nothing fellow, and your clothes disgrace the school.’

Looking back on these years in later life, John was sometimes tempted to draw up a balance-sheet, by no means altogether flattering to his own class. The ‘toughs,’ who bore the whole brunt of the Gaffer’s powerful sense of discipline, were silently disdainful of their more favoured brothers, as well as humbly obedient under their own lot. There was no bullying, though the toughs were immensely stronger than the members of the higher civilisation: a code of manners and behaviour obtained, which was gentle and considerate compared with that of any of the schools to which England’s upper classes sent their sons.

On the other hand, John was to learn later on what he would never have learnt at Oakenshaw Higher Grade School, that tale-telling is contemptible. Tale-telling was here strongly encouraged. All the teachers had open favourites; so had all the girls among the boys, especially the best girls. If a teacher left the room, some boy—or, more frequently, some girl— would be asked to note the behaviour of the rest till she returned. The deputy would quite unblushingly say that John Arnison and Will Torkington had behaved beautifully, but that Jim Adshead had been very bad. So John Arnison and Will Torkington would receive ‘good marks,’ and Jim would be headed towards another appearance before Gaffer Jackson.

Sometimes the teacher herself, perhaps weary of teaching, would announce that she was going to give good marks just for five minutes’ good conduct. Thereupon all the right-minded boys and girls would do as commanded (‘All books on the desk, all arms folded’), and with heads flung back and chests pouted would vociferously call attention to their meritorious behaviour. ‘Me, teacher! me, teacher!’—sometimes with right hand pointing to themselves.

In brief, the school training made for sycophancy and tale-bearing; and the strange thing is that it was the ruffianly section that kept out of both accomplishments. No doubt they were little encouraged to join in them, for Jim Adshead was never asked to report on his classmates’ conduct during an interregnum. Nevertheless it has to be said that, from whatever motives, they did keep out of them, and gave the impression of sincerely despising both.

2

When the young Arnisons joined the Burgess Higher Grade School, it was in the last stages of the long-drawn-out throes of preparation to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Practically everyone was to engage in an orgy of patriotic song and recitation, before breaking up for the summer holidays. The heart of this demonstration was a prolonged cantata, in which maidens representing India, Australia, Canada and other savage regions came humbly before Britannia and expressed their deep gratitude for her consistent and uncalled-for kindness to them. Britannia was an extremely pretty girl. At the close and climax, every child was given a New Testament, that the Great Queen’s glory might be stamped on eternal memory. The Victorian age gave away a lot of Bibles, if it gave little else.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Children (like most grown-ups) rarely analyse their feelings, or even stand far enough aside from them to see them in outline, objectively. In later years it struck John Arnison as mildly strange that the Empire-cult of these last years of Queen Victoria’s reign bored him. It may have been because in those earliest years of all, which we are told are the most formative, he had been under the charge of Indian servants, and had unconsciously begun by thinking of them as creatures like himself. But other children also were bored, who had known no such first experiences. At the end of that reign of sweeping triumph, England, and the industrial North in especial, was tired. It was no doubt gratifying to realise that God had chosen to give you an Empire on which the sun never set. He had done more, He had given you a number of splendid poets who followed the late Laureate, Lord Tennyson, in exhorting Britons to ‘hold your own,’ an own which had become a very vast and glorious own, including much, as Andrew Lang seditiously observed, which former alien owners had been unsuccessful in guarding from Britons. But neither the gift nor its hymnists could hide the fact that it seemed to have done little for most of these world-possessors.

The truth is, the break-up which those who remember ‘the days of faith and loyalty’ deplore began far earlier than they think. At the end of last century squalor and hatred and despair were commoner than now. John Arnison realised very early on, that in the streets around him other feelings eddied than the ultra-ecstatic monarchist one which had made the school a nest of singing birds. He was frequently asked the riddle (whose solution must be suppressed), ‘When does t’ Queen reign over China?’; and the massed singing of the National Anthem by the school’s eleven hundred voices, to any ear that listened closely was marred by other versions, one of which we may tone down into

God save our gracious Queen!
Smack her hard, and make her scream!

The misery and grossness of that day have been forgotten, but they were beyond exaggeration. The overwhelming majority were clamped down where they were, with no possibility of escape to anything but undistinguished labour. If a man lost his work, he begged or starved; and it was hard to do the former successfully, because of the belief that he was unemployed because he did not want to work or because he ‘drank.’ In such a life there could be only one luxury, the one to which Nature has cynically attached so hard a penalty. Children of semi-gentry, such as the Arnisons were, compelled to live in this human worm-heap, had to shut their eyes and ears. ‘Have you got a sister? Fetch her here, and I’ll——’ John, not hearing, hurried by the youths sprawling on the pavement, waiting till the factory dinner-time was over.

Chapter V

1

Yet the desolation of the Oakenshaws of England was so recent that a rustic past was still remembered, and survived as tradition. Uncle Hamlet, local preacher, grocer and florist, degenerate from a line of farmers and sub-gentry, brought this past near. In these first depressing days, the Arnisons saw a great deal of him, and he was sometimes interesting. He told them how men used to be hung in chains on Raymond Moor, for sheep-stealing; of one Eli Marsh, who had hung there until he rotted to pieces, in the memory of Uncle Hamlet’s own father. You could not readily imagine it now, for no sheep, except as a carcase, ever came within ten miles of Raymond Moor, and the Moor was merely tram-lines and houses. But it gave an eerie terror to thought of it, to see it as it once was, with the unimpeded winds whistling through creaking bones and clanging chains.

People had shed the beauty and dignity of the country life, and believed they had shed its discomforts. They had not shed its superstitions. Uncle Hamlet’s wife Muriel, a most disgusting, unappetising woman, as much beneath her husband as he was beneath his sister, was in frantic dread that summer, because an ‘asker’ had appeared in her cellar. An asker was full of poison, it would spit death at you if you approached it. Now an asker is only a newt.

Robert Arnison had warts; and one day Uncle Hamlet, local preacher though he was, took him secretly, enjoining him never to tell his mother, to an old man who charmed them away. They remained, nevertheless. But so did Uncle Hamlet’s faith.

And Uncle Hamlet’s whole household, that July, was shaken for weeks together by the sufferings of a neighbour’s boy, who had ‘swallowed a bee.’ This bee caused the poor swallower the most horrible pains, and he would scream and scream for hours, so that all the neighbours would run pityingly to him and his parents. Mrs. Arnison heard of it, and went and told them it was sheer imagination; no bee could have lived on in anyone’s stomach.

Uncle Hamlet, whose piety and orthodoxy were remarkable, reminded her of Jonah, and reproved her for ‘infidelism.’

‘Yes, but Jonah was only three days in the belly of the whale,’ replied his sister, who also knew her Bible. ‘And this boy says he swallowed the bee six weeks ago! Besides, no bee can sting more than once. It’s all utter nonsense.’

Her arguments were flung away. The sufferer’s father, an old farm labourer, refuted them solemnly, and his words were endorsed with universal approval except for Mrs. Arnison. ‘T’ owd queen can sting hunnerds of times.’ ‘T’ owd queen’ choosing that moment to manifest anew her undiminishing potency, the boy set up a most appalling yelling, and Mrs. Arnison left.

2

The summer holidays were spent in the desultory manner of those who are too poor to get away from England’s Oakenshaws. Mrs. Arnison herself, submerged in the infinitely harassing new life, hardly came up even to breathe. If she ever thought of Goitdale, and of lands outside this dreary wilderness, she put the thought from her. She could do nothing to satisfy her longings or brighten her children’s days— yet. They were ‘settling in.’

But though she dared not think of them, perhaps the spirits of the wild unmastered Peak thought of her; and, hearing that Madge Hendred (who had gone away from them for so long) was back and living as near as Oakenshaw, sent an ambassador. In August she was visited by Mother Phipps.

Mother Phipps lived in Orbury, a village, like Oakenshaw, in Lancashire, but on the Derbyshire borders—four miles from Ufferton in Goitdale, but south-west of it, and not on the direct Oakenshaw-Ufferton route. She was a survivor from the days when Mrs. Arnison was Madge Hendred. She and her husband had greatly looked up to James Hendred, but in the democracy of religion they all mixed as temporary equals, in tea-meetings and circuit gatherings. On these occasions, at some selected chapel, all Goitdale and sub-Goitdale Methodism would congregate.

The family were sitting down to dinner, when their mother found the salt had been forgotten. Trixie rose to fetch it, and saw a face at the window, behind the curtains—a face weather-beaten, watchful, peering and speering. In the precaution of inspecting before knocking and enquiring, no one who has lived near Manchester will see anything but a wise reconnoitring of ground which may after all prove to be held by an enemy. The rumour that Madge Hendred had returned might be only a rumour; it might not be Madge Hendred at all, but someone quite different, from Sheffield or even London. And then where would you be—looking like a gowk and all, after having knocked at a strange door! Manchester does not let itself in for such risks.

At Trixie’s exclamation her mother turned her head. She stared, then she went to the door.

They heard her cry out, ‘Why, if it isn’t Mother Phipps!’

It was indeed Mother Phipps, a rounded shaking old body. Immeasurably ancient she seemed, quavering but energetic in voice and manner. The air rained with her ecstatic greetings.

‘Eh, my dear! If it isn’t Madge! Madge again, after all these turble turble years! Eh, but what a big tall boy this is, to be sure!’

And so on.

From Orbury to Oakenshaw was ten miles. She had walked several, and obtained lifts for the rest.

‘And now, my dears! Guess what I’ve brought for you!’

She beamed redly, leaning forward, and flourished a bottle, produced from under her shawl. ‘It’s a bottle of my elderberry.’

A great maker of country wines, Mother Phipps had brought a sample of her most renowned brew.

‘I knew you’d be fair mad to know if old Mother Phipps still made it as she always did. Well, my dear I do, and you shall see it for yoursen, you shall, Madge, my dear.’

Mrs. Arnison expressed her delight.

But the day had been a sweltering one. ‘I walked a mile, and then, my dearie, I could walk no more. Not if you paid me, I couldn’t. So I sat me down, and I had a soop, like. Then I walked a bit more, like, and I had another soop. I had some more soops, and then I got a ride from a baker chap. But the feller were only going as far as Tweedie, so he put me down after a matter of fower miles. And I had some more soops. And then I got another ride, like. So, my dear, this is all I have left. But you’re welcome to it, you are reely.’

She pressed it on them. The true spirit of hospitality shone in this astonishing and excellent woman, and she desired to see her gifts enjoyed. She singled out John, as the eldest and worthiest, and to his intense anguish compelled him, as a special treat, to drain the last half-inch remaining of her nectar, and to praise it.

‘Ah!’ she said exultantly. ‘My Thomas, he always used to say as my wines were reet champion. “You can’t beat ’em, Lizzie,” he used to say, Thomas did. “Not if it was Her Royal Majesty’s own Windsor Palace and all them kings and princes coming to dinner, you couldn’t.”’

She dined with them, then rested before returning, her eyes exploring wall-paper, linoleum, furniture, faces, her tremulous explosive voice asking questions and exclaiming unceasingly. The visit had memorable moments, especially when Trixie was puzzled by mysterious noises and her gaze searched for their origin. Mother Phipps noticed her perplexity, and understood it. ‘It’s only my bally roomblin’,’ she placidly interpreted. ‘I gets it inside sometimes, so that I keeps on soundin’ like a droom.’ Though eminently Victorian, Mother Phipps had managed to slip through the era’s entire length without coming in contact with its conventions. She had not yet read The Idylls of the King.

Mrs. Arnison sent her back in a trap drawn by a diminutive pony, whose owner charged five shillings for this service.

3

The return visit could not take place until a Saturday in October. John accompanied his mother on it.

Orbury, having no coal mines and lying outside the sphere of Noah and Felicity Burgess’s operations, had remained scandalously uncivilised—lush and unkempt, the cottage slates plumed with ferns and long grasses. It was insanitary, rheumaticky, quietly and peacefully beautiful. Its tiny garden strips were bright with goldenrod and St.-John’s-wort.

They looked down on it all, from Mother Phipps’s home, to which they had to climb a stairway. This exalted site was because Mr. Phipps in his lifetime had provided for her, as very few husbands are able to provide for their wives. He had lent the last ten pounds, when Orbury Methodist Chapel was built, on condition that he and Mrs. Phipps should inhabit two tiny rooms built above it, until the sum was paid back. Ten pounds is a heap of treasure to a struggling Derbyshire congregation, and the sum never was paid back. So the Phippses lived above the chapel rent-free—as Mother Phipps in her ecstatic way often observed, like the Lord’s swallows (‘Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God’). They lived thus for twenty years, and Mr. Phipps’s relict for a span of years longer.

Mother Phipps, who would never own to her actual age (so Uncle Hamlet averred), admitted to being seventy. As she had been the friend of Mrs. Arnison’s mother, who looked up to her as the elder, and as Mrs. Hendred had been born in 1818, Mother Phipps’s mathematics seem at fault, and justify Uncle Hamlet’s suspicions.

The incident of the ten pounds loan suggests that the Phippses were thrifty, a conclusion which other evidence supports. As they stood looking down on the village, Mother Phipps told them her favourite story, of how Thomas Phipps one day, on one of his rare visits to Manchester, picked up a dropped parcel, inside which were sheep’s kidneys. There was no chance of finding their owner, and they were plainly sent by Providence at a time when Thomas was in some financial difficulty, seeking a job. ‘And,’ Mother Phipps would end triumphantly, ‘I biled ’em right away. And me and Thomas had ’em for breakfast and dinner and supper, for five days. A wonderful lot of ’em there was! And they were reet champion, they were! Never better kidneys I tasted in my born life!’

She had a habit of closing with flights of mysticism, delivered with extraordinary fervour and strength of voice. ‘Ah, it were wonderful! To think that the Angel of the Lord should have sent my Thomas along that way the first of any, before some other feller should have found ’em! For He gave them manna in the wilderness, and they did eat thereof and were filled.’

Uncle Hamlet spent much time surmising that Mother Phipps one day—a day already (his tone suggested) indecently long deferred—would ‘cut up well.’ ‘She’s got something put away in her stocking. Thomas made good money as account-keeper in the colliery, and she and he never spent a penny if they could help it.’ It was plain that he reckoned some of this fortune predestined to come his way. Mother Phipps, however, regarded him with a curiously detached coldness. Once she sent him a ‘message’—she was fond of sending messages, her scriptural knowledge thus flowing out. ‘Whatsoever He telleth you to do, do it!’

The reader will recognise that the message comes from the incident of the water turned into wine. There was probably no innuendo in it; Mother Phipps had just thought of the text and of Hamlet together, that was all. But he resented it surprisingly, and brooded over it.

Chapter VI

1

By September, Mrs. Arnison knew enough of her dreadful financial inadequacy to be terrified. On such an income, she and five children had no right to live at all. The fact that they did live on it can easily be shown to have been statistically impossible.

Yet they did live.

And what amply justifies fine thinkers of the old school (who look back to the times when men were independent and all that, as Burns observes) in their conviction that all this modern system of doles, etc., is unnecessary (as well as pauperising, degrading and wrong), is the undoubted fact that, no matter how very poor the very poor are, very few of the very poor die of their very poorness. Look at India, for example! Which proves that the old system was the right one. Statisticians are asses, and dishonest juggling asses at that. They shall receive no encouragement from me.

Mrs. Arnison, however, who had not yet proved that she could bring up five children to the threshold of manhood and womanhood, on under thirty shillings a week (after rent and rates had been deducted), was panic-stricken, and looked round for ways of augmenting her resources. She decided to do this by her old pre-marriage profession of teaching. Days had changed since Miss Hendred was a pupil teacher in a Young Ladies’ Academy. Nevertheless, she did for a while run a small school for very small children (contributed by harassed mothers glad to have them off their hands); and she saved weekly twopences by making Harold and Peter, to the former’s intense mortification, attend this. They had to march round and round, singing, as their mother played on the piano which she had saved from the sale of her husband’s better effects, a moving little ditty:

Thus the timid shining snail
Draws within his head and tail.

She taught music also, to half a dozen pupils.

She did her own baking to save expense, until it was plain that it did not save expense, for her children loved the newly made bread too well and ate too heartily of it. Butter had to be considered also; a necessary and frequent protest was, ‘You are spreading it as if it were cheese!’ For a time she did her own washing, but her back ached and sick headaches and neuralgia avenged her overtasked body. She was never out of doors, except when she went to church; and, however ill and wretched, she was obliged to keep busy for her brood’s sake. In such suffering there is no dignity. It is merely something that has to be borne.

2

It was a great comfort to her that she was able to give her elder children a good start in life, and was not reduced to sending them to a board school, where they would have been so badly taught. The Burgess Higher Grade paid for their tuition; the St. Bartholomew’s scholars did not. And, rightly and naturally, a feud existed between payers and paupers.

The heavy snows of January 1898 fell, and one day the Burgessians, coming out from class, found themselves beleaguered. The Barties were a rough crew (and the girls worse than the boys). It was stinging agonising work to fight through the hard-crunched snowballs, often with a pebble for core. The Barties kept no rules; they would rush ten or twelve together and roll you on to a heap of squelchy muck, whose chilly foulness they pushed into eyes, mouth and down your neck.

John somehow fought through, only to discover that he had lost Robert. It had been borne in on him that he must always stay by Robert, who was so defenceless, a lamb whom nothing but a miracle could save from these ravening beasts, if he were left to them. John fought his way back, into the besieged city, through the noises and dirt and cruelty and confusion of battle. But he could find Robert nowhere. So at last, when the war had died away, he went unhappy home. Here, to his amazement, he found his brother, who had been back a couple of hours. Possibly because he had made no attempt to fight, possibly because the hand of unseen powers had been over him, Robert had slipped through the investing armies, and gone quietly and easily home, while John was searching for him.

Victory whetted the Barties’ blood-lust, and the Burgessians were waylaid again next morning. Those who reached school safely organised a counter-attack, to bring in struggling comrades. A line of the dozen boldest had run out on this errand, when they found their retreat cut off, by a foe more dreaded yet. The Gaffer stood before the school gates, his inflamed visage backed by a snow-laden solitary fir—menacingly grand, like a stormy sunrise over Lapland. His appearance was greeted with musical honours:

Old Gaffer Jackson!
Who lays the smacks on?
Old Gaffer Jackson!
Whackson, Jackson!
Old Gaffer Jackson!
Run away, you Burgy boys!
Run away, and stop your noise!
Gaffer Jackson’s going to skelp you!
Run away! and may Gawd help you!

lines by some anonymous folk-poet, lines much esteemed by the Barties. Their singing now did nothing to assuage his wrath.

The incident which followed did even less. ‘O for a sculptor’s hand!’ cried the poet Keble once, under strong provocation. There are times when the novelist must echo the cry, and almost weep for the inadequacy of his own medium. There stood the Gaffer, his fine military nose uplifted, a lion when he sniffs his prey. With him, as with all great leaders, thought and action by long habit had become almost simultaneous—his right hand was twitching—sawing the air and making involuntary passes and smitings—as he glared on the rabble who were showing such disrespect to a future Justice of the Peace.

And then—suddenly, swooping softly through the air, as the white owl swoops on its unsuspecting prey—came something scatteringly furry. One of the enemy, emboldened by being able to dip swiftly down behind a garden wall, had taken a long dropping shot, and caught the Gaffer’s face flankwise. ‘Gaffer’s got one on the ear-’ole!’ a delighted bulletin informed the world.

It was indeed true. Unlike most official reports, this was severely accurate. And, in addition to filling the ear satisfactorily, the missile had an adequacy left over for mouth and nose as well. With a roar horrible to hear, the Gaffer rushed forward to identify the marksman. But the Barties, having vindicated their prowess beyond their wildest expectations, now displayed only shyness and aversion to publicity. All the Gaffer could see was backs disappearing, and clogs making good time round corners.

Recovering his dignity, he collected his own school’s rescue-party and took them in. Then all classes were marshalled in the big assembly-hall, the salliers by themselves during the hymn which opened the day’s work:

Come, let us join our cheerful songs
With Angels round the Throne.

Devotions over, the Gaffer gave a brief address on Behaving like Board-School Boys who wear Clogs. He illustrated his meaning very strikingly afterwards, the whole school being kept from their studies, to watch his prisoners being whopped.

John should have been whopped with them, for he had been among the salliers. But the Gaffer did not consider that gentlemen’s sons needed whopping. He had pushed John aside, and pretended not to see him. This leniency made John more ashamed and miserable than the whopping would have done. The actual whoppees, however, thought nothing of it. They took it for granted.

3

Education without religion is faulty education. Religion was above all things seen to in the Arnisonian regime. John, Robert and Trixie, like wise mariners with a long voyage to go before seeing land again, Sunday by Sunday took in a store for the weekdays to come. They attended early Sunday school (or, as it was called by preference, Sabbath school—Sabbath has a holier, softer sound), at nine, and stayed to ‘chapel’ at ten-thirty; they went to afternoon Sabbath school; and again, to chapel at night. They thus became saturated with the Gospel, which was very good for them. Sabbath school was held in the same buildings as the weekday school; it was (and this must be admitted to be remarkable) a distinctly drearier experience.

Death, and the thought of agonising wretchedness after death, were prospects constantly held before them. There was one hymn, a particular favourite with the Superintendent, which began by asking, in a tone of mild surprise:

I know there’s a crown for the saints of renown,
And for saints whose good deeds are unsung;
But O say, Is it true, if their days are but few,
That a crown is laid up for the young?

It appeared that a crown was laid up for the young, though—as John learnt that most things in life (and still more, after life) were—on stringent conditions. Only,

If their lives daily prove that the Saviour they love,

was that crown laid up, and a place provided where ‘the Infant of days’ would be able to ‘strike his harp in the praise’ of the Being whose benevolence had made this arrangement.

The form which religion took seemed to be continual menace. ‘Thou God seest me’ said a caption under a huge eye, hung in John’s classroom in the day school. That this reflection came originally as a message of heart-searching comfort, to a poor outcast Bedouin mother whom Infinite Pity had snatched from the wretchedness of seeing her only son perish of thirst in a desert, no one ever suggested. It stood only as a warning, and an awful ever-present threat. The Love which moves the sun and all the stars had meant its presence, in this shaking universe which it has created, to be a calming strengthening thought, a shelter from storm and heat, a companionship in the darkest night and loneliness. But English puritanism was wiser than this Love, and corrected its purpose for it. ‘Thou God seest me’—seest me with a never-sleeping suspicion and malignancy.

Childhood can be, and for many has been, the most detestable time of life. John was vaguely uncomfortable, and already felt that sense of closing walls which oppresses the poor. But nothing that he was taught held out any hope of improvement ever, except in a most unappetising after-life which would come to a minority. Mr. Gummidge, the Sabbath School Superintendent, a man of self-torturing earnestness, when he opened proceedings with prayer almost invariably quoted from a hymn which congratulated the Deity upon conduct which even to the boy of nine seemed doubtfully praiseworthy:

Not more than others we deserve,
Yet Thou hast given us more.

Another hymn inculcated Sabbath-keeping, on a note of warning rather than of invitation:

The suffering scarce, alas! can know
This from the other days of woe.
May we the worth of Sabbaths learn,
Before we suffer in our turn!

The poet’s standard of suffering is obviously high, and he urges Sabbath-keeping in melancholy minor key. It may seem an unnecessary cynicism to assume, as he does, that everyone is bound for wretchedness sooner or later, but John soon saw that this was based on a sound observation of life. The hymn depressed him, but it gave him that visualisation of Providence as eternally vigilant for a chance to sandbag you, which has been so useful in keeping his class and generation quiet, like children dreading to rouse an ogre.

If it were not that missionary stories were allowed, the children would never have caught strange impossible gleams of an entirely un-Oakenshavian world —not Oakenshaw nor in the least like Oakenshaw—into which the Spirit of God might command a man to go, and even count his going as service. Those who sneer at foreign missions know nothing about them, either in their own achievement or in their imaginative shadow on England’s dreadful religious record. They were a rainbow land of escape, at a time when Methodism passed the whole of life under its clumsy thumb, and affixed a clarty Nil Obstat to a drearily untruthful, infinitesimally tiny section of it.

4

Mrs. Arnison sinned in this respect, as against her her own parents had not sinned. For her mother kept memory of Catholic Irish kinsfolk, and her father’s religion, though deep and steadfast, had been irradiated with whimsical awareness that Owd Rabbitmuck and itinerant preachers did not make up the whole of an ideal world. Besides, his age was still close to the time when the raptures and liberating force of Wesley’s message had been more real than its clamping silly ethics.

His daughter’s age, however, concentrated on these. On these, and the doctrines that drove them home. God permitted Oakenshaw, which no sane Omnipotence would have done, just as He permitted the heathen in his blindness, only because one day He meant to burn up all this loathsome festering rubbish of iniquity everywhere. As she had striven to save the heathen, so Mrs. Arnison strove to save her children. Each day, however huddled, opened and closed with family prayers. Birthday gifts were all edifying, part of the unpausing tension of all energies toward one great purpose. On his first birthday after his father’s death, John was given a bound copy of the Methodist magazine of the previous year, because it contained a brief appreciative obituary of the Rev. Matthew Arnison. Thereafter followed, for him and his brothers and sisters, the devastating sequence, The Peep of Day, Line upon Line, Lines Left Out, Precept upon Precept, Example on Example. Surely (she hoped) the tremendous message of The Peep of Day could not fail of its effect even upon the mind of Harold, who was now nearly five:

This is what God will do to those who do not love Him. God will bind them in chains, and put them in a lake of fire, called hell. There they will gnash their teeth, and weep and wail for ever. God will put Satan in the same place, and all the devils. Satan is the father of the wicked, and he and his children shall be tormented for ever. They shall not have one drop of water to cool their burning tongues.

Many people in hell will say, ‘How I wish I had listened to the words of my teachers! But I would not mind, and now it is too late. I never can come out of this dreadful place. How foolish I have been! Once God would have heard my prayers, but now I weep and wail in vain.’

I hope, my dear children, that none of you will ever speak such sad words. . . .

If you are God’s child, you will not be frightened when the world is burning, for you will be safe with Jesus, praising Him for having loved and saved you.

5

Yet the Power which has made the world, or (which comes to the same thing) has allowed man so to mismake it, has its caprices of kindness. It wanders, illogically and fitfully, into beauty and gentleness, and takes us with it.

The winter of 1897-98 passed, and the spring; and with May even Oakenshaw became aware of a change of season. His way to school took John by the railway station sheds, a grimy ramshackle region, walled with boards. In one place, from motives of economy, a line of hawthorn hedge had been left, and the branches, soot-coated and dying, opened into spangles, a flower here and there scattered in feeble protest and assertion. The flowers were few in number, and their date was brief. But, like Mrs. Browning’s Oreads, they ‘struck a glory through the mist,’ even the mist of rain-sodden Oakenshaw. They wakened a cloud of indescribably happy-making thoughts.

For in that brain were the hawthorn flowers of Cornish years (undeniably there, jostling sunsets and corncrakes’ voices and parrots fighting at dusk and quiet brown men squatting in aromatic booths behind their wares). They linked up strangely with magical pictures on old dessert plates of almond-eyed Chinese gentlemen, silently moving about under trees studded with starry dewy petals. Those petals were meant for cherry flowers, but their enamel gloss was like the bright centres of opening may-buds. The plates were cheap Staffordshire ware, but behind their design must have been a dreamer—some artisan who had strayed from wild hill country to Brummagem glories, and had been caught and held there as a drudge. The pictures’ freshness proved eternal, for it took its place within the mind.

The world loses its newness, and changes it to a staleness and grossness that make us forget it ever existed. But that newness once lay all about us, and made by association its own forgotten and lovely universe. We have to lose it, and for ever; it is usual to say that only the poets keep it. But the poets do not keep it, any more than the rest of us. They keep only the habit of trying to keep it, and an unhappy knowledge that if they could recover it their verses would become worth writing.

John suffered a pain almost like that of betrayal experienced, when he learnt from his missionary magazine that these Chinese gentlemen, whose bodies were civilised gestures as they moved amid their cherry-gardens and drooping mulberry-groves, had some very bad practices. They killed missionaries, and told lies about them. Their country was the one part of the world where you still had a good chance of winning the martyr’s crown. It seemed strange and un-Chinese, when you looked at those polished forms and kindly faces, bending in grace of courtesy as denizens of paradise talked together. But it was true—a glimpse of the sinfulness that hides under fair appearances. When he had finished with Oakenshaw, he would go out to China, and tell them to stop killing missionaries, a habit unworthy of people who lived where hawthorn was always flowering and the world all trees and greensward. He would tell them to keep their gracious leisured smiling life, but to make it perfect by adding the love of Jesus.

Chapter VII

1

Life in Oakenshaw in spiritual essentials cannot have been very different from life in the ages of medieval darkness. In those ages villein and churl kept their stations, craftsmen remained in their guilds while nobles ruled the state and from time to time were beheaded. Villein and churl and craftsman were allowed to huzza for their betters, and were burnt or hanged and quartered if they so far forgot themselves as to have thoughts in religion or politics. Ghosts and goblins patrolled the heaths and marishes. Fiery eyes, presumably in the visages of frightful beings, rushed through the deserted paths by night. The Devil wreaked dreadful pains on mighty sinners, and sometimes even in broad daylight.

In Oakenshaw now, the buzzer went while the mist rang with hurrying clogs; men and women clattered in the dimness to the toil which was theirs unchangeably from adolescence till death or marriage. If they ventured to have thoughts of their own, there was no longer any stake or quartering block; but there was swift and irrevocable ‘sack,’ a death to all manhood and self-respect, with choice only between starvation and the workhouse. And the gleams from an appalling capricious unseen world still shone. Next door to the Arnisons lived a Mrs. Weems; it was said that she was a ‘spiritualist.’ When she died after long illness, this rumour was confirmed; her maidservant, Mary, a young woman who often chatted to John, told him of her awful experience. ‘There was a flash and a clap of thunder, like, and I saw wings go past the window—oh, just as quick as lightning. So I knew Mrs. Weems was dead. And she was! She died that minute!’ Ithuriel Death had touched the wasted quiet little body with his spear; and she had sprung into a being of plumes and swiftness and terrors, an elemental menace. The house proved impossible to let for eighteen months, until Mrs. Weems had been forgotten.

John’s mother was what to-day is called ‘psychic.’ The spiritual world was always in her thoughts, and once or twice it had broken through into vision or physical audition. It seemed natural to her that it should. She was of that puritan line which believed that this world was the scene of a real and never-slackening warfare, in which devils and angels were far more closely and continuously engaged than ever the gods and goddesses of Olympus were on the plains of Troy. She had seen her grandmother’s wraith, when she was a child of seven. Her people since Wesley’s time had confronted all time as one unbroken procession, with death merely a barrier brook:

Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now.

Her father had taken her to visit a queer old fellow just after his brother had died. They had been told how the living had sat beside the newly dead in his coffin, all night long, ‘and I sang until the roof was nearly lifted.’

Mrs. Arnison was a woman who had passed successively through wasting influenza that had left her heart diseased, through her husband’s dragging illness before death—and now, almost without resources, was trying to feed and clothe five small children, herself often beaten down with pain, while she could not rest for even a day, and summer holidays were out of the question for any of them. But she never wavered in her belief that this life was God’s will for her and for them, and that an unseen cloud of witnesses were watching her trivial, grotesquely unimportant battle. This conviction alone sustained her; this, and the mere physical presence of five helpless children. Something was done and achieved, with each day that saw them to their beds. And God was with her, she was sure of that. She prayed, in language unvarying through the years, as she gathered them for evening worship, that they might ‘all meet an unbroken family around Thy throne in Heaven.’ The drab terrific day was but the curtain of rough serge hung before a drama of eternal things; there would come a time, known only to the Father, when that veil would shrivel away in fervent heat, and everyone would know what had been all the while happening. Even now whispers of that hidden drama pierced to her, and they comforted her. She did not seek them. They came.

2

Uncle Hamlet also believed much in that unseen world, but in grosser, more apocalyptic fashion. He studied much in booklets which proved that the end of the age was at hand. He managed to be convinced successively that the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan War, the Great War, were the ‘beginnings of sorrows,’ the eve of a day about to break in crashing tempest. He mourned deeply the loss of faith, most of all in the people called Methodists. When he had first become a lay preacher, in still rural Oakenshaw, what days of faith and love had been! Tears of repentance and of finding, God visible in thunder and in forgiveness! There had been great preachers in those days. Who was there now who could shake a congregation ‘over the mouth of Hell,’ till strong men were lying in convulsions and women were screaming, as Richard Roberts had done—and could after all this bring them quietly home to peace and God, in gentle sobbing that ended in exultant singing—like ships coming over the long slow harbour swell, to thanksgiving under the church bells? No one. He remembered Morley Punshon, that mighty voice. Uncle Hamlet had once heard Morley Punshon (who learnt his addresses all by heart, and poured them out in one unfaltering majestic fluency) lecture on the Pilgrim Fathers. The organ-voice, with glorious modulation and varying, had played for sixty-five minutes, unpausing, and then stopped. ‘Father, what a wonderful introduction!’ Uncle Hamlet, just beginning to be a local preacher, had exclaimed. His father had checked him with a movement of his hand, for Punshon was about to pronounce the benediction. The ‘introduction’ was all; and, as we have said, it had taken sixty-five minutes.

Uncle Hamlet had tried to be a Morley Punshon himself; had memorised long passages from Pollock’s Course of Time and Bishop Bickersteth’s Yesterday, Today and For Ever, and from all the best models of English verse and prose as these were known to the people called Methodists. Then, embedded in matter of his own, or slightly changed into what we must call his own style, he had unloaded his golden cargoes on to village audiences. Alas, the degenerating influence of the modern age was already at work, and it revealed itself. There were protests that this or that chapel would not have Brother Hamlet again, and Brother Hamlet was admonished in a local preachers’ meeting. Yet how these very places would have gone out of their minds with joy, if Morley Punshon with his great fame had visited them—instead of Brother Hamlet Hendred, who was still unrecognised for the genius that he was!

A local preachers’ meeting! Again a cloud falls on our narrative, as those words remind us (as they reminded Uncle Hamlet) of the distance we have lapsed from the faith of our fathers. To-day, Uncle Hamlet complained, a local preachers’ meeting was practically nothing but a mere business meeting. There was no ‘unction’ about it. When he had first become a local preacher, it had been very different. Then they had invariably begun their monthly gatherings with that glorious hymn, ‘I am a local preacher.’ How the nobly simple strains had exalted all who sang them!

I am a local preacher;
My name is on the Plan.
Jehovah is my teacher;
I am a happy man.

Happy men they were indeed, and their experiences such as hardly any ever had now! True, they knew times of discouragement. But how marvellously these were varied!

Sometimes when I’ve been preaching
It seemed no good was done;
And then at the next meeting
The Word like fire has run!
I’ve seen the broken-hearted
In tears for mercy call;
And some for Heaven have started,
While I’ve invited all.

Where did you get such preachers now? In those days, the poorest ‘local’ was better than the best ordained minister of to-day. Indeed, Uncle Hamlet strongly held, and frequently proclaimed his conviction, that in so far as the old fervour and eloquence survive anywhere, it is in the ranks of the locals. Here and there you still found one of these who faintly recalled the giant minds of old—as they say that in Lebanon you can occasionally come across a drink-sodden stupid muleteer who yet, by some touch of majesty in his swaying gait, some spark in his mien, reminds you that Crusading kings left their lineage in this land. Such a one was Uncle Hamlet’s bosom friend, Brother Zephaniah Jaggers, who kept an ironmonger’s shop at Roynton, three miles from Oakenshaw. People were beginning to brag because ‘the Plan’ contained two B.A.’s of Owens College, Manchester, and even a Professor. ‘How fine,’ a visitor had exclaimed, ‘to have a famous man like Professor Dixon preaching in a little village chapel!’ ‘Oh, yes,’ had been the reluctant assent. ‘Professor Dixon is no doubt all right. But’ (brightening) ‘give me Jaggers every time!’ And Brother Jaggers himself had roared out, at a local preachers’ meeting, ‘What’s all this about your B Hays and your Hem Hays? Hi’m a B Hay and a Hem Hay! Hi’m Born Hagain and Marvellously Haltered!’

3

If the spirit of satire seems inclined to brood over these years, it is the spirit of pity to whom they belong of right. And the spirit of admiration claims them also. No people ever showed such patient acceptance of lowly estate as ours have done; none ever went from generation to generation in such meekness and humility, asking so little, envying so little. The mill-owners were knighted and ennobled, their sons and daughters became gentry, all that remained lovely of the fields and woods—a vast region—was shut off from the people who worked and fought England’s battles, and kept for a handful to shoot and ride over. A foreigner visiting us might be forgiven for thinking that ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ was a national motto, of which it was desired to remind the masses on every opportunity. And the people accepted their disinheriting; there was never any viciousness, any ‘red fool-fury of the Seine,’ any revolution such as wicked foreign countries had. We killed only one king (and that was long ago), we drove out no nobles, we did not even speak disrespectfully of baronets. We continued to vote them into Parliament, as often as they signified that they wished it.

And English Nonconformity, a poor and unendowed thing, to which the Universities, the Government, rank and title and influence and position, were as far removed as the planets in heaven—and literature an activity suspect and unshared in, and the drama as evil as dancing, and as dangerous—English Nonconformity kept alive poetry (it would not have called it this, had it recognised it) and courage and an infinite flow of kindliness from man to man. Patience, valour, sympathy, these have never lacked in the English poor. Their springs were largely in religion—a religion narrow, uninstructed, ugly, but known to God, and with majesties of power and imagination strangely rising from its darkness. Blake’s vision of Jerusalem being built among ‘these dark Satanic mills’ to us is picturesque, part of our Second National Anthem. A generation ago, it was merely prophecy of God’s will, was history in anticipation. The dark Satanic mills would one day—a day which would rise like any other—be shattered, along with the gentry’s estates and the majestic heavens and the now irrelevant sun and moon and stars! the Epiphany for which the centuries had waited would fill all vision! The Second Coming drew daily, hourly, nearer! John’s spirit shook within him when he heard the people called Methodists sing of this. Listen!

The dear tokens of His passion
Still His dazzling body bears!
Cause of endless exultation
To His ransomed worshippers!
With what rapture
Gaze we on those glorious scars!

Do you mean to tell me that that is not poetry such as kills the modish work that was its contemporary, the moment it is set beside it? The rhymes, you tell me, are bad. They are; but I never see the rhymes, they are swept away on the wind of that imagination and its triumph-laden expression. A body once broken for mankind carries its scars for ever, lovelier than any beauty seen or sung on land or sea. Those scars are dear, and eyes filled with tears of passionate love can scarcely see them for their perfection, dazzling beyond any earthly sun. And the generations who have been ground down and, one after another, pressed into the dust after their hot and weary little day had finished, have been caught up—rapt—into an almost intolerable ecstasy of gladness!

Chapter VIII

1

At Trevanion, John had attended a dame’s school, where a bit of everything had been taught, including ‘Greek and Roman history.’ In consequence, he brought a mind like a rag-bag, filled with unassorted scraps and threads of knowledge and near-knowledge. It was sufficiently imposing to enable him to start well up the new school, and within a year he was in the Fifth Standard, a class often privileged to be taught for half an hour by the Gaffer himself.

This was fortunate, for it set high standards, and the value of early impressions cannot be exaggerated. John Arnison learnt that a lapse in accuracy is a very serious and terrible thing. The Gaffer showed this very clearly; his scholarship was exact and exacting. He often warned the school that he would permit no mispronunciation. No, not even of a foreign word.

The Fifth Standard were reading a compilation which included extracts from The Story of Other Nations. When Greek words swam up, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, their lady teacher took them, humbly and confidingly, to the source of expert knowledge. “Àrist-ì-des?’ queried Miss Leverhulme, trembling. ‘Àrist-i-dès,’ thundered the Oracle, with the i as short as it could be made, and tremendous emphasis on the ist. She was scarcely back in her classroom when the Gaffer appeared in her wake, carrying his cutting cane. He pounced on Jim Adshead to read the passage in which the Athenian’s name occurred. Jim read it as Miss Leverhulme had taught them to read it, before she received enlightenment—‘À-rist-ì-des’—and was soundly flogged. ‘I will not have any word mispronounced!’ the Gaffer shouted, perspiring after his exertions. ‘You shall not get the Burgess Higher Grade a bad name, just as if you were board school children from a place like St. Bartholomew’s, and were taught no better! I will have scholarship—exact, perfect scholarship—from every boy and girl who passes out from under my hands’ (a favourite expression of his), ‘even from idle hulking fellows who come to school in clogs.’

To this day there are lorry-drivers and small shopkeepers in Oakenshaw who are as innocent of Greek as they are of Paradise Lost, but can still name to you one Athenian. If his ostracism were again in proposal, they would vote for it as unhesitatingly as that fellow-countryman of his who voted for it because he was sick of hearing of Aristides the Just. Their bodies involuntarily twitch still, in sympathy with a sufferer nearly forty years ago, as they pronounce (or rather, mispronounce) the horrid name.

Ranging widely, the Gaffer spread enlightenment everywhere. The Aristides incident aroused him to the danger of wrong pronunciations spreading. He took up English history next. The book John’s class were reading was prefaced by a list of kings, each complete with nickname (if any). John Lackland, Edward Longshanks, William Rufus, Edmund Ironsides. The Gaffer was determined to permit no slackness here, any more than in classical fields.

He pointed to ‘Edmund Ironsides.’ ‘Pronounce that, Arnison.’

‘Edmund Iron Sides,’ said John.

‘No! Edmund Ei-ròn-si-dès,’ he bellowed, and made the class bellow after him. ‘Ei-ròn-si-dès, a Greek name meaning “Son of Peace.” I am surprised at you, Arnison, for your father was a gentleman and an educated man.’

A great music-lover, Gaffer Jackson sentimentally kept alive the memory of the appalling hungry sixties, when Lancashire clemmed during the American Civil War, and bands of starving men dragged themselves along the roads, singing ‘Rosalie, the prairie flower’ and ‘Hard times, come again no more.’ Much time was accordingly given to singing. It is amazing how large a proportion of it was taken up by Gaffer Jackson making the school, for twenty minutes on end, repeat nothing but ‘Do-ray-me-fa-so-la-te-do.’ ‘Do!’ and eleven hundred voices would send out the mystic note, resonant as Memnon struck by sunrise. ‘Do it again. That was not deep enough.’ And he would strike with his tuning-fork (he had a more efficient instrument for striking beside him, on which the singers kept wary eyes). ‘Do!’ And ‘Do!’ would ring out again. ‘Too deep that time. Do it once more. Do!’

They sang hymns every morning. A great favourite of the Gaffer’s was

Beautiful Zion, built above,
Beautiful city that I love.

They were rarely allowed to sing a hymn right through; he would stop them, and make them repeat a line or even half a line. And the high reputation as a scholar which he had given himself necessitated that he should make often and arbitrary pronouncements on scansion. Thus, in the lines

Thy love unknown
Has broken every barrier down,

‘barrier’ had to be pronounced as strictly two syllables, without any dance or flick in the middle (for that would have made it bad poetry). ‘Bar-yer.’ And ‘bar-yer’ the school had to sing it, seventeen times, till they had it right.

Poetry, too, Gaffer Jackson considered an important part of everyone’s education. It was at Oakenshaw that John learnt how loathsome poetry can be. They had to learn by heart ‘He never smiled again,’ ‘Casabianca,’ and some perfectly imbecile passages by one Walter Scott. Scott, it transpired, had a family of half-witted children, who used to pester their father with idiotic questions in winter as to whether the daisy would again prank the lea. (‘Yes, prattlers, yes.’)

2

‘Yes, prattlers, yes’ haunted John with a deep exasperation. He gathered from the ‘Notes,’ which he studied with far greater care than the poetry and found far more interesting, that the prattlers lived in the midst of perfectly delightful country. Within the veritable confines of faery, almost under the shadow of Eildon Hill, which another Scott, a wizard (beyond doubt an ancestor of these fortunate children—but why ever did the ‘Note’ omit so dazzling a fact?), had split into its triple crest! And, in a moment of lapse into wisdom such as even the compilers of school poetry primers have occasionally, twelve lines were quoted from a later poet (of whose work, John thought, there should have been more), glancing back at this very region where the junior Scotts had had their home:

Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood
Fleets through the dusky land;
Where Scott, come home to die, has stood
My feet returning stand.

A mist of memory broods and floats,
The Border waters flow;
The air is full of ballad notes,
Borne out of long ago.

Old songs that sung themselves to me,
Sweet through a boy’s day-dream,
While trout beneath the blossom’d tree
Flashed in the golden stream.

The mind has its bas-reliefs and pictures, its own dread mythology and mythological figures; and Tweed stood up, a river-god with dank ropy tresses—seen dimly through the gloom of a winter evening, which the lamps were sprinkling with points of light. A second living creature—distinct from the god, yet obedient to his guiding—the loved ghost of his brook drifted through a mysterious land filled with murmurs. It was a land like that of which Mandeville tells—lying in deep night always—unattempted by the frightened tribes on its borders, who yet testified that they heard from it the voices of living men, sounds of trumpets and instruments of war and music, and crowing of cocks that marked the coming of some manner of dawn.

Dawn came in the boy’s day-dream, suddenly and amazingly, in the vision flashing up in those two final lines. He saw himself in an April orchard, far from Oakenshaw, beside a stream where petals sailed among the bubbles and trout were leaping. This was where the prattlers had lived—not in the conventional and stereotyped ‘country’ of the town spinsters who write pieces about ‘Nature,’ a bird and ‘lambkin’ dotted parchment, but in the very fact itself—the fact of wildness and freshness and infinitely changing scene! Eildon and Tweed and stretching heathy vastnesses, such as had environed John’s all-too-brief Cornish sojourn! Yet it was these children who, when their summer ‘gambols’ were stopped by winter, used to beset their father with imbecile questions which he thought no shame to write down, for other children to have to learn by heart, long afterwards:

They anxious ask, ‘Will spring return,
And birds and lambs again be gay,
And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray?’

Inconceivable! yet it appeared to have happened, for their own father related it.

John’s inner hunger cried out for fulfilment, and thrust out further, and yet further, from its stony prison. Oakenshaw was beyond redemption, and without mitigation. But two miles from its Town Hall were suburbs, still only in act of creation. There were building plots, and segments of spinney marked out for clearance but not yet cleared. You could play here for a while and lose your imagination, if not your body, in a mimic tiny wilderness.

Or you could go another two miles further out, to a region dotted with ‘pits’—ponds which held, some of them, sticklebacks. John caught them easily, on a string innocent of hook or bait; and they would live for a week in the Arnison backyard, until, despite crumbs and worms abundantly fed to them, they unaccountably died.

His mother, herself too busy to read, and pitying something gaunt in his eyes, as of patience coming before its time, let him use the public library ticket she possessed as a ratepayer. Every day he hurried through dinner, to have time for a detour on his way back to school, and called at the library for a fresh volume of Jardine’s Naturalist’s Library. These books, their lovely plates of etchings, gave him visions of unutterable ethereal beauty. How wonderful was the landscape over which wild Nature moved in such paradisal leisure and peacefulness! The Chillingham Park cattle, the graceful axis deer of India! Somewhere, surely—or the artist would never have depicted them—these glades existed, and that strip of sky overhead!

And then one day a Nosey Parker, some kind of overling in the Library, noticed that Mrs. Arnison, a lady notoriously addicted to good works and Methodism, was reading a terrible lot of Natural History. Volumes as fast as the rules allowed her to change them! Was her brain giving way? He stopped the boy, and rigorously examined him. When he found that he was hardly nine, and that the books were for his own reading, not his mother’s, he was very fierce and said the privilege was being abused and he must forfeit the ticket. But the boy’s distress managed to get behind the petty official, to something human and (which is not by any means the same thing) even intelligent. He went to the shelves and took down the books that John had had out, and was mollified to find their virgin whiteness as clean as on the day they came. They had been read, but read carefully, in a decent home.

‘All right, boy,’ he said mildly.

3

In June 1898 the Timothy Road Sunday School took their annual treat and outing at Alderley Edge. John and Gaffer both accompanied it. The day swam up then, and I have no doubt swims up still, in the memory of the happy ones who enjoyed it, as an island floating in violet haze,

Under Ionian skies,
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise.

Alderley Edge used to be a good place, forty years ago.

John was in luck that day. When the specially chartered buses stopped at their destination, he and his companion, a boy called Tom Sutton, went into a shop to buy something fizzy. They found themselves beside the awful Gaffer. But Jove was kindly, and presented them each with a pork-pie and an orange. What a meal they had in the bilberries afterwards! It was like a College Gaudy. Ginger-pop and sandwiches and pork-pie and apples and oranges. They lay back on the slope, and swigged and feasted, lying as the gods do on their cloudy couches above the dusty plain.

Golden hours of revel and wandering followed. They strayed into a swamp, where John saw spotted orchises. Keenly interested in wild flowers, he took one to the affable Gaffer. ‘What is it, sir?’

The Gaffer explored it, twiddling it up and down. ‘It is a periwinkle,’ he announced at last. He liked having his scholarship deferred to.

That was in Queen Victoria’s reign, and John Arnison has since then won some small fame as a field botanist. In 1933 he added the Cephalanthera ensifolia to the Berkshire flora, proving no less an authority than the late Dr. Druce mistaken in his refusal to accept an ancient record of its occurrence. He is a Fellow of several learned societies, and gives papers on plants and their distribution. Yet to this day he can hardly bring himself to believe that an orchis is an orchis. Periwinkle is what he longs to say; and when he says orchis, he shakes in terror of a flogging before the assembled savants. It would seem in no way unnatural if the ghost of the Gaffer loomed up, flourishing and tossing the well-remembered canes. ‘This school has a name for scholarship, sir— sound scholarship! I will not have that name disgraced by idle hulking fellows in clogs! Hold out your hand.’

4

John learnt also that a mountain was anything that touched a thousand feet in height. Where one festering arm of Manchester threatens to invade Derbyshire was an actual mountain, the Gaffer told them, Grimpeth Low. Just one thousand feet, neither a foot more nor less. A mountain! The Westmorland Arnisons woke up, and bade their descendant go on pilgrimage to becks and clinging snow-patches, waterfalls and the bead-bonny ash that overhangs them. He and Tom Sutton accordingly walked to Grimpeth Low, to scale their first ‘mountain.’ It was a six-miles tramp, along a tedious sloping road, and up a brow; then six miles back again, over flat-paved streets. Grimpeth Low was a fraud; merely an extra bulge at the beginning of the monstrous wen which is called Manchester.

There were real mountains, such as even the Dovrefjeld and Jotunheim need not have despised as foothills, within what should have been easy reach of Oakenshaw. But Derbyshire’s Peak must not be defiled by human foot. It is a sacred mountain, dedicated to hare and grouse. Wander over its wild moors, and you will get a ‘soomoons.’ The poor are kept under by the dreaded word ‘soomoons? A ‘soomoons’ means not only a fine (such as a rich man squanders easily several times over, on a night of amusement, but such as the poor cannot make up by weeks of privation). It means the disgrace of appearing in the police-courts, and having your name in the papers, for the neighbours to read.

Let a district prove itself plague-stricken beyond redemption, and its inhabitants will flee from it. Then why is it that the roads leading away from Manchester are not congested with desperate men and women, toiling outward and away, with their babies and chattels—falling by the side exhausted and dying, sometimes raising themselves to push on again—sure of one thing only, that Manchester must become merely a dream whose recollection makes the spirit shudder but whose insistent reality has passed away for ever? I cannot explain why this does not happen. But I do know that a merciful civilisation would allow no one but its criminals to live anywhere within a dozen miles of Manchester’s heart. Yet, in the civilisation which we have, Manchester swarms and festers, drawing into its central bog of misery new places that once had open spaces and open air. The bog’s confines are always shifting.

But they never retract.

Chapter IX

1

Oakenshaw is Manchester.

The city fathers deny it, by a preposterous subterfuge keeping their separate Council and encouraging their own football team, the Oakenshaw United. But what is the use of denying it, when you can walk from ‘The Jolly Shepherdess’ to the Manchester Exchange, ten statutory miles, without once touching unpavemented soil? A squirrel could traverse the distance, leaping from rubbish-pit roof to rubbish-pit roof or one advertisement hoarding to another, and never descend.

‘The Jolly Shepherdess’ is—unquestionably—jolly, as her signboard asserts. But it is a jollity maintained in defiance of physical law, its equilibrium creaks and sways. Clearly a shepherdess who has seen better days, she wears a forlornly dissipated look like that of the florid faded beauties who have sunk to the plane of nightly performance on the boards of the Oakenshaw Empire. Her artist has depicted her yodelling to invisible sheep. But Oakenshavians, who know nothing of yodelling and not much of sheep, can judge only by what they see; and the general interpretation is that she is ‘T’wench ’at’s overdone it,’ and in consequence is hiccupping in some discomfort, as she stands askew and all but lurching, flourishing her crook in untidy derision.

June 1898 brought a hot breathless spell, and after a succession of cruel days and nights Mrs. Arnison one day saw ‘The Jolly Shepherdess.’ She had seen it before, but only in the sense of the prophet Esaias, differentiating non-sight from sight—‘seeing without seeing.’ This time she was returning from tea with brother Hamlet and sister Muriel, and took a tram back. It halted just opposite the signboard, so that the two ladies, the idyllic and the real, confronted each other at extremely short range. A breeze was waving the Shepherdess gently to and fro; and as Mrs. Arnison waited for the tram’s restarting, the Shepherdess’s message (it is an idiotic statement, but true) spoke to her. She was sitting in the tram’s upper storey, and from that equal altitude she saw what she had never suspected, that those leprous yellow blodges under the Shepherdess’s feet were cowslips. She remembered lambs and green fields, and was desperately home-sick. The day had been punishing, and was closing in dust and drouth. Oakenshaw swam up round her fainting senses like a sepulchre seen through miasma. She must escape from it, though for but a day, or else she would perish.

Next day was Saturday, always a school holiday. So she called at the omnibus offices, and they hunted out for her a sequence of buses which fitted together, with but a few minutes’ waiting for two changes, and would bring her within two miles’ walk of Goitdale. She would see Goitdale again, with its hanging woods and hinterland of boundless moor and mountain.

2

The children managed to get seats behind the driver, where they could see the magnificent horses for every yard of the way. This in itself is a splendour locked in the minds of my generation, which no succeeding generation can know. The steady swinging of those glorious limbs and bodies, the outflung haunches—not crude swelling flesh, but strength and vigour flung wide and swaying—the snorting of the great patient creatures as they gathered breath from time to time—the music of their pounding hoofs! The machine is a fine thing, and imagination not only must, it easily can, find sustenance in contemplating its spreading empire. But even before the machine came there was beauty in the world, as well as an abounding squalor which the machine (to give it its due) has already done much to banish.

But Goitdale, golden Goitdale, whose arms were once crowded with gorse and primroses, whose head was heather and fern, had all but perished, and the shadow of their mother’s deep distress gradually darkened over the children, bravely though she hid it. The moorland slopes were a grey fungus growth of colliers’ hovels, slate-roofed and soiled into sympathy with the melancholy rain which was usually dripping from them. Slag-heaps abounded, and no picturesque copse of willows seemed to be sent to cover the abomination, as in old days when slag-heaps were few and quickly abandoned.

They learnt that the upper moors were now strictly preserved. Young Rabbitmuck (grandson of the Owd Rabbitmuck whom James Hendred had served) lived in London on his royalties. He had married an American lady with a proselyte’s enthusiasm for preservation of what she called ‘the real old English life.’ But the literature which had presented her with her picture of that life must have been somewhere faulty, as it showed only a countryside of feudal gentry and faithful retainers and bowing worshipping peasants (useful as keepers and such). She painted a little, she wrote poetry a little, she adored England. But it was only in the hunting season that she sometimes showed her gifts and graces in Goitdale. And, except when Lord and Lady Goitdale were in residence with a sporting party, Gurt Hall was occupied by strangers. To these strangers, a different set each year, the moorland shooting was let. The strangers were usually Americans; and something closely akin to the hatred of the sheltered greedy folk in England which once caused an explosion in New England was growing up in a Derbyshire valley—against America and Americans. The tide of empire had shifted, and it was from the West now, from the sunset lands beyond the Atlantic, that men and women came ‘to keep the Past upon its Throne.’ They came, and set up their ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted with the Utmost Rigour of the Law’ boards, and planted the wild paths thick with keepers. You must keep to the steaming shut-in valley, ghastlier every year with its grey heaps piling up and its stagnant pools collecting and widening.

‘They think no more on us than if we were so many crow-boggarts.^1 And it’s crow-boggarts that we are, and all. Ay, and we’s gettin’ to look like ’em. Now, if Owd Rabbitmuck were still livin’, ’e’d ’ave ’ad summat to say about keepin’ ‘’is own fowk off their own moors. Ay, ‘’e would that! But this newest Lord Rabbitmuck and ‘’is Lady Rabbitmuck . . .’

Mrs. Arnison sat despondently by the wayside, and they ate their lunch. Then she plucked up heart, and led them to Hodgefold, her home of childhood. At any rate, that remained. It must remain, somewhere, and in essentials unchanged. No one could ruin a place so large and lovely.

3

They found it dilapidated, and given over to storerooms and harness-rooms. Mrs. Arnison did not ask to see over it, as she had intended to. She stood by the wall, gazing long and hungrily and in silence. Then they returned to where they must catch their first bus back to Oakenshaw. They were all too tired for talking. John heard his mother say, as she dragged her feet homewards, ‘I wouldn’t have come—I wouldn’t have come—if I’d known.’

But the family had in them the fire of unquenchable resilience and vivacity. A small thing restored them to courage and cheerfulness. There is always one thing unchanged, in every town and hamlet, however the seventy times seven devils of industrialism have hacked and ravaged everything else. The old church stands, like a runic stone from forgotten ages, mossed and quaintly inscribed. They presently passed the church where Madge Hendred had worshipped in childhood. Her parents were Methodists of the original stock; not Dissenters, not Nonconformists. James Hendred had been both ‘chapel steward’ and church sidesman, the leading layman at the Methodist place and, next to Owd Rabbitmuck, the leading layman at the Anglican one—an amicable and catholic arrangement in which no one saw any hurt. Madge had consequently attended church in the morning, or, rather, Sabbath school before church, and chapel in the evening. She laughed as she told them how, after their school, the children all used to be shepherded into a large vestry, where they were kept prisoners through the morning service, so that their parents might worship secure in the knowledge that they were not up to mischief while restraining influences were away.

The church lay open, and they went in. Disappointment began to melt and disappear, as she told of this and that remembered figure of her childhood, and who had always sat here and who always there, and where her own father and mother sat. Then they rested in the pews, and stared at the rose-hued western window, in which Christ called over the Sea of Galilee to Peter, who was sinking. The fire on the shore, by which Our Lord was standing, shone, preternaturally glowing in the afternoon rays striking through it; and behind Our Lord the artist had set the sunrise, in such a manner as to transfigure a tree by the water’s side into the semblance of a cross. Our Lord seemed to be pointing to it, as he talked to Peter. ‘This He said,’ John heard his mother murmur to herself, ‘signifying by what manner of death he should glorify God.’ Peter’s face was half turned, and it was almost exactly like the face of their own Peter. From that evening the picture passed into the children’s memories, and in it stood always, not the rugged Galilean fisherman who should have been there, but the face which the artist had made so absurdly youthful, suffused with the dawn-light which the afternoon had made wonderful. It was their own Peter.

They went into the vestry, and their mother, growing full of laughter, made them sit there and then showed them how she and the others had waited all through those Sunday morning services of long ago, their only diversion coming from the rector’s various entrances, to change from this robe to some other. By these entrances they knew exactly what point of the service had been reached. And there was always one contribution which, by immemorial mysterious custom, they made to the service itself. The door stood ajar, showing a few (but only a few, a very few) what was happening inside the church. These favoured ones acted as precentors to the rest; and through that open door came into the church always—once, and once only, from beginning to end—a great burst of infant song, in the Te Deum. When the congregation sang ‘Govern them,’ then immediately, from the spirits in prison, came the shouted joyous additional exhortation, ‘And lift them up for ever!’

So they made their way back to the first of their return buses, cheerful again; helping Baby Peter, and singing along the road, ‘And lift them up for ever!’

‘And lift them up for ever!’ Remember, O Lord, Thy people of the North! Govern them, if Thou must, with Thy grim ministries of rain and hardship, of coldness and penury, of exile from loveliness and banishment from their own fair countryside! But do not turn Thy face away from them utterly and for ever! For since Thy world began, nowhere have more courage and patience—courage unquenchable and patience too deep for tears—been shown by Thy children!

For I too, who am remembering this story, am a man of the North and not of the warm comfortable South. And if my pen is sometimes bitter against Manchester, it is not because I write as passing Southrons do, who see only our greyness and starkness. I know our steel-true heart of valour, I know our long-suffering which is three parts stupidity but one part martyrdom. I know——

Oh, more than this I know! and have recorded
Upon the red-leaved table of my heart!

Chapter X

1

I have said that the South of England is the comfortable part. No Northerner who has ever come to it, and settled into any sort of financial competence, ever voluntarily returns to Manchester or Bradford or Glasgow or Edinburgh, and to their cold slushy miserable winters.

The terrible winter of 1898-99 came, when icicles hung on the back door, a yard long, for two months on end, and day succeeded day in bleakness. The Arnisons were short of food and fuel, and the impression went deep. Something of the impression must have shown in their outward appearance, for Mr. Penney, the milkman, one morning lingered talking. ‘You’re not looking too well, ma’am,’ he said with respectful sympathy. Sympathy, as those who practise the Third Degree know, is the Inquisitor’s deadliest weapon; in a few minutes, with little said and none of it said complainingly, he knew enough of the family’s struggle to appal him. Mrs. Arnison, as a minister’s widow, was recognised by him as in a social scale above his, and he would never have dreamed of offering direct help, even could he have afforded it. But he was one of the ‘Poor Stewards’ of the Methodist Church, and as such collected Mrs. Arnison’s quarterly pew-rent. It had been taken by him this morning, and he tried to thrust it back. ‘I won’t take it, ma’am. It isn’t right, that a lady who has given all you have for God should have to give the children’s food as well.’

But it was her turn to be appalled. She would not rob God. She would, and must, pay rent for her niche in His house. A tithe of all she possessed was His due, as set down in His Word; she paid, scrupulously, a tenth of every penny that came to her. She dared not withhold her pew-rent—dared not, because of her ever-present fear of that rigorous Conscience within her, far more exacting than any fears which could be held before her eyes. ‘Conscience, that aboriginal Vicar of Christ—a prophet in its informations—a priest in its blessings and anathemas—a monarch in its peremptoriness.’ Mr. Penney took her pew-rent with heavy reluctance, but take it he had to. John, a silent little boy at her side, lived through the incident, unnoted by either of the others.

2

To make this winter’s memory more appalling, Baby Peter had a cruel accident. The children were all playing together on the staircase, when he fell backwards (John, who was a wild bear of the Rockies, suddenly springing from a thicket), and rolled down the steps. A splinter of wood ran into his face, above the right eye. For weeks he was threatened with loss of it.

A weak puny child, he had always seemed unlikely to grow up. He was a darling, naturally and deeply unselfish and sunny, and his patience during these weeks struck his brothers and sister as the most heartbreaking thing they ever saw. The local doctor, it was whispered in Methodist circles, was ‘fast’ and ‘drank.’ How he managed to be the one, living in Oakenshaw, perhaps some student of economics and social conditions could explain; it is beyond the present writer. As to the other charge, Methodism has always been distinguished for having a very low standard of insobriety; even if he did take an occasional peg, we may believe that higher ethics than even Methodism’s have long ago forgiven him. He made precious little money by his practice, and he took infinite trouble. He saved the eyesight and the child, and his bill was such as even Mrs. Arnison could manage to meet.

3

Help, then, had come from strangers. But Uncle Hamlet, from whose vicinity so much had been promised, proved of little assistance. His own troubles were bubbling over. His business had never gone well; presently it was going worse, and, queerly enough, at first because of an unexpected rock-wall of principle. Hamlet was an intense politician, a follower of’Honest John’ Morley and equally honest John Bright. His millenial dreams held somewhere the Yankee face of William Ewart Gladstone, sternly bidding the Hosts of Evil to let the people go from bondage. He was living under the Fifth Dispensation, but nevertheless meddled a great deal in the world’s wicked affairs.

In the autumn of 1899 the Boer War broke out. Uncle Hamlet obstinately stood fast to his Radical faith, and denounced it from the pulpit, until some village chapels refused to have him any more. He was even said to have drawn attention to the fact that a transport crammed with troops had just sailed from Plymouth, and to have added, ‘May God send them all to the bottom of the sea!’ This was an exaggeration. But he became widely unpopular, and a recently opened Co-operative Stores collected his patriotic customers, who mostly left his bills unpaid.

John was with Uncle Hamlet one day, when a small boy on the opposite side of the street called out something opprobrious. John did not hear what it was, but his uncle’s face darkened, and he said malignantly, ‘That boy wants a good hiding.’ John was surprised. Strange as it seems, he had not yet heard the word ‘want’ in that very common significance, and he took a second glance at the youth who was cherishing such abnormal desires. The latter put his fingers to his nose at them both, and bawled, ‘Pro-Boer!’

The outbreak of the war came on a day memorable in other ways. It was the custom of the school to remit homework whenever a day’s temperature touched eighty. This in Oakenshaw, in a region drenched with rain throughout the year, rarely happened, but it happened on that September afternoon. The sultriness seemed portentous of other sultriness to come, of other sort. At last, after ages of peace, the Great Queen’s majesty was threatened—by a puny folk, it was true, yet nevertheless able to put up more of a semblance of a fight than the hordes of Zulus, assegai-armed, or savages in Ashanti and Asiatic forests, who had hitherto by their foolish conduct contributed most of its martial glories. The last real war had been the Crimean; John had seen pictures of Russians in the snow, being routed by busbies and bayonets. The snow and the gleaming points together had conveyed something of the ghastliness of war. Now it was to happen again. That afternoon, an excited master—they had a couple in the bevy of lady teachers—went round from class to class, with the Gaffer’s sanction, announcing that the sands of patience had run out, and the war which the insolent republics had asked for was to be granted them. Every class was made to rise and sing ‘God Save the Queen.’ That evening Uncle Hamlet called, and brought an evening paper. ‘Battle raging in Van Reenen’s Pass,’ he read out; and John visualised a ravine which held eternal night in its deep fissures, where desperate men were at that very moment grappling in the fashion of the picture-books. Uncle Hamlet was emphatic that the war had been made by one Joe. In a striking simile he observed impressively, ‘As John Morley says, They’re ringing their bells now, but they’ll be wringing their hands soon. Ah, the Angel of Death will soon be darkening all the land. I can hear the very flapping of his wings.’

A new journalism had started, brighter and brisker than the old, with wonderful prophetic gifts of guessing at facts before they had happened. Its spearhead was a paper sold for a halfpenny. This paper was taken by the school’s second master, who rushed in displaying its headlines. ‘Victory in sight! Great Battle at Glencoe! British losses 250, Boer losses 800.’ The proportion was satisfactory, though after Hastings and Towton and Waterloo the battle seemed disappointingly trivial, a mere skirmish. But next day Mr. Puckle reported an even greater victory, at Elandslaagte, and read them luscious accounts of Lancers spearing the farmers through and through.

4

The North has kept alive a love of singing, closer to the folk and community singing than anything the South knows in its stately solemn gatherings. A Mr. Ackroyd, in private life an ironmonger, had a company of boys and girls, known as ‘Mr. Ackroyd’s Little Folks,’ who in the winter evenings gave concerts for good causes. They sang and recited, and did it uncommonly well—simple, sensible ditties—not at all like the appalling saccharine stuff which Uncle Hamlet’s wife used to twitter at the piano. Mr. Ackroyd’s Little Folks gave a concert now, to raise funds for the soldiers going to fight. Mr. Puckle, the Burgess School second master, co-opted himself a member of their entertainment board for the occasion, and appeared, tambourine in hand, singing ‘The Absent-minded Beggar.’ He collected extra pennies into the tambourine at the close.

Patricia Marston, the pretty girl who had been Britannia in the great Diamond Jubilee Cantata, was one of Mr. Ackroyd’s Little Folks. She was, however, a lesser star than her younger sister Anne, an engaging baggage who sang

Oh, my bonnet!
But it’s not my bonnet!
It’s the pretty little face inside!

and strutted about the stage with a lucky boy with whom she sang in duet,

Reuben, I have long been thinking
What a lovely thing ’twould be,
If all men could be transported
Far beyond the Northern Sea.

Patsy was a delight, singing archly (which in Victorian days was a charm, shamelessly admired as such), ‘Someone’s stole my heart away.’ But she paled beside the rippling swanking impudence of her baby sister.

5

All this was quick delightful excitement, but it was followed by the disappointment which is bound to come when the sport-loving Briton lowers himself so far as to battle with sub-civilised races. The papers filled with bitter complaints of the mean way this enemy waged war. Instead of coming out to meet his betters bravely, it seemed that he preferred to skulk in holes and shoot our fellows down; and there seemed to be no authority capable of compelling him to play the game and keep the rules. ‘Anyone can lie up in a ditch,’ as Mr. Puckle pointed out, ‘and shoot men who scorn to hide themselves in that rotten fashion. They are showing that they are cowards as well as bullies. Remember that, boys and girls. A bully is always a coward.’ Tales of disaster came unaccountably, after the first brilliant beginning.

The war sagged downwards into a bathos of dulness, and John, resembling the majority of his older countrymen in this, relegated it to forgetfulness. It was still going on somewhere and somehow; and after a long interval things happened for which they were bidden to rejoice. But even Mr. Puckle, telling of one of the greatest of these, the Relief of Ladysmith, did so with only a chastened exultation.

Chapter XI

1

1900 began with an argument in the brilliant new daily, as to whether the twentieth century opened in 1900 or in 1901. To Mrs. Arnison’s heartfelt thankfulness, the year began also with the conversion of all her children. To Oakenshaw Methodist chapel came a famous revivalist, on a ten days’ special mission. The Reverend Thomas Ramsden was a farmer’s son, ruddy of face, fervent in spirit. His technique was simple. He first told the story of his own life of wickedness: how he had gone in for drinking rum, for card-playing, for Sabbath-breaking, swearing, had even attended a dance hall. Then conversion had come, to him the worst of sinners, and the call to bring in others.

The preacher was sincere and earnest, and though his ethical categories were somewhat mixed this was a matter his audiences could not detect, for their own were confused. But his campaign rather dragged. As Uncle Hamlet justly pointed out, there was a lack of spiritual fire about it. Then, on the last day of his visit, all this suddenly changed. A mighty tide swept souls into the kingdom, and with them John, the last of five Arnison souls.

Robert, good, patient, with simple face lit up by a natural trust and love, had gone in easily, the very first day. His going had rejoiced his widowed mother, though it was hard to see what life of sinfulness Robert needed to be reclaimed from. He had been born in an excessively hot summer in India, one that stood out in a century of summers by the appalling horror of its breathlessness and fury; and had come too soon after his elder brother. All through his childhood he had been sickly, and had not been helped by the opium pills with which his native nurse had put him to sleep and eased her own labour with him. His mother, more than fully occupied, had not been able to see to him as a mother would to-day; and when the results of his illness (and the opium) showed in an unnatural simplicity of intellect, it had been accepted as ‘a cross,’ sent by ‘the Lord’s will.’ But, whatever he may have lacked in mind, he lacked nothing in character. He genuinely loved whomever he was told to love, and in this category was God. When he rose and walked straight to the penitent room, his mother, though pleased, could not feel that grace had yet got at the real centres of wickedness in her home.

Victorian parents interfered with their children’s secret thoughts and emotions in a manner which we should think justified parricide and matricide. Mrs. Arnison, like John’s pastors and Sunday school teachers (but she did it more insistently, and—though it was done most lovingly—naggingly; the word cannot be dodged), kept encouraging him to bring her a Bible (given for the purpose) to show her written on the fly-leaf, ‘This day I have given my heart to God.’ John happened to have been cursed with an almost pathological honesty; such people are the hardest of all to convert. Uncle Hamlet’s wife, whom no one would have accused of any unhealthy excess of honesty, used to get converted periodically; with every fresh revivalist preacher she would fly into an orgy of shallow and silly hymns, tinkled out on her piano, and would appear sobbing at the penitent form. Then she would backslide, until the next evangelist came. But John had been ‘obstinately closed to the workings of the Spirit’ (Uncle Hamlet’s sorrowful testimony). The only result of the abundant trouble taken with him had been an uneasy irritated feeling. He was not unwilling to be converted, unappetising as a religious life appeared, and he was anxious to be good (though all authorities assured him that mere goodness, even if flawless, could not save him from eternally burning in Hell, a frightening prospect, for he had a sensitive imagination and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs went deep indeed). But it had to be genuine with him, for he knew he could not fool himself, and felt that if he could not fool himself he could not hope to fool God. ‘Thou God seest me.’ If he pretended to be converted when he was not, he would infallibly be detected, and like the man without a wedding garment would be bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness and the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But as the days passed, one orgy of excitement rising from slow beginnings in a crescendo, his resistance weakened. Gaffer Jackson had so far co-operated that all homework was excused—for ten days!—and therefore every Arnison had to attend every service. The hymns were disquieting, lugubriously stressing the sinner’s fate; the prayers were menacing. The army of the saved was growing, and the unconverted felt increasingly that they were being left in a small desperate group devoted to massacre for the warning of others. On the third day, Harold, aged six, had been convinced of sin, and had been gathered into the penitent room; on the fifth, little Peter, not yet five, who like his mother at the same age had begun to seek the Lord sorrowing, found Him (more fortunate than his mother, who had to seek for seven years). Trixie was a harder case. Probably medieval Christianity was right in suspecting women of a more ingrained tendency to sin than men have; at any rate, Trixie continued ‘worldly’ right up to the eighth day. Then she broke down under the entreaties of Miss Patricia Davies, a young lady teacher whom she adored, and consented to give up her lusts and darling sins, as the preacher phrased it in a special address to the Sabbath school. John continued outside the kingdom, certainly not from any wish to be outside it.

The last night came, heavy with terrors and sense of eternity about to go by for ever, and of death and judgment about to occupy all. John felt as Dr. Faustus when his last half-hour drew on, when earthly friends had abandoned him in awe and shakings, and he knew that Hell was clustering about his room, to rush in and take possession for ever. The Reverend Thomas Ramsden opened with ‘Depth of mercy.’ It plunged poor John in despairs from which he could see no rope that would lift him. ‘Depth of mercy,’ the crowded congregation sang:

Depth of mercy! can there be
Mercy still reserved for me?
Can my God His wrath forbear?
Me—the Chief of Sinners—spare?

The chant glowed and gloomed through shimmering lava-fires, till it rose to solemn exultation of assurance. The Deity was placated, voices asserted; the peril was passing.

Kindled His relentings are!
Me He now delights to spare!
Cries, ‘How can I give thee up?’
Lets the lifted thunder drop.

That ‘lifted thunder’ proved too much for several obstinate cases, and a stream set strongly towards the penitent room. John felt a jab in his back; he raised his bowed miserable head, and saw his mother’s face in tears. Desperate, feeling that if lost he must be it should not be by his own choice—he would throw the blame on this inscrutable Being who demanded man’s heart yet made it so hard for that heart to be given to him—he rose and joined the river seeking salvation. The ecstatic delight that flashed into his mother’s tears brought a deeper sense of shame and wretchedness, that he should have made her so happy while himself feeling queerly dishonest. However, once inside the penitent room, no doubt he would be helped to believe. ‘Only believe!’ the preacher bawled at them, for the hundredth time. ‘Only believe! that is all, my brothers and sisters.’ It is so easy—only believe. Ah, but God has made it so hard—has sown the way of faith with so many unnecessary and sheerly wanton stumbling-blocks!

Inside the penitent room, he found himself confronted by his own Sabbath school teacher. Mr. Beales was a good man, himself not in the least inclined to what Professor Huxley (who perhaps did not understand everything he ‘ticked off’) has called corybantic Christianity. He accepted it when it was thrust upon him, but with a discomfort which he was too modest to admit. He was mildly embarrassed to have to deal with John, whom he did not in his heart regard as a really bad boy. The business, moreover, was urgent; such a harvest was pressing in, on this last night of deep sea fishing for souls, that little time could be spared for such as John. John could not be far from the kingdom, being the son of so saintly a woman as Mrs. Arnison. So Mr. Beales knelt beside him, and asked him, ‘Do you believe you are a sinner?’ ‘Yes,’ John admitted. He had no doubt about this; he had been consistently told it, and was willing to take it on such universal testimony. ‘Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the World?’ He admitted this also, readily enough. Then—’Do you believe He died for you?’ ‘Yes’ (more doubtfully—for this was just the crucial question). ‘Then you are saved,’ he was told; and was sent out hastily into another room. He felt no exultation, no relief, no peace. But he was reckoned among the saved.

His salvation had one result which he resented. His name was sent in to Gaffer Jackson on a list of other Higher Grade scholars who had been similarly snatched from a life of sin to one of righteousness. John, who was now in Standard Seven, was sometimes taught by Mr. Puckle. Mr. Puckle was himself a religious man, and like everyone else at that day he had never entertained any fancy so foolish as that children had any sort of right to privacy in their own minds. When he caught John talking to another boy in class, he upbraided him. ‘A boy who has said that he has given his heart to God should set an example to others. Your conduct is unworthy of a Christian.’ John blushed with such humiliation as he had never known, and wished he were with wicked Jim Adshead, of whom no example was expected.

Little Peter also backslid, and was found playing with marbles on the Sabbath. His mother put them sadly away, and reduced him to tears. And Trixie in a short time began to be worldly again, and even wanted to cut early morning Sabbath school. She alleged she had a cold, and tried to prove it by coughing at night.

Chapter XII

1

John had outgrown the Burgess Higher Grade School, and even Gaffer Jackson’s scholarship was not an inexhaustible well. His mother, who was anxious above all things that he should be fitted to take up his father’s work, spent much time considering the next step. It was taken in September 1900, when he was sent away to Grammand Memorial School.

Grammand School is above Kedworth, in the Severn Valley. It was founded in the reign of King William the Third, by Hezekiah Grammand, linen-draper of Bristol, for the education of sons of ‘ministers of the pure gospel,’ which phrase the trustees and custom have steadily interpreted to mean any preacher not belonging to one of the three Catholic Churches, Roman, Greek or Anglican. John, since his mother was a widow and the Gaffer spoke up stoutly for his abilities, was awarded a special scholarship.

Grammand School was a good school by the time’s standards, so far as education went being better than many which held a showier position on fame’s scroll. But if the purpose of life is to get through it with some self-respect and without being broken prematurely in the effort, ‘education’ is not of primary importance. The Grammand curriculum was of normal public school type, and for imaginative boys opened up the same glamorous vistas. But nothing happened to them after they left it.

It would be tedious to indicate the ways in which the school ran true to model. Junior and, especially, new boys were plunged into purgatory and kept there for the proper season, just as if Grammand were an esteemed and wealthy foundation. All were insufficiently warm on winter nights, and were aroused to study at unspeakably early hours, just as if Grammand were an esteemed and wealthy foundation. The school knew bad patches, when stealing and cribbing and sodomy were rife, and would have sudden orgies of discovery and expulsion and public flogging, after which the stream ran cleansed for a while. It was very jolly if you were in the upper forms and in school teams, just as it is in the esteemed and wealthy foundations. Food was bad, and often loathsome, just as in those foundations. An intolerable deal of this food was rice pudding, made very waterishly, and as few boys, even at Grammand, were quite ravenous enough to eat it except reluctantly and at long intervals, not too much had to be provided.

Rice pudding! Public school rice pudding! The Rev. Jimmie Crankshaw, who is so well known as a seditious Indian missionary and so popular at Student Christian Movement gatherings all the world over, has said in his Autobiography (a beautiful book, simply yet sensuously written, as Milton advises) that he ascribes his first interest in India to the wave of uncontrollable pity that swept over him at Grammand, when a visiting missionary told them that the natives of that unhappy country lived almost solely on rice. Years and experience have deepened the impression then made. He has told me that he believes the significance of rice in this Indian question has never yet been appreciated by our politicians. ‘Give the people of India a change of diet,’ he urges, ‘and you will see a change of heart.’ Rice is at the root of half the sedition. And the menace is growing, since the public schools of England have so greatly lessened the amount of this cereal in their meals; unable to export it, the natives of India have no choice but to eat all their rice themselves.

John happened to reach Grammand at one of its bad periods, when it was overrun with precocious ruffians, and the staff, lack-lustre from long staring at the material in front of them, seemed to have abandoned all hope or desire to do anything with it. They just lay down, like a camel when not merely the final straw but a crushing superfluity of straws beyond that (and beyond that) have been put upon him.

In consequence, bullying was a cult which ran through the days and hardly ceased at night. At its best it was merely oafish unpleasantness. But its best was rare. There is a comforting belief that if a boy has a bad time at one of our excellent public schools, it is because he is the sort that deserves a bad time, and will so profit by it that in later life he will thank God that he had it. He suffers because he does not wash, or is a scug or sissie, a Shelley who moons about and likes poetry. I shall not attempt to disturb that belief, beyond remarking that John committed none of these crimes, except the mooning about (and that not to excess). He merely came to a bad school (when all schools were pretty poisonous) at a bad period, which is something that might happen to any boy. It amounts to the same thing if you come to a good school at a bad period, which happens to quite a lot of boys every year.

John’s first year was an experience which his mind in after-years wisely treated as Prospero treated his book, plunging it deeper than plummet could ever sound, into depths where it lay deliberately irrevocable.

2

He came home for the Christmas holidays, a strangely subdued John. This change usually gives satisfaction, no doubt rightly. The boy is being ‘licked into shape,’ is being made a man, and (what is more glorious yet) is being made an English man.

It gave his mother neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction, for the simple reason that her own problems were becoming so insistent that she did not notice those which lay in a world far outside her own experience, where they must be guessed at. She never knew, for example, that she had added to his difficulties, with an efficiency that the most calculated cruelty could not have bettered, when she had sent him to school dressed in the hideous fashion of ‘long-shorts,’ trousers coming halfway down the shin, below the knee. Much esteemed in Oakenshaw and Manchester, these were shudderingly avoided in every sane portion of the kingdom. They were worn freely at the Burgess Higher Grade; at Grammand they were worn by only one miserably conspicuous boy.

He found it hard to get her to see why they were so impossible. ‘But, John dear, I’m sure they look very nice.’

‘Oh, mother! if you knew’. They’re horrid! too horrid for anything!’

‘But Uncle Hamlet says many of the local preachers are wearing them. He says it’s a shameful wicked sign of the way even Christians are getting worldly.’

John, though a big boy nearly twelve years old, burst into tears, and they were a clinching argument. Puzzled, for the ‘long-shorts’ were so nice and (in Oakenshaw) so becoming, and worried, because she did not know how she was going to find money for new clothes, she nevertheless promised to find it somehow. The long-shorts could descend to Robert.

John’s heart lightened instantaneously, with the stripping of those deadly sanbenitos from him. But that first evening, himself tasting the relaxation of home again and of escape from the misery of singularity in apparel, he sensed that things were going wrong. His mother, comforted to have her first-born back—and moreover, back from the great outside world—after the younger children were in bed began to talk.

She was wretched from sense of poverty—now worse than it had ever been, for a reason which she managed to conceal, even from John, a little while longer. This wretchedness was reasonable enough, God knows. Yet it was characteristic of Mrs. Arnison (is it not of all of us?) that she vexed herself most, not over the appalling facts, but over absurdities. She was now particularly troubled about Harold, aged seven.

3

Harold, his mother always averred, was ‘a little Turk.’ The inference was that he was always fresh from some Bulgarian atrocity, and meditating new ones. His most recent lapse had been discovered almost by an Act of God, else no one knew how long it might have continued. He had been visiting a public-house. In fact, he had kept a regular drink round.

Old Mrs. Flanders, who lived in the same street, a person of seedy semi-gentility, untidy rather than poor, seeing him go by had one day called him, and told him her doctor said she must have stout daily, and she wasn’t able to walk that far, she wasn’t reelly, and it was only to the ‘Duke of Wellington’ at the end of the street, and would he be a good kind boy and get her medicine for an old lady, the barman would know it was for her if he gave him the jug and said it was for Mrs. Flanders, and she would give him twopence for himself. Harold was quite willing to be a good kind boy on those terms; and became one, collecting twopence daily for his services. He had been seen on his errand of mercy by a gentleman who wore a tasselled cap on his rare appearances in his strip of front garden, and this gentleman had stopped him and asked him, Here, boy, why are you going into the “Duke of Wellington” so often?’ Harold had told him of the poor old lady, and her doctor’s prescription, and the old gentleman had said, ‘Well, you might as well get my beer as well, while you are about it. It’s better than getting one of these young fellers whom you can’t trust not to drink half of it and then say they spilled it. You can manage two jugs without spilling them, can’t you? You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ Harold thought he could manage two jugs, and found he could. The old gentleman told him that he too was under doctor’s orders, to have a couple of pints daily, so that in helping him Harold was doing a reel kindness. He gave Harold a penny daily.

But there came an evening, when Mrs. Arnison, having occasion to mend Harold’s best trousers, turned out no less than fourpence halfpenny from their pockets. Such a mass of bullion had never fallen into any of her children’s hands at once before, and she sat in her chair aghast. It could not have been come by honestly. Harold happened to be out, so she asked Trixie, ‘Has Harold been getting any money from anyone?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Trixie. ‘He’s been having ginger-pop every day. And he’s been giving me and Peter some.’

‘Ginger-pop every day! Are you sure?’

Ginger-pop every day! Belshazzar could not have produced such a scene of lawless luxury as swam up before Mrs. Arnison’s horrified imagination. Had the boy been stealing, she began to wonder.

Trixie nodded. ‘Ginger-pop,’ she corroborated. ‘Stone ginger-pop. It’s very nice.’

‘But how could he have got the money, Trixie?’

‘He gets it for being very kind to a poor old lady who can’t walk as far as the ‘Duke of Wellington,’ and for a poor old gentleman who can’t walk there, either,’ Trixie explained. ‘And I think he sometimes helps a young lady who’s very busy and can’t leave her work.’

Harold, when questioned, confirmed this, and the flourishing little practice that he had built up was peremptorily stopped. His mother talked to him with such shocked severity that he wailed out in family prayers, ‘Oh God, forgive me for going into the “Duke of Wellington.” didn’t mean to be doing anything wicked.’

It was some time before she could bring herself to tell Uncle Hamlet and Aunt Muriel. They were very grave when they heard. ‘You ought to have whipped him in a way that he’d remember all his life,’ said Uncle Hamlet. ‘If the Devil is allowed his way with a boy when he is young, that boy will infallibly go to prison when he grows up, and to Hell after this life.’

‘My two dearies would never think of going into such a wicked place,’ said Aunt Muriel.

‘He didn’t know he was doing anything wrong,’ said Harold’s mother weakly.

‘“Didn’t know,” is the Devil’s favourite argument’, Uncle Hamlet pointed out. ‘But of course he knew that it was wrong to go into a public-house. It was just worldliness—greed for money and greed for sweets. Worldliness—that takes thousands of souls to everlasting perdition, every day that passes from time into eternity!’

‘Public-houses are Satan’s parlours,’ said Aunt Muriel.

‘You should give that boy a hiding that he’ll never forget,’ Uncle Hamlet concluded. ‘It’s the only way to make children realise the awful sin of worldliness. And to make them realise it before too late.’

Excellent advice. But she felt the time for following it had passed with the crime’s actual unveiling. She was flustered, moreover, with preparations for John’s home-coming that afternoon. When that happened, her worry cast over it a semi-gloom, which dashed its joy for him.

‘What’s the matter, mother?’ he asked, after the younger children had gone to bed.

She told him, sadly enough. ‘You know what a regular little Turk Harold is.’

John nodded. He knew Harold’s Ottoman characteristics.

‘Of course I know it’s mostly just mischief. But it’s worse than that now, and I don’t know what to do about it. Harold’s been visiting public-houses. And he’s only seven.’

‘Visiting public-houses? Harold?’

‘Yes. Regularly. Every day. Sometimes twice a day.’

He stared into the fire, dazed by the vision of infant depravity these revelations called up. He liked Harold.

‘But, mother——’

He heard the whole revolting story, beginning with the first clue, the finding of the fourpence halfpenny. She had not quite finished, when to her astonishment she saw John wrestling with uncontrollable laughter. He lay down on the couch to give way to it with more comfort. Startled, then she found herself laughing too, and an unnecessary horror rolled away from her world.

4

The little Turk awakened next morning to a restored and friendly Concert of Europe. It was Saturday, and breakfast was not the usual series of alarums and excursions, with their mother rushing in with porridge from the kitchen and generally hounding them off to reach school on time. It was leisured and hilarious, with Darkie luxuriously lying on the warm hearthstone.

Darkie had been bought with Harold’s earnings during his brief professional career. He was a vast lop-eared rabbit, unlovely as a bulldog and disreputable in appearance. He had cost a whole shilling, with an almost complete set of cigarette cards of the Kings and Queens of England thrown in. A valuable animal.

And a most remarkable one. His soul was dedicated to freedom, and hutches he abhorred. Several were made for him, in quick succession, always with the one result. Bang! bang! bang! Crash! smash! thrash! That was Darkie kicking his hutch to pieces. He soon accomplished this, and was lolloping in at the back door. If it was shut, you had better open it. You do not want a good back door wrecked. He asserted his right to sleep in the house, inside the kitchen fender. No matter how raging hot the fire, he merely blinked gratefully in its fury. Hot ashes fell on his fur, and left his complacency unsinged.

But in the garden he was a tiger. Any cat that ventured in it was chased back over the wall, more quickly than she came. That garden was his charge; and very efficiently he saw to it. John’s enthusiasm had planted its small extent thickly with flowers. But all trace of their existence Darkie swept away, as cleanly as if he were an animated razor. The two lilacs were skinned. The weeds that had thought themselves safe in wall-crevices learnt better, as far up as a huge rabbit could reach. Let a blade of grass anywhere thrust up, and it was seen to immediately.

He had been with them three weeks, and it is a testimony to Mrs. Arnison’s extreme harassment that on the jubilant evening when the Turk had appeared holding, with some assistance from Peter, a struggling elephantine rabbit, she had somehow slipped the fact that he had cost a sum far beyond Harold’s resources, and had vaguely thought ever since that he had been a swap for cigarette cards. This was perhaps partly because Peter, who claimed a quarter share on account of having contributed the greater part of the cards, had unduly stressed them, in the incoherent bliss of first explanations. It shows how little a woman knows, that she should think you can get a rabbit with both ears lopping, in exchange for cigarette pictures!

That he was still with them was thanks to kindly neighbours. For he would climb to the ash-pit roof, and sit there enjoying the sun (on the rare occasions of the sun feeling he could stand the sight of Oakenshaw for an hour or two); and from the ash-pit roof was a trivial leap to the top of the encircling walls, which he periodically scoured of their weeds. From the walls was a soft easy jump into the next gardens, which no rabbit seemed to be properly attending to, they were so scandalously lush and luxuriant. Mrs. Arnison’s rabbit became a notorious character, his crimes forgiven in the esteem which his staunchness, courage, independence and adventurousness rightly brought him. His renown spread far and wide, like his wanderings, and was all through the ranks of Barties and Burgessians alike. Anne Marston, owing to her sister Patsy’s going away to school, was now the star performer of ‘Mr. Ackroyd’s Little Folks,’ singing more entrancingly than ever. And Anne (even she!) had called to see Darkie; and, being practically a millionairess, what with her father being a doctor and with her own enormous earnings as a stage personality, had offered Harold and Peter no less than half a crown for him. But they had stood like rocks against the suggestion. Darkie was a person, not a rabbit; you do not sell persons, as if they were mere rabbits.

It is true that John’s heart failed him when he first viewed the result of Darkie’s labours in the garden.

If Paradise, as the best Early Fathers held, really was in Mesopotamia originally, then what Adam would feel if he saw Paradise now is a faint reflection of what John felt when he saw the place where his cherished flowers had been.

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?

Darkie had made a desert and called it peace. But with Harold and Peter and Trixie jigging up and down in their delight to have John back and to have this remarkable new-comer to introduce him to, he saw that his first feelings of regret were sentimental and unworthy. Darkie thought so too. So certain was he of welcome, that he was standing full stretch up against John, his soft wincing nose enquiring whether the visitor was sure he had brought no carrots with him.

5

After school, the comforts and little luxuries of home—cosseting on the grounds that he must be tired, breakfast frequently in bed (with no menacing raging bell in the chilliness of night that was reluctantly becoming morning, no rush down to the bleak hour of study which Hezekiah Grammand had laid down as essential before breakfast, from seven to eight—Hezekiah had said this hour should be spent in prayer, but Grammand had advanced just enough to make it Shakespeare or Caesar instead), the deference of the younger children, the sense of some leisure at last, after months of heel-nagging devils after him—jaded snarling masters or loutish bullies—all this was heaven to John. The drab poverty of their home sank away, for it was home, and home as full of courage as a plot of earth in spring is full of shoots. After Cotswold highlands, it is true, Oakenshaw seemed Oakenshavian to a degree of unbelievable repulsiveness. But for the time being, he could dispense with Cotswold highlands. Arcady infested with demons and mischievous satyrs might well seem less desirable than Poplar inhabited by Quakers. His recent experiences had at least this advantage, that they made Oakenshaw seem more and more unreal, and thereby endurable. It took on a dream quality, from its very peacefulness. The shipwrecked mariner who has scrambled away from sharks on to a raft is not going to be critical of the raft because it happens to be dirty. Nor is he going to look forward, even momentarily, to the ever-nearing hour when he must plunge into those shark-infested waters again. The zebra that by a miracle has escaped from a lion, all gashed and mauled though it is, will placidly resume its cropping of the herbage. The harassed fox, if he gets a respite, will pick up a stray chicken. Children and animals, they ‘soon get over it.’ Which reflection is a great satisfaction, if you are ever troubled by what seems unnecessary suffering. Hunters have often commented on this comforting insensitiveness of wild things.

Chapter XIII

1

It was early in the next year that Mrs. Arnison’s secret anxiety deepened, with knowledge of a crisis drawing on. She had become deeply involved in Hamlet’s affairs. Encouraged by his wife, he had steadily remembered his pledge to keep in touch with his sister. As a small boy he had been spoiled by that sister, and it had always been his habit to accept anything she had—sweets, toys, money—as his right. She existed to be his cushion against life’s thorns. Then she had gone abroad, an action vaguely resented as an injustice to him, and had been lost to him. God had sent her back.

He began with small borrowings. Then he discovered that her tiny pension came always in the first week of the quarter. That week would see a furtive Uncle Hamlet on the doorstep; when his sister opened the door, his first question would be, before he even greeted her, ‘Has your cheque come?’ Of that cheque, if it had, he would proceed to collect as large a proportion as he could. His conscience, if it ever momentarily faintly questioned him, he quieted by pointing out that his sister was very well off. She had a pension which, with children’s allowances, amounted to sixty pounds a year; no, sixty-three pounds, ten shillings— thirty shillings a week, and her rent did not come to more than eight and sixpence. And no doubt friends helped her a lot, because she was the widow of a minister. She was making a heap of money by her four music pupils, and if she needed them could no doubt get more. Besides, she was luxurious; she had a woman in to help with washing, twice a week. And everyone ought to make sacrifices to help religion forward; and look at all the time he gave freely and without payment, in his preaching. Moreover, life had treated him badly. With gifts like his, he ought to have been a minister—admired, rich, influential. Anyway, his wife, who was without morals of any sort except that she was not sexually promiscuous—for which, indeed, she was not equipped—had no interest in what happened to anyone but her own family. She hounded her weak silly husband out on his predatory excursions.

Mrs. Arnison ought to have refused to wrong her own children. But when she saw her own small brother standing before her, nervously fingering his straggly sandy whiskers as she remembered he used to finger his white face when he was frightened, long years ago, she had to help him. In less than two years he had managed to accumulate a debt to her of more than thirty pounds. This terrified her, and she began in her own mind, though as yet unaware of this, to move towards fleeing from his neighbourhood.

In March 1901 his catastrophe was checked (it is too much to say, arrested). An uncle died, and left a small sum to brother and sister, a hundred and sixty pounds altogether. Hamlet’s eighty staved off his bankruptcy for a couple of months, and he managed to collect forty pounds of his sister’s eighty, which postponed it a little longer. She resented his taking this from her, and he resented her keeping the other forty pounds. Uncle Jonadab, as Mrs. Hamlet pointed out, would have had to leave the whole hundred and sixty to his nephew if he had died without making a will; this was the law, as she had always heard. The making a will had been shamefully worldly, and its provisions flatly dishonest. Hamlet did not regard the forty pounds he collected as in any way a loan, though for a time he called it that.

2

In July 1901 Hamlet went bankrupt, and John came home to find him and his wife and their two loathsome girls somehow installed in the tiny Arnison house. For seven weeks this visitation was with them, through a holidayless July and August. If the Arnison children in after-life showed under adversity a patience remarkable even in the Lancashire poor, it must be ascribed to the fact that this experience set a standard of wretchedness very hard to reach a second time. Their cousins were spoilt and dirty and whining, and their parents were without shame or consideration for others.

The physical discomfort of having to squash in this appalling reinforcement into the tiny house was the most bearable thing. It could be endured also that Elsa and Lizzie scratched their cousins’ faces, took their marbles, tore their books, accompanied them when they went to play with their friends. What became increasingly unendurable was the unpausing oversight of the two dreadful grown-ups. Hamlet and his wife, who never found anything amiss in their own progeny, found everything amiss in their nephews and niece. He with fiddling probing finger thrust into all their private thoughts; she nagged.

Uncle Hamlet was inquisitive and speculative about their future. He ‘supposed,’ with acid sarcasm, that John would enter the ministry. A reverend nitwit from the lowest social classes had recently achieved the epigram that the Methodist ministry would presently be like the House of Lords, hereditary; Uncle Hamlet, who had never forgiven destiny for having kept him out of that ministry, was fond of this remark. The remark stung John’s mother, who had dedicated John to that ministry before he was born and who would have poured out her life-blood—in fact, was pouring out her life-blood—to see this pledge fulfilled. It made John burn with humiliation, for he feared that he could not escape the ministry, and it already seemed to him a job (no doubt holy and honourable, but) mawkish and unmanly. Mrs. Arnison ventured on a rebuke. ‘No man taketh this upon him,’ she quoted crisply, ‘save he that is called of God, as was Aaron.’ That temporarily silenced Uncle Hamlet. But it also made poor John writhe anew. He loved his mother deeply, but the fervour of her piety made her always pronounce the word ‘God’ in a fashion that went through him..

3

Uncle Hamlet was a great lover of poetry, and knew by heart not only innumerable hymns, but almost the whole of Blair’s Grave, Young’s Night Thoughts, Bickersteth’s Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever and other masterpieces. He considered his nephews and niece, especially the latter, worldly to a degree which placed them in especial peril if the cataclysmic days of the Old Testament should ever return, and sinners be swallowed up alive into the pit. Trixie one day flatly declined to give up a favourite doll to Elsa, though Elsa was a guest. Uncle Hamlet rolled out a quotation, impressively indeed:

How dreadful must thy summons be, O Death,
To him that is at ease in his possessions!

Uncle Hamlet was usually at ease in other people’s possessions. Trixie, unawed, looked at him resentfully. ‘If you are so fond of potery like that,’ she commented, ‘why don’t you write some yourself?’

The casual shaft from a childish bow struck its mark. A lesser conviction of Uncle Hamlet’s was that, ‘if he had been given a chance,’ he would have been, not only a famous preacher and divine, but a great religious poet. He now spent a whole week trying to launch the epic he had planned fitfully for twenty years. Of this only two lines had hitherto existed:

Too soon the sun sinks down,
And leaves the earth in gloom.

These, though satisfactory as a beginning, doing what every beginning should, arresting attention immediately, did not get you very far. Uncle Hamlet was not clear as to why the sun sank down ‘too soon,’ or how the gloom (which must be understood, dear reader, as in essentials a spiritual gloom, for this is none of your worldly Parnassus-haunting bards) was to be expounded in what followed. After a week of toil, he produced the following exordium to ‘The Course of Salvation, an Epic Poem in Twelve Books’:

Too soon the sun sinks down,
And leaves the earth in gloom.
Sinners! that word should strike your hearts with dread!
Gloom! ’tis an awesome sound, reminding all
What anguish waits the careless soul which spurns
All mercy till the day of grace has gone.
Had I a trumpet voice, my tongue should shout,
‘Sinners, repent! or gloom will be your doom!’

He was not sure about the internal rhyming of that ‘gloom’ and ‘doom,’ whether it was good or bad, and the doubt held up further progress. Mr. Robert Graves has told us that in his opinion every age is summed up and concluded in its epic, and cannot die until that has been produced. Possibly the reason why the age of sombre juiceless dissent still drags on, and refuses to finish and make way for vital religion, is that Uncle Hamlet never finished his epic.

4

Uncle Hamlet was a disquieting enough presence. But Aunt Muriel, his wife, by comparison made him seem a charmer. He at any rate had a brain shot with dreams and imaginations—misty and foggy, but with occasionally such flashes as show in dull stagnancy, when Dank Will with his lantern flits over the black mud. Something of Ireland and Derbyshire was in him—somewhere. The poetry he liked was bad poetry, but he liked poetry. The eloquence he admired was turgid, but he liked eloquence. But Aunt Muriel——

If she could have been quiet, it would have been somewhat. But she was never quiet. She tinkled all day long, and in that awful Lancashire whine that makes the Manchester intonation the ugliest of all (in England, that is—I am not sure about Scotland—Scotland has Glasgow). Uncle Hamlet had married below him, almost immeasurably below him. That’s what comes of going round as a very young local preacher, conducting services in villages. When Aunt Muriel was not nagging, she was being silly, or strumming and singing. She sang, in a nightmare squawk (the Lancashire voice gone thoroughly bad), ‘I built a Bridge of Fancies.’ But her favourite ditty was the most drippingly sentimental of all—’Some Folks’:

Some folks get grey hairs!
Some folks do! some folks do!
With brooding o’er their cares!
But that’s not me! Nor you!
Long live the merry merry heart,
That laughs by night or day!
It’s the Queen of Mirth,
No matter what some folks say!
It’s the Queen of Mirth,
No matter what some folks say!

Mercy, not strict justice, is what a reader is entitled to from an author, so I have not set down the tune. Only the words. If I had set down the tune, with its twittering chirpy brightness, reason would totter.

Long before her dread visitation of them, her nephews and niece knew her. Particularly her niece. She used to like to get Trixie for a week-end, when her main aim was to make her, child as she was, slave for her, thereby saving the wages of the girl who sometimes came in. One trick was never forgiven. She told Trixie that if she would scrub out the kitchen floor, a job her own mother would never have dreamed of asking the child to do, she would give her ‘a portrait of Queen Victoria.’ Trixie did it, and was solemnly presented with a penny. Later, she discovered that this penny had been abstracted from the pocket of her own overcoat, which was hanging in the hall. Aunt Muriel made no bones of having done this. She considered it an exceptionally smart trick, and her girls enjoyed it with her.

5

Uncle Hamlet and Aunt Muriel had often lamented to each other that Mrs. Arnison was worldly, and when her brother went bankrupt she showed this vice by something which surprised herself. He had not included his sister in the list of his debtors. He had left her out because of laziness, because his wife made him, because he did not consider the money he had wormed out of her to be loans—and also because of self-respect. It hurt him to be paying only five shillings in the pound, so he omitted any sum he dared, however small (and seventy-six pounds—if we count the forty from the legacy—was not so very small; the poor do not rim up debts of astronomical magnitude), which would enable him to feel he had paid a little more than he could otherwise have paid. Mrs. Arnison, when she found he had left her out, resented the omission with a fervency that made her very miserable, showing, as it did, that she still had ‘the world’ in her heart and thoughts. She prayed, agonisingly and for weeks, that this ‘idol of worship of money’ might be cast out, and only God left, and at last her prayer was answered. But not before she had accidentally revealed to her brother that she resented his action. His pure spirit was shocked, and he announced that he would not stay any longer with a sister whose mind was so meanly mercenary. She was ashamed, and wept at his reproaches. But she was angry also, and not least because he and his wife had now taken upon themselves to made good deficiencies in her own faulty discipline. They had thrashed little Peter for quarrelling with his cousins, and the young Arnisons had flown into a passion of wrath on his behalf. The incident happened a whole generation ago, and Uncle Hamlet has gone to his heavenly reward. But I saw John last year, and he said something in which all the old hatred flared up. ‘If Uncle Hamlet’s eternal damnation at the Last Day goes by any sort of voting, I’ll hold up both hands for it!’ Mrs. Arnison could not be insensible to a feeling so strong and unanimous, and she was herself bitter also. So she let the guests go at last.

Uncle Hamlet got a job as traveller for a sewing machine firm. His first travelling was to his sister’s. She had a machine, but he made his first sale to her. He received one pound commission on each machine he sold.

Chapter XIV

1

In the Providence of God, everything has a purpose. The Hamlets went, September 14,; and three days later, when John returned to school, he realised that the summer holidays had been so intolerable that he was glad to go. He was glad to go—even to Grammand and to what he knew was awaiting him there.

He was glad to go.

He was glad to go. Back to Grammand.

He went back a very exhausted and dispirited boy.

His mother knew it, and she wept after he had gone. In the deep loneliness of that half-hour before she dropped off to sleep that night, she began to wonder if their coming to Oakenshaw had been so wise after all. No doubt they had been guided there, she knew that. But why had they been guided there? It was hard to see. Truly, Thou art a God that concealest Thyself, and most of all from those who love Thee! Christians have no need to waste their time over crossword puzzles.

She jumped out of bed, and prayed, passionately, that if it were His will God would ‘make an opening,’ that He would guide His children away from Oakenshaw. Only if it was His will. But from that moment it was certain that if anything remotely like an ‘opening’ appeared, the pent-up panic in her heart would send her racing towards it.

Well? That would be all right. The opening could not lead them to a worse place. I noticed that the Felicity Burgess Memorial Committee, in 1927 celebrating the jubilee of the poetess’s coming to Oakenshaw, claimed that ‘statistics show that a larger proportion of Oakenshavians have risen than those of any other city.’ Statistics for once must be accepted without question. Any Oakenshavian is bound to rise—if he leaves Oakenshaw. He will rise, if he merely moves to Levenshulme or Stockport. He will rise still more, if he moves to Billingsgate, Houndsditch or Walthamstow.

2

In November some semi-aristocratic ladies who abounded in good works thought of Mrs. Arnison. Human nature is a fallible faltering thing, and it is not unusual for us to feel that we can use two problems to cancel each other out. These ladies were particularly interested in foreign missions. Their chief, the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte, had been interested in them for many years. It was she who had originally interviewed Madge Hendred, and sent her out to Ceylon. The very memory of her holy quietness produced a hush in Mrs. Arnison’s troubled mind.

These ladies had had another widow suddenly thrown on their hands; and, unlike Mrs. Arnison, she was an importunate widow. The Reverend Isaac Heppenstall had died of blackwater fever on the mission field, and Mrs. Heppenstall insisted that something more than the customary meagre pension must be done for her and her child. She was a frail person with an air of haughtiness and of distinction somewhere in reserve—as if she were a duchess about to break out of incognito. The benevolent ladies, to whom she applied had other suppliants on their hands, and so looked about for help from Providence. Providence sent them the usual ram caught in a thicket. They remembered Mrs. Arnison. She also was a missionary’s widow; no doubt was poor. In fact, she must be poor. It would be an act of Christian charity to help her, and it would be a stroke of sanctified business if in helping her they could relieve themselves of Mrs. Heppenstall.

It was the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte, that consecrated and noble lady, who saw the solution of all difficulties at once. She noticed that a house—Rosy Prospect, Clerkenwell—was advertised as to let, ‘eminently suited for high-class boarding establishment.’ Mrs. Arnison was gratified and surprised to receive a letter, most gracious in tone as well as unexpected from so exalted a writer, recalling her husband’s great services to the Kingdom, and expressing sympathy with her in her struggles. These, it seemed, had given the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte many an anxious hour, even amid her nights and days of wrestling with mission problems. Such consideration flowing out to a very humble and unimportant widow touched Mrs. Arnison deeply. Mrs. Blathwayte enclosed the cutting which contained the advertisement, and added that she herself, accompanied by another eminent religious leader, Miss Eleonora Smyth-Smyth (daughter of Sir Wesley Smyth-Smyth, M.P.), had actually visited the place and found it admirably fitted ‘to be a centre of Christian comfort and holiness, where tired workers can find a home and return to their labours refreshed and inspired anew.’ Would not Mrs. Arnison undertake it as a boarding-house? She could immediately provide her with several boarders, among them a Mrs. Heppenstall, a charming woman, and deeply devout, with one dear little girl. Mrs. Arnison must have heard of the Reverend Isaac Heppenstall, who had been a pioneer missionary to the Yorubas. Nothing, surely, could be fitter than that ‘two elect ladies bound to each other by such holy memories’ should live together, to help each other! And Mrs. Arnison would of course have abundant service, the profits of a boarding house easily paying for this as well as necessitating it. A life of ease as well as lofty usefulness was offered to her, and the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte could not help feeling ‘that it was almost a Call.’

It seemed so to Mrs. Arnison, with tears of thankfulness reading this letter, and she dared not refuse it. That she knew nothing whatever of the intricacies of running a boarding house, that her own nature was generous and self-giving to an extent which made her a simple prey to anyone with a streak of hardness, of this she had no suspicion. Even if she had known it, what would it have mattered? When a Call comes it must be answered. He who sends the Call will send the strength also. ‘As is thy day, so shall thy strength be.’

3

The Arnisons therefore left Oakenshaw and went to Clerkenwell. The one timid objection which Mrs. Arnison ventured, in her reply to the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte’s letter, was soon disposed of. She had pointed out that her own supply of silver and china was inadequate for a boarding house. It seemed that Mrs. Heppenstall had some silver and semi-silver cutlery. It was arranged that Mrs. Arnison should have the use of this, in return boarding Mrs. Heppenstall free. Mrs. Heppenstall did not press for more than this, and was willing to pay eight shillings a week for her dear little girl. Mrs. Blathwayte thought this a very fair proposal, and if Mrs. Blathwayte thought this, then Mrs. Arnison knew that it must be so. She agreed to the proposal, thanking Mrs. Blathwayte for having taken so much trouble on behalf of an obscure person like herself.

A good deal of china had to be bought, however, and some cutlery. But Providence, which was clearly giving the Arnisons a good deal of attention just now, arranged for this also. Mother Phipps died, and unexpectedly proved possessed of no less than two hundred pounds. She left ninety of these to Mrs. Arnison. The rest went to the Orbury Methodist chapel, which was also released from its original ten pounds debt to Thomas Phipps, Esquire. To Hamlet Mother Phipps left nothing, except a large illuminated text in a gilt frame: ‘Work while it is day, for the Night cometh when No Man can work.’

This favouritism showed up Mrs. Arnison’s artfulness, as Hamlet’s wife bitterly observed. ‘She didn’t keep visiting her and getting round her for nothing! Downright artful, I call it!’ What it showed in the just deceased, Uncle Hamlet, experienced and eloquent public orator though he was, found himself inadequate to express. But he recalled how his own mother had been wont to say that Martha Phipps ‘could be a little devil when she liked.’ There was a strain of worse than impishness, of the sheerly diabolic, in her! Uncle Hamlet had an uncomfortable feeling that Mother Phipps, on whose possessions he had so long kept an interested eye, had suddenly escaped from him into the Infinite, with mocking little shrills of laughter. And this is not a pleasant impression to have as your last one of a lady who had lived for twenty years above a Methodist chapel, and whose husband had lent ten pounds to a village cause.

4

No brother likes to be shown a beloved sister’s artfulness. But Mrs. Arnison showed worse than even artfulness, she revealed her growing meanness also, when she gave Hamlet only fifteen of the ninety pounds she received by Mother Phipps’s will. And then she deserted Oakenshaw and him, fleeing away from that North which, as Tennyson has pointed out, is dark and true and tender, to the false and fickle South which has to be reached by a railway journey that costs money. Her conduct, and the emotion it stirred, stung Uncle Hamlet to his second poetical expression—the beginning of a piece called ‘Ingratitude’:

It is our own who wrong us most—those hearts
Sordid from lust of lucre—souls once pure
But drowned in dross, as sinners drown in Hell!
Such shun Thy holy courts, dread Lord of Hosts,
And from Thy Zion rush, like ravening swine,
To Babylon and guilty opulence!

It is on this sad note that we must close the Oakenshaw episode.

Part II — Grammand

Chapter I

1

It is no wonder that, looking back on this period of his life in later years, John sometimes felt that the Powers that ordered the children’s existence were out for records, daily self-surpassed—striving continually to convince them that the misery just over had been a trifle, to the trials now encountered. He came home at Christmas, to Rosy Prospect, thankful that the Hamlet incubus and succubi had at any rate vanished; and found the family installed in a regime to which he had never dreamed they could sink, a London boarding-house. True, the inmates were all pious, and there was a great deal of hymn-singing (the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte had advised this), and everything else that might convince you that this was in reality a holy enterprise—as Mrs. Blathwayte had put it, ‘a company of devout men and women living together in brotherhood and sisterhood, striving to help each other.’ But John thought it was just a boarding-house, and a boarding-house in the throes of untidy beginning, with his mother racked and harassed with problems beyond her strength and reach and understanding. He only hoped that none of the fellows at Grammand would ever learn of his appalling home life. But that hope, as soon as it rose faded out in despair. They were bound to hear of it. The Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte was a household name in Methodism, and she had promised to send people to them.

‘My uneventful life,’ he once told me, ‘contains two regrets. They are for uncommitted murders. Uncle Hamlet is one, Eleanor Blathwayte the other. Yes, on the whole, I think I loathe her the most. For Uncle Hamlet in a sense couldn’t help being Uncle Hamlet, poor devil, whereas she deliberately made herself what she was.’

The children knew they were in the way all the time, and they mourned over lost Darkie and the Oakenshaw tiddlers. When they left Oakenshaw, Darkie had passed into Anne Marston’s keeping.

However, all things pass, even holidays in a boarding-house, and John returned to school.

The first term of 1902 opened and ran true to expected form, so that he began to wonder if he had done Rosy Prospect, Clerkenwell, injustice. But the celebrated patience of the Immortals is not inexhaustible. Though they had no intention of finishing their sport with John yet, they meant to make it less arduous for him. They were growing weary of Grammand as it was. It was going to be changed—not radically, but enough to become tolerable.

Heavy snows fell in February, just as three small boys ran away from school. They took with them a number of blankets, for they meant to sleep out until they reached their homes, which all lay in Oxfordshire. But hunger proved more urgent than weariness, and they presently pawned the blankets. The fugitives had been missed for four days, and were standing disconsolately under Bristol Town Hall clock, all their store of cash gone and their bellies yawning for food, when they heard behind them the well-known tones of ‘Jerks’ Lumley, the Grammand Science Master.

‘Yes, sir. These are the boys, sir.’

‘Jerks’ Lumley addressed everyone as ‘sir,’ boys included. This was pedagogic pseudo-facetiousness. They turned, and saw him with a policeman.

‘We’ve ’ad our eyes on these three young gents for two days,’ said the bobby. ‘We guessed they was up to no good when we saw them ’anging about instead of going to school. Where did you three young gents sleep larst night, may I arsk?’

‘Please, sir, we slept in a shed we found open.’

‘Ah! you would do, you would, wouldn’t you! Nice young gents you’ve shown yourselves, running away from a good school. I expect your master’ll ’ave something to say to you! Something sharp and for your good. You go along with ’im now, and be thankful I don’t arrest you and send you all to prison! Disgracing your school!’

They returned to Grammand, feeling—as refugees often feel, though knowing the gallows awaits them —momentarily glad of capture, since it meant food some time or other. Grammand Hill wore a white mantle as they toiled up it, in front of the grimly silent form of Mr. Lumley. The air was full of rasping little lancets of cold.

One of them shivered. It was noted by their keeper’s eagle eye.

‘Soon be warm, sir! soon be warm, sir!’

They were.

But, after their circulation had been restored, Raeburn, the Second Master, who from his study windows had caught a glimpse of huddled dishevelled figures wincing past over the snow, sat long by his fireside, troubled. The boys must be flogged, of course. No doubt they had already been attended to by the Headmaster, the Rev. Henley Haslam, before being fed. They had thoroughly earned their stripes. Mutiny is always, and under all circumstances, and without any possibility of mitigation, a capital offence, otherwise discipline (which is so essential) cannot be maintained. Yet why should three young boys run away from school, and in the depths of a snowy winter expose themselves to a world in which they had practically no money to buy food or shelter or warmth? They had been guilty of stealing, an offence hardly second to blasphemy; they had taken school blankets. Very wrong, of course, and by now they would be realising this. But still—if they had not taken the blankets they might have died of starvation. He came home to the disquieting question, Why should boys run away from one of our fine old religious foundations?

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Every decade or so, when a boy commits suicide or has an eye put out by sanctioned brutality, Authority in some public school wakes up and does away with some custom (despite the Old Boys’ Association passing its unanimous vote of complete confidence) which seemed quite all right when it arose in the days of bear-baiting and chopping traitors to pieces, and would still be all right if the world outside the school had not gone in so precipitately for new-fangled effeminacies. Authority, thanks to Raeburn’s enquiries, woke up at Grammand now. After their flogging the three runaways were questioned, and questioned with some kindness. The Headmaster, who had unwillingly permitted Raeburn to make investigations and been present at the final one, at last convinced of what everyone but himself knew and what was only too notorious outside Grammand, decided that something must be done about it. Authority therefore pounced, and made a terrific capture and an even more terrific ensuing slaughter. John Arnison since then has lived through some stricken days, and has memories which no flood of Lethe can efface. But neither Loos nor Passchendaele has transcended the awfulness of expectation which overhung him and his comrades, when he was thirteen years old. No less than twenty boys had been caught red-handed (or whatever should be the proper expression here) in their life of thieving, sodomy and general unsatisfactoriness. Rumour affirmed that they were all to be flogged publicly, in the big schoolroom, and given twenty strokes each in turn, from the Headmaster, Second Master and Gymnasium Instructor. Sixty strokes in all! A ghastly and majestic execution, which the mind sickened to contemplate. You felt faint at the thought of it.

In the end, however, the sinners were soundly flogged by the Rev. Henley Haslam only, in his study (dedicated to this purpose, rather than to books). Their sufferings were strictly private, and the sadistically inclined could merely stand on a certain staircase whence the topward swish of a cane was visible through a skylight, and argue afterwards as to how many strokes had actually been given. Then at the term’s close there was a vast clearance, a number of boys leaving the school for its good. When Grammand reassembled in the autumn of 1902, it was a distinctly cleaner and more tolerable place.

2

But the main thing wrong with Grammand was not its foreground of dispirited masters and ill-trained ill-taught boys, or even its barbaric background of puritan parents. It was the dead hand stretching clammily forward, claiming to manacle and fetter after-ages while they were still living with the roses and the sunlight. The Governors of this pious foundation had never had the sense to forget its foundation (as those of our great public schools—and the Colleges of the Varsities—have long ago forgotten theirs). Religion informed everything—again, as with the rice tyranny, we are reminded of India, where everything is religious and all of life’s activities deeply spiritual (and to the outside world very surprising). It was flung swirling round the boys, at all seasons and miscellaneously, just as wasteful sowers squander seed or as in the Middle Ages physicians made patients drink largely and variously of decocted herbs, viper’s liver, sheep’s dung, things wholesome and noisome alike, in the hope that somewhere, somehow, in the Infinite Mercy of God, there might be absorbed ingredients that might do good.

An intolerable deal of catechism had to be memorised, because the pious founder had laid it down that it should be; and no one dared to ask if it would harmonise with other lessons, or if the smug folly of the reply that the chief end of man was to glorify God for ever—a statement meaningless unless it rushes spontaneously out of the soul’s ecstasy—did not suffer woeful loss when laid side by side with the trembling pitifulness of

So spake she; they long since in the Earth’s cool arms were reposing,
There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon.

Great stress was put upon ‘proof-texts,’ and a surprising number of these were plucked out of the driest and most juiceless sections of the New Testament—quite a lot, for example, from the Epistle of St. James, which Luther was quite right in calling ‘an epistle of straw.’ When the Spirit of God blows through a man, shaking his spirit with fire and mystery, that man does not write ‘proof-texts.’ ‘If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! Could any words more deeply search the hidden places of thought? Yet what doctrine could they be pinned on to, as a ‘proof-text.’ John, loathing it, had to patter off ‘For we received of the Lord that which also we delivered unto you’—which means nothing whatever, except that the speakers were dead sure that they were right, as in our less sane moments we are all dead sure that we are right—-and ‘God is angry with the wicked every day’ (and what that means, if true, lovers of God had better refuse to think out).

There had to be an extravagance of compulsory attendance at religious services, again because the pious founder had directed that ‘every child should be subjected to the pure milk of the sweet and blessed Gospel daily, and if possible many times daily.’ But how much wiser would it have been to have been up-to-date, and to have taken the advice of that great Prophet of the Victorian Era, Mr. Martin Tupper! ‘Ask not the parson to thy house,’ says he warningly, ‘lest thy children see him’ (and, if you asked the parson, it would be very difficult to secrete him from children’s prying eyes, even in an age when furniture was massive and seemed expressly made for games of concealment) ‘and make a mock of his infirmities.’ Andrew Lang remarks that this happy comment seems to hit all concerned equally: the children are cubs, you are assumed to be incapable of checking their juvenile excesses, and the esteemed guest is notable mainly for infirmities. But surely Tupper was right, except that he put it wrongly. He should have said, ‘Drive not your children to listen to the parson, unless you have first personally vetted him sound in wind and brain, and free from eccentricities gross enough to make them shy off religion itself!’

There was no vetting done at Grammand, and the children were driven to church, like sheep to market. And it is true, they sat under the preaching of some excellent men, and from time to time impressions were made which effected permanent good. But what remained most in memory and was most repeated, we fear, was what came under Martin Tupper’s head of ‘infirmities.’ For example, they often heard the Reverend Joshua Sunderland, who suffered from poetical indigestion. Life to him was one confused blur and splash of colours, and no one had taken the trouble to diagnose his sickness and turn him to health that made for sounder vision. He could always be counted on for at least one squashy mush of alliteration. Small boys prowled about the school corridors, snarling ‘When the housewife becomes a slovenly slattern, and “Home, Sweet Home”’—(with a long shooting out of the jaws, followed by a rasp and snap)—‘an unsavoury sarcasm.’ There was one happy week when the whole school went about declaiming phrases that went like a wheel’s revolutions. ‘Saints—radiant—and iridescent—with the rainbow—glories—that radiate—from around the throne.’ Oh, the triumphant racing in of those r’s, as of a chariot which has turned the last corner! ‘From around the throne.’ Once he preached on ‘malicious and malevolent Malchus.’ His thesis was that Peter’s blow was no random stroke. The Apostle did not do such things; he knew well what he was doing, and hit the right man. Malicious and malevolent Malchus had got up the whole foray, and was leading the whole gang. But his hearers, perhaps mislaying (as boys will) a link in his chain of reasoning, concluded that the cause why Malchus was selected for this bad eminence was that he was the only scriptural character (except Malachi, who appears to have been blameless) who had the misfortune to begin his name with mal. Malchus appeared with many other adjectives for a while, till the jape was forgotten; was not merely malicious and malevolent, but malignant, malingering, malodorous, mal-other-things.

But of all the sentences spoken during John’s school career, the most memorable fell from the lips of Dr. Erasmus Hornblower, the eminent Church historian. Dr. Hornblower, an anaemic stooping heavy-spectacled man, with an appalling lisp, finding himself booked to harangue three hundred boys, felt he must preach a sporting sermon, such as the little beasts could understand. Boys like sporting sermons. So he illustrated his theme—the mistaken policy of slacking off after having once started on the right path—by a story of a race. Just as the race was nearing its finish, the leading runner (who had been doing so well!) looked back to see how the others were coming along. ‘And an old’ (oh, how prolonged and crooning was that old!) ‘International wath thanding by. And he thed, “Thilly boy! He’th loth five yardth.”’

3

Grammand’s headmaster was a cleric, thoroughly and passionately good. He had been a brilliant science student at Oxford; indeed, his scientific attainments were high enough to have made him notable at Cambridge or even London. But the Rev. Henley Haslam had never played games, never had any general interests; and he had been appointed Headmaster of Grammand, Nonconformity being then parlously short of graduates of either of the two Universities which matter, when he was not quite twenty-three. As a result, he never learnt the difference between what is merely a technical offence and what is genuine baseness. His definition of wickedness was rather like the Army’s definition of ‘crime.’

His ignorance was unfortunate. A small accumulation of technical offences would bring you before him for a flogging. But you could be an utter and most outrageous skunk, and pass for blameless. If you came before him often, he regarded you as devilishly abandoned, since he had no moral categories except those ready-made by the school rules. He was a fine head for a Nonconformist public school, for Nonconformity had its moral categories of the same crassly inelastic kind. Its Seven Deadly Sins were Sabbath-breaking, Theatre-going, ‘Drinking’ (which covered the whole field from being a sot to splitting a mild beer with a pal), Gambling—in which, as a deadly sub-species, was included card-playing, whether for stakes or for fun—Dancing, Swearing and Being Worldly. Those Grammand boys who went into Nonconformist ministries (an immense number) or became lay pillars of Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian churches, revered him greatly and rightly, and his toast is always drunk (in water) at the School’s annual commemoration dinners. But John Arnison, who in his first year had the misfortune (being himself in the same, though a lesser condemnation) to witness him thrash with maniac ferocity a boy he considered lost to all decency, sickened at memory of the sight ever after, and found that from that moment he had lost all respect for him. The sufferer was not a bad fellow at all, but merely casual and high-spirited, on whom rules sat lightly; and the execution would have revolted some witnesses, if it had taken place before the Duke of Wellington’s army.

John’s witnessing of it had nevertheless been meant as a sort of kindness. Not the sort which Cowper suspected, when he alleged that he had heard a nightingale sing on the First of January and, with some reason, asked:

Why, when thousands would be proud
For such a favour shown,
Am I selected from the crowd,
To witness it alone?

Not that at all—but a kindness truly Christian, one that had warning in it. The Rev. Henley Haslam had had his attention drawn to Arnison’s ability, and also the fact that he was believed to be ‘idling’; and so, though John was not entitled on this occasion to a whacking, he was told to wait when the other reprieved ones were dismissed, and to see what happened to the really hardened. That was it: to wait and see. If he took it wisely to heart, then he might some day be able to look back, and to chant with the Psalmist: ‘Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold, and see the reward of the wicked. But it shall not come nigh thee.’

Unfortunately, so far gone in depravity was he already, he entirely missed the message of the spectacle, and saw in it only a human brute disporting himself in his own beastliness. The benefit which had been intended for him was lost in consequence.

Chapter II

1

Nevertheless, though he did not deserve it, John’s Guardian Angel looked after him efficiently, even zealously, and certainly indulgently. It was not until the winter term of his second year—a fortnight after the recapture of the three runaways—that he was sent up for a flogging, and then it was for an offence which no Guardian Angel could have been expected to condone. It was for profanity.

There is a tradition that Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who took a deep interest in Grammand School, once persuaded John Wesley to inspect it. The evangelist was inadvertently allowed to see some small boys kicking an old ball they had found. He was shocked, and quoted his favourite proverb (a German one—it would be!), ‘If a boy plays when he is a boy he will play when he is a man.’ The sound psychology of this impressed the school’s Governors, and for the next century and more, games of all sorts were forbidden. This tabu had gone when the nineteenth century reached its last decade, but the austerity behind it persisted. ‘Let everything the children do be religious,’ Wesley had exhorted Lady Huntingdon. ‘Nay, if they must play—which God forbid!—I would that even the playing should be religious, if that were possible.’

Wesley thought it not possible. But very few things are that, and it had become possible since his day. In John’s day, boys evilly disposed to idleness played a great deal of ‘blind cricket,’ that puerile pastime (yet preferable to learning the Methodist catechism). You run up your teams, you cover a sheet with tiny squares inside which are written numbers from 0 to 6, and b, c, l.b.w., r.o., s (bowled, caught, leg before wicket, run out, stumped). To this John added his own sardonic variation, u.o. (umpired out). Shutting your eyes, you bring down your pencil on the paper, and as it falls among the squares the batsman’s fate falls accordingly.

At Grammand, the favourite sides were ‘Old Testament versus New’. It was surprising how members of these sides made themselves an individuality and thereafter in the main kept true to form. Goliath was a wicket-keeper, and as a batsman stolid and unenterprising but useful. He rarely if ever hit a century, but he would creep into the nineties. Had he lived to-day, he would have gone in first for Yorkshire or Lancashire. Samson was a powerful but unreliable hitter, very exciting when well set but keeping his admirers with hearts in their mouths, for a glorious six was only too likely to be followed by a snick to first slip. Very like Owen-Smith or Constantine. Jeremiah was a swift but erratic bowler, Peter another temperamental bowler (distinctly fast), Solomon a polished bat, Job a trundler of guileful slows, John a dull but safe man to send in first, Melchizedek was like Archie Maclaren or F. S. Jackson (as well as a useful change bowler).

As this summary suggests, the Testaments were unevenly matched. Their tussles became like the annual Eton and Harrow game. However the official correspondents in their kindness (for your Englishman, most of all your public school man, loves a sporting grinding scrap) explain in advance what a close thing it is going to be—what a punishing young genius goes in third for this school, to counterbalance the wonderful bowler that the other school possesses—we all know that one side is going to have the better of it on the actual field, and we know well which side. Your own Special Correspondent, you could try to persuade yourself that the New Testament had a chance, but in your heart of hearts you knew better. What a team the Old Testament could show! Job, Jeremiah, Melchizedek, Goliath, Samson, Saul, David, Hezekiah, Jehu, Ahab, Enoch, with Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar as reserves! Set out against them the best that the New Testament can produce, and where is it? Simply nowhere. It is like turning out a good London club side against Kent, in the days when even players like A. P. Day and R. N. R. Blaker were not always sure of a place.

John during one prep, period had just written in

‘Hezekiah, caught and bowled Tertullus, 83,’

when the paper was snatched from him. Looking up, he met the wallaby-like visage of ‘Filthy Lucre’ (Mr. F. Looker, B.A.), a long nose wrinkled in triumph and indignation, peering through a bush of whiskers. The paper was returned to him, corrected to

‘J. Arnison, caught and bowled F. Looker, a flogging’;

and the Reverend Henley Haslam that evening castigated him first for idleness, and then for blasphemy, until his arm ached almost as much as a different part of the sinner’s person did.

John did not play blind cricket again for a whole week, and when he did play again, he played the Æneid against As You Like It, since religion had clearly not changed since Old Testament days (when it ran like a live wire through ark and tabernacle, and slew you if it touched you).

2

The change made for safety, eliminating sacrilege and leaving only the crime of idleness. But Vergil and Shakespeare provided disappointing teams, leaving him doubtful if either had really cared about sport, for all the former’s fuss about his funeral games and the blather of school editions about the latter’s love of country pastimes. Only Turnus satisfied, with a headlong bowling style that on its day was effective. John knew it would not have been effective against Job, Jeremiah, Melchizedek, Goliath, Samson, Saul, David, Hezekiah, Jehu, Ahab and Enoch, any more than England’s pitiful trundlers of to-day would have been effective against Grace, Ranji, Jackson, Hayward, Palairet, Perrin, Mason, Fry, Jessop, Hirst and Rhodes. But it sufficed against Æneas, who aroused in him the usual schoolboy prejudice.

That prejudice was often expressed by his form master in this second year, Mr. Walmsley. When they were translating the story of the arms which Venus made Vulcan fashion for her son, Walmsley drawled, ‘You couldn’t hurt the poor dear! No one was to be allowed to hurt the poor dear!’

That was in the cynical world of the Olympians, on whose pattern man has made his own. The beginnings of ethics come early. In John, with his memories of Oakenshaw and its squalor and his mother’s ever-present anxiety, they began with a fierce resentment of injustice. He set his teeth and resolved that people should be allowed to hurt the pious Æneas. It was some reparation to haul the Cyprian lady’s minion out of the Æneid, and into a struggle where he was allowed no magic gloves or extra-size pads. He played unfairly here too, of course, stepping up like a county professional to defend his wicket with his legs. But the unbribable pencil would indicate l.b.w. to the grinning umpire’s uplifted finger; or bowled, neck and crop, as the rascal thoroughly deserved to be.

3

Walmsley’s sedition where Æneas was concerned was typical of that detested yet influential teacher.

But it took time to learn this; what you first learnt was Walmsley’s severity. An austere unreasonable disciplinarian, he no more than Gaffer Jackson allowed any excuse to extenuate any offence.

In May 1902 was an epidemic of measles. Boys are very blind to their own interests. While Authority tried all it could to keep down the number of those who lost their studies by sickness, the school did all it could to increase them. Boys who had been neighbours of the envied ones who went off to rest and luxury in the Sanatorium were much in demand, as supposed to be themselves infected, to breathe into the faces of the uninfected. It is not possible to say if this ritual had much success. John, however, was one of the lucky ones who developed measles, and when he returned from his long segregation his form were reading an author whom he had to take unseen. An exhilarating experience this, for the strong intellect! Browning, robustly invincible Roman, tells us he made a practice of ‘greeting the unseen with a cheer.’ John, however, not yet a strong intellect, winced at it. He came down badly, revealing the fact that he was not prepared in the work that had been done during the four weeks of his absence. He was duly punished by Walmsley, and had the sense not to expect anything else. And this treatment was valuable, it was real education, fitting you to play your part in a world which is so arranged that it shows no more mercy to ignorance or sheer misfortune than to deliberate wrong-doing. It sends its thunders on just and unjust equally.

This treatment is part of the English public school system. It is the reason (one reason) why we are such a great nation. It was enforced rigorously at Grammand, and not by Mr. Walmsley only. For example, John’s form, a large one, consisting of forty boys, were given a weekly hot bath, in the hour immediately before evening prep. Using every bath and every minute, from the moment when the revels opened, it was just possible for thirty-five boys to get ablutions over and join their studies on time. This steaming relay race was supervised by a loathsome being known as Cockles, half master, half usher, who stood watch in hand, to see that every boy took five minutes, and not a second more or less. Though five of the forty knew that doom was waiting for him as the result of what was done or not quite done within this fleeting half-hour or so, all were incorrigibly cheerful, chanting hymns, as the Spartans did on the eve of being slaughtered. The favourite hymn was eschatological, looking forward lugubriously to reunion, beyond the grave, with their present preceptors:

Snorting Harry will be there,
And A. D. with greazy hair,
And Toits with none at all!
(Crescendo) Oh, that will be awful.
Awful awful awful!
Oh, that will be awful,
When we meet to part no more!

It is my belief that Cockles was one of those men against whom Shakespeare so impressively warns us, as having no music in their souls and not being moved by concord of sweet sounds, and in consequence fit only for treasons, sleights and stratagems. He used to creep round dormitories at night, trying to surprise any and every sort of offender—exercises, these, as vain as those of a hippopotamus trying to stalk a snake in a shop piled with bric-a-brac. Adenoids and an imprisoned portentous breathing gave him away; and his approach, manage it as noiselessly as he could, always queerly coincided with an outbreak of luscious and horrid rows in throats and noses of all in his vicinity. He disliked these manifestations of interest, and disliked also the name ‘Snorting Harry,’ which he suspected might be intended for him, Mr. Henry J. Quinn. He would strive to make his protests heard above the sound of swishing splashing rushing waters and soaring human song: would warn offenders of ‘something else that you will find awful. I mean to report you to the Headmaster for insolence, boys.’ But in the end he had to be satisfied with his grim pleasure of announcing that the sands had run out, and all still in the bathing place would infallibly be late for prep.

And infallibly late they were—five of them, inevitably, every time. And inevitably, infallibly, automatically, every time five were punished for being late. Since there was a tendency for their personnel to show sameness, the bigger stronger boys bathing first, these defaulters were soon seen to be hardened, and fines were abandoned in favour of a thrashing. ‘You are the sort of boys who can only be taught through their skins!’ thundered the Reverend Henley Haslam; and taught them accordingly.

And this, too, must be classed as education, and as very very useful education, preparing you to understand and accept natural law. Grammand boys have done fine work as explorers. You see, they realised—easily, quickly, instinctively, without having to be argued into it—that, if they found themselves in tropical jungle when a tornado was flinging forests at them, those who did not slide swiftly into inconspicuous niches would be crushed—that, ashore on an ice-floe, chased by a polar bear, you must reach your ship again before the bear catches up with you or you are done. Other Grammandians have done well as scientists. You never hear of them as writers or poets, but in the physical sciences the school’s record is exceptional. And this fact must be credited to the truly excellent system of training. All through Victoria’s reign, while boys from Eton and Winchester, bishops and archdeacons and Presidents of Magdalen and Deans of Christ Church and Masters of Caius or Balliol, were still clinging to the hope that perhaps, somewhere, somehow, the Universe might be open to reason or, at any rate, to prayer, Grammand boys saw at once (that is, those who did not enter the Nonconformist ministry) that the Survival of the Fittest was an absolutely criticism-proof doctrine.

Walmsley embodied the Grammand system at its stiffest. Other school authorities might, rarely and reluctantly, accept an unshakable alibi or the fact that your offence had arisen because you were acting under the orders of some other master, but Walmsley never. ‘I accept no excuse. None,’ he would say coldly. With this admirable result, that after a while you saved your breath for other tribulation, and offered no excuse. As a disciplinarian, then, he must be ranked as one of the ablest and most effective members of the staff.

But he differed from the official attitude in one important point. He was a heretic, as his distaste for pious Æneas mildly indicated; and by degrees, and almost insensibly, his class imbibed from him the perilous wine of graver heresies. He flatly declined to accept the belief that all revealed religion, from the times of Moses to those of the British Constitution, was very nice and kind (as well as factually true). Over large tracts of the Grammand curriculum, the desolate moorland stretches of catechism and Scripture, he dared not express his doubts openly. But he refused to punish for failure in memorising catechism, and by gestures and manner showed his contempt when he had to hear it. And the doubts he dared not express openly he hinted, and most corrodingly in the drop and turn of his drawling voice. They studied the lives of the Kings of Israel and Judah, whose less edifying portions sometimes came thickly together—for example, the days when David was old and stricken in years and gat no heat until they found him a suitable sleeping companion, and the same king’s final instructions to Solomon concerning delinquents. ‘The man after God’s own heart,’ commented the sardonic voice; and after a pause, witheringly, ‘So died the man after God’s own heart. Let me die the death of the righteous; and may my last end be like his.’

The leer behind that quotation startled John, and delighted the lewder members of the form. What are known as ‘the facts of life’ were sedulously guarded from the boys by the Grammand curriculum and practice; they were nevertheless fairly generally known, or at least suspected, and John himself, though more ignorant than even the average and not particularly interested, was beginning to be enlightened.

Walmsley’s distaste for David approved itself to John. David and Æneas seemed similar characters, equally detestable, equally the expression of a world arrangement which has put the skunks in high places and kept them safe there. Methodism did not altogether deny this arrangement, but carefully explained that it was going to be upset in the next world. John felt it ought to be upset here. Oakenshaw, with its shawled or ragged figures hurrying through the morning rain while the buzzer screamed at them—its oafs diffusing their unlovely persons on the pavements during the midday dinner hour—remained in thought as a nightmare background.

But you could do nothing; sense of helplessness returned like reminder of chains to a convict awaking from dreams. Methodism said you ought not to try to do anything. The world and its shows were passing away, Eternity was rushing on to your view. Why bother about anything so fleeting as the arrangement of the world and its kingdoms? Let the Devil have them if he wanted anything so trivial. Poor fellow, it was all he was going to get, for the Lake of Fire was going to be his eternity! And if, here and there, a Methodist preacher was tormented by the poverty and helplessness of the people whose souls he was trying to save, he was assured that God was seeing to that matter, and would set it right ‘in His own good time.’

David, however, like Æneas, could at least be proceeded against by a gesture. John was finishing with blind cricket, that childish amusement, because he was finishing with being a child. Only in the catechism periods, and then as a sturdy protest against the accursed memorisation, would he set in array the Bible antagonists. In the last few games that he ever played, David was dropped from the Old Testament eleven. Sennacherib took his place, and did far better.

4

Individuality was growing firm and clear in outline. John had his friends and circle; and his own character was growing noteworthy for an almost pathological sense of fairness. It had this valuable quality, that it enabled him to be singularly detached in judgment, even when ill used himself. Walmsley was a beast, and was by no means a just beast. But he had his merits, and John recognised it, and was always grateful for them. He was a liberating influence. You learnt under him.

And in return, Walmsley, though a cynical and embittered teacher, applying a system and in revenge making it of ramrod rigidity, to save himself the bother of thinking about what he detested and despised, began to treat John with respect, as a person. He did not do this consciously; it was not his habit to think about the loathsome creatures who passed through his hands in relays, and provided him with some sort of a living. But he became aware that sometimes a boy was learning from him. He became aware that Arnison was learning more than facts.

And this awareness explained an astonishing incident, in John’s last term in his form, in the third week of June 1902. John took a liberty, and got away with it—incident unprecedented! He walked into the dragon’s cave, and pulled the dragon’s whiskers, and came away unsinged. The adventure awed his contemporaries.

It happened this way. Walmsley was known to despise particularly the Rev. Joshua Sunderland, whose flowers of rhetoric he invariably picked out on the Monday following his sermons, to illustrate how English should not be spoken or written. And not his sermons only; his notices, and method of giving them out, his habit of stroking his face with both hands. And, almost most of all, the verse rhythms which invaded his prose. ‘“The Ladies’ Sewing Meeting will meet on Wednesday, at three-thirty p.m., at Mrs. Drummond’s.”’ Walmsley would lean back, and intone the rest of Mr. Sunderland’s announcement, these stirring trochaics:

‘Mrs. Drummond gives a hearty invitation
To—all the—ladies—of the—congre—gation.’

These diversions gave vast enjoyment, and almost insensibly the class’s terrible discipline relaxed a little. Only a very little, however. Unless you have been a member of Walmsley’s form, you do not know what real fear is.

Then, one day, Walmsley outdid himself in heavy gaiety. He began with: “‘The collection last Sunday realised four pounds seven shillings and sixpence three farthings.” What does the fellow mean by realised? Now if it had been a Harvest Festival, or some mission chapel in Darkest Africa, and the congregation had contributed marrows and carrots and ivory and any old junk they happened to want to get rid of, and all this had been sold at some jumble sale afterwards, you would say the collection realised a certain sum. But perhaps Mr. Sunderland meant that they had collection buttons and foreign coins to dispose of.’

The sycophantic and appreciative laughter which greeted this put him in a good humour. Presently, in the course of his exposition, he explained the figure of speech known as zeugma. ‘Now,’ he concluded, ‘“he bolted the door and his dinner,” “he took his hat and his leave.” Give me other examples. Invent some! Show that you are not all just the brainless lumberyard of dead logs that you seem. Any example you like! But for pity’s sake rub up what you call your minds and give me some.

Mr. Walmsley gives a hearty invitation
To all the dullards of his congregation.’

He sat back despairingly, and his glance settled on John. The devil entered into John, and he remembered another ‘infirmity’ of the unfortunate Rev. Joshua Sunderland.

Mr. Walmsley noted the gleam in his eye.

‘Well, Arnison?’ he snapped. ‘Is it possible that you have got what you would style an idea?’

‘Yes, sir. At least, I think so, sir.’

‘Really! One of you boys actually thinks he understands something that has been carefully explained to you. You sure you’re quite clear what zeugma is, Arnison?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Arnison is quite clear what zeugma is! Listen, boys! Arnison will proceed to give us his striking example of the figure of speech known as zeugma.’

Thus encouraged, John opened his lips. Tremblingly, for he was about to take a risk. These invitations of our facetious elders to join in their sportiveness, how dangerous they are! However——

‘Hurry up, Arnison. Your example, please.’

‘Please, sir—Is “he cleared his throat and the chapel” an example of zeugma?’

Mr. Walmsley almost jumped. For one dreadful minute John’s mouth parched and his heart stood still, as a thunderous silence overhung the class. Then Walmsley proved a sportsman, wryly admitting to himself that he had asked for it. Himself jesting at the eccentricities of the preacher, he had invited these children to jest with him.

‘Yes,’ he said grimly. ‘Yes, Arnison. “He cleared his throat and the chapel” is an example of zeugma. I think that will do for the present.’

Chapter III

1

But the system has not yet been invented which can prevent some real education from reaching at least some of its victims. In school there were the wasted hours—the third-rate Shakespeare plays, with memorisation of heavy rhetoric about Caesar and Cassius swimming together or about the quality of Mercy, the bad poetry, the catechism and Kings of Israel, the mathematics flung at them with little or no explanation, the science shorn of all its rays of wonder. But in school also there were the hours spent in unauthorised study of matters no one ever bothered to point out.

The best anthologies are the passages set in grammar books, as Appendix, for ‘parsing and analysis.’ Golden verses set in glinting juxtaposition! The grammarian, his mind occupied only with asses, has stumbled at journey’s end on a kingdom. Maybe, just because he was not trying to anthologise but merely to find poetry for boys to hack about into subject, predicate, and the rest, his tired brain unthinkingly set together passages which had once lit a fire which not even pedagoguing and examining and school-book-making had ever quite put out. Analyse:

The lively Grecian, in a land of hills,
Rivers and fertile plains, and sounding shores,
Under a cope of sky more variable,
Could find commodious place for every god.

Analyse it. The lively Grecian—a spirit of sense and quickness, for he had not been clamped down into slate-roofed hovels dripping with smoke-dirty fog and rain, but he moved in a land of hills, rivers and fertile plains, and sounding shores—of course he could find commodious place for every god. Not for Mammon only, as our civilisation does, but for Artemis and Phoebus, for oread and naiad. He had sunlight in his veins and on his face, his daily walks took him through vineyard and oliveyard and over the heavenly contours of Attic mountains, which springtime slashed with a passion of wild colouring. They took him by sounding shores—do not forget the sounding shores; Wordsworth did not, remembering the sea coming over Morecambe sands and feeling with thunderous fingers round the edges of its kingdom, if peradventure it might thrust in yet further. And John could not forget, either, remembering his Cornish ocean breaking on places whose very names have its dull menacing fall in their music: Dundagel, Trevanion, Hartland, Lundy—a coast whose tumult and staunchness of defence are registered in heavy dentals and the lion-snarly n’s. The lively Grecian was in luck, and had he ever looked on Oakenshaw he would have cried to his gods to save him from their Tartarus, for he had seen it and it was worse than his too too light-hearted imaginings of it.

You passed from this, furtively read during the School’s general prep period, while you were supposed to be reading the chapter on weak and strong verbs, and you found yourself invited to analyse next:

If this great world of joy and pain
Revolve in one sure track—
If Freedom set will rise again,
And Virtue flown come back—
Woe to the purblind crew who fill
Their hearts with each day’s care,
Nor gain from past or future skill
To bear and to forbear!

A weak finish, rather like the loathed catechism. But what a picture of abandonment and zest in the Universe swinging on its eternal ‘track’! Surely it linked up with the next (from which you were invited to pick out principal verbs, distinguishing them from the minor ones—as if anyone would ever want to do anything so futile), a maddening picture of a world of energies whose service was perfect freedom:

While from the purpling East departs
The star that led the Dawn,
Blithe Flora from her couch upstarts,
For May is on the lawn.
A quickening hope, a freshening glee
Foreran the expected Power
Whose first-drawn breath, from bush and tree,
Shakes off that pearly shower.

2

‘Arnison, are you working?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Show me what you are doing.’

‘I’m picking out principal and subordinate clauses, sir, from these two passages, and wondering how you ought to paraphrase them.’

And, indeed, how ought you to paraphrase them? Or ought you to be asked to paraphrase them at all? Or would you be asked to paraphrase them, except in an educational system that was semi-lunacy?

(a)

And even while it lay, i’ the look of him,
Dead, the dimmed body, bright Alkestis’ soul
Had penetrated through the populace
Of ghosts, was got to Korè,—throned and crowned,
The pensive queen o’ the twilight, where she dwells
For ever in a muse, but half away
From flowery earth she lost and hankers for,—
And there demanded to become a ghost
Before the time. Whereat the softened eyes
Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still
Straying among the flowers in Sicily,
Sudden was startled back to Hades’ throne
By that demand: broke through humanity
Into the orbed omniscience of a God,
Searched at a glance Alkestis to the soul,
And said . . .

(b)

I am a Goddess of the ambrosial courts,
And save by Herè, Queen of Pride, surpassed
By none whose temples whiten this the world.
Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in hell o’er my pale people peace;
On earth I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,
And every feathered mother’s callow brood,
And all that love green haunts and loneliness.

‘I shall ask Mr. Walmsley to-morrow whether this is what you are supposed to be doing,’ concluded the master on duty, rightly suspicious of a boy whose eyes had such a fire in them while he was picking out principal and subordinate clauses.

But what a picture—what a series of pictures—to set before an imaginative boy, as the silly tiresome day was ending and he had escaped from Grammand and all its works at last! ‘The look of him’ (whoever he was)—and ‘dead, the dimmed body,’ thudding piteously down—and ‘bright Alkestis’ soul’ penetrating through ‘the populace of ghosts,’ until she reached that pensive queen of the twilight, dwelling for ever in a dream of earth and humanity! And the stubborn absurd demand of that childlike soul, to be made a ghost before her time! No marvel that the softened eyes of the lost maidenhood straying among the flowers in Sicily were startled back into divinity, and even into the grimness of Korè’s own official divinity, by that demand! Yet how instantaneously eternal infinite pitifulness broke into the perfect circle of full celestial knowledge, carrying humanity with it into that circle (as in the glorious Christian story)! and, searching poor trembling defiant Alkestis through and through, said:

I am a Goddess of the ambrosial courts,
And, save by Herè, Queen of Pride, surpassed
By none whose temples whiten this the world.—

launching itself, with magnificent irrelevance, on that grand personal statement! Well, who would not be entranced to listen to Korè expounding herself?

John got it all wrong, of course. The two passages, though it happened by an accident that the speaker of the second was also Queen of Hell and the Dead, had nothing to do with each other. He got it wrong most of all, by an idiotic misunderstanding of the Goddesses’ ‘temples’ which whiten this the world. For some mad bad reason he visualised it as the shining brows of the Queen of Pride and her sisters—moving majestically on their appointed ways, and making whiteness of dawn and noon and eve above the earth on which they looked! But the passages at least taught him the one lesson that mattered, that all this mythology which now we dismiss as teasing stilted conventional stuff was once living thought. There had been Goddesses then. The world and all its works had been alive, and men had seen them as alive, as personal energy.

3

After class next morning, Walmsley called him up. ‘Mr. Simpson tells me that in prep last night he found you reading the poetry at the end of your Grammar, and that you told him you were picking out its principal and subordinate clauses and paraphrasing it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

John resigned himself to be sent up for a flogging. He had been caught idling, and had then told what was not strictly true. There could be no escape.

But then happened his second miracle, which was fully attested by the fact that two other boys were standing by, waiting for the master to speak to them. When his name comes up for canonisation, the Devil’s Advocate will have a job to get round this one!

Walmsley looked hard at him. Then, after what seemed an infinity of silence, ‘I shall overlook it this time, Arnison, because, though you were not doing what you were supposed to be doing and—which is far worse—told Mr. Simpson that you were doing what I very much doubt if you were doing—Tell me,’ he asked suddenly, ‘were you paraphrasing those passages, Arnison?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I thought not. I credit you with more intelligence than to waste your time except when you are made to waste it. Show me what passages you were reading.’

John showed him.

Walmsley concluded, ‘All right—this time! Prevarication is bad, Arnison. It is unforgivable. And you prevaricated.’

‘I suppose so, sir.’

‘And you ought to be flogged.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You ought to be flogged. And it is my duty to see that you are flogged. On the other hand—I am reluctant to have any part in ruining one of the few boys who may some day make Grammand known as anything more than the sickening machine that its founder meant it to be. Go in peace. And sin no more.’

4

But imagination is like opium-eating. Once you have begun it, you want to enter its picture-world again and again. That last half of the school year—May and June of 1902—John repeated his offence again and again, until his brain was reeling happy with the myths it had made for itself.

How wise are the men who select these passages for boys to murderously analyse, parse, paraphrase, dissect! Like the very wise Walt Disney, they make their entertainments brief (eight minutes for a silly symphony; and he is too wise to make it nine minutes!). Pillaging Wordsworth so largely, they gave John a few lines at a time, and of every mood. But all were in key with that drowsy last-hour of prep, when the gas-flares had all but hypnotised you into sleep and you were wondering if you dared glance round, to see if the clock indicated approach of the time to close your books and burst into a permitted babel of talk while monitors brought the frugal supper buns. Summer, warm and languorous, with scents drifting in from the lime avenue and the drone of chafers blundering against the lights; and your own spirit composed to perfect peace as the divine poets, unauthorised to do anything so gracious, gliding up sat beside you, and chanted their message of a world which your preceptors had never heard of, and would have gravely suspected of sin if they had!

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray,
The wild hawk stood, with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey.
And the nightingale thought, ‘I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay!
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.’

This vesper-service closed, without delay
From that exalted station to the plain
Descending, we pursued our homeward course
In mute composure, o’er the shadowy lake,
Under a faded sky. No trace remained
Of those celestial splendours; grey the vault—
Pure cloudless ether; and the star of eve
Was wanting; but inferior lights appeared
Faintly, too faint almost for sight; and some
Above the darkened hills stood boldly forth
In twinkling lustre. . . .

Reader, pick out the verbal forms in that last passage, state whether they belong to strong or weak verbs, and give the principal parts in each case.

Chapter IV

1

It was January 1905, and John had been four and a half years at Grammand. Life was becoming distinctly pleasant, after the first wretchedness of tadpole existence in the crowded Lower School. He was in the Fifth Form, and had a reputation for abilities (‘Does not use them,’ said his reports; ‘Has a tendency to think he is entitled to use his time in his own way’; ‘Must shake off his slackness and work’), which were greatest in the humanities. He did best in examinations, where he would almost invariably, except in mathematics, stand first; his form place would be much lower. He was an energetic three-quarter, already in the Second Fifteen, and one of the best bats in the Second Eleven. He was certain, if he stayed the normal term, to attain to First Fifteen and First Eleven, to captaincy of his house and possibly of the school. Partly because of his higher place in the school, partly because he was older and more cunning as well as tolerated, partly because of his respectable athletic prowess, he was much less harassed by authority than formerly. Leisure and peacefulness were flowing into fife.

There were times when life contained much more than even these blessings. We have said nothing about Grammand, apart from the school. It lies not two miles from the Severn, that glorious river, and under a spur of the Cotswolds, those glorious hills. After a childhood in Oakenshaw, it had been unbelievable paradise. A hilly ascent led to a long plateau stretching until it broke down again to Bath, thirty miles away; and that plateau was a region of wild white violets, cowslips, orchises, red squirrels, magpies, shepherds and their flocks. It was a great place of winds, a great place of riders. You could look out on the Severn opening into his estuary, and in the spring you could watch the Sea marching white-crested inland. You could drop over a wall and find yourself in a pasture thick with bee-orchises. An easy walk brought you into wooded valleys, villages whose stone walls were fern-encrusted, and beside a brook that ran through meadows painted with kingcups and saxifrage.

Autumn, and sharp cold Cotswold mornings, when as you dressed you looked out to a fine of poplars, pale-golden-leaved, like the forest of a dream, exquisite in sadness and delicate melancholy! The yet sharper cold of deep Cotswold winter, close on a thousand feet above the sea—when the snow piled deep in the dingles, and the sudden quietness made time pause—when the air seemed empty except for a solitary magpie flying slowly to his holly-bush! The raven’s kinsman, with each deliberate defiant beat of his wings he reminded you that he came a messenger of the Powers who would one day call an end to earthly years.

The region flung its clouds and trees richly about his mind.

2

There were many good things about the school, and one was that soccer was despised for the effeminate inadequate pastime that it is, and kept going with immense difficulty, and then only in the after-Christmas term when rugger fixtures had finished. In the evil nineties, when school after school was abandoning the proper game of heroes and taking up the other, Grammand stood firm. Then came the All Blacks’ tour; and, as a drunkard awakes to sobriety, so England, witched by noble playing, wakened to her folly and wickedness. Rugger came back, never to be threatened again. Grammand reaped the reward of staunchness then, in the glow which conscience suffuses when we have endured the wiles of the world and Satan! A fine rugger school, even in England’s virile West, it has provided the county fifteen with not a few players while still at school.

However, fellows would occasionally turn out for soccer, when nothing better was going, and one December evening a kick-up game was got up. John was in it; and at full back, his place, he had opportunity of seeing, not merely gladiatorial scuffles or individualist rushes, but the whole game in perspective, in its setting of earth and sky. Suddenly a stormy sunset concentrated into one deep glare; and for John, he and his commonplace companions were turned into dwellers in Asgard, Aesir divine at sport in that glitteringly unreal Arctic atmosphere. He played as in a dream, with the artist’s impersonal exultant detachment. He thought ever after of Asgard in terms of an English winter evening.

A trivial incident showed that others were not untouched by his mood. It was the night of the amazing display of Northern Lights, of which West Country dwellers still talk. They came trooping swiftly, silently, those shadow-warriors, and filled the sky with spear and pennon. The boys were conscious of a strange lightening of the dusk suddenly as Thornhill, the school captain (who condescended to play centre-forward in these inferior contests), was about to take an open shot at goal. The goal’s defender, who had rushed out, had slipped and lay sprawling; Thornhill’s victory was as good as won, and all that he needed to do was to stretch out his hand, so to speak, and collect his laurel. But he did nothing of the sort. He booted the ball, wildly, ecstatically, far off the pitch, and shouted, pointing. Everyone else stared also, and the game was at a standstill.

Another day, John’s form were reading the Alcestis; and their master, Mr. Raeburn (who continually did wise things), before they started on what would necessarily begin with hunting out words and construing sentences, read to them from Balaustion’s Adventure:

There slept a silent palace in the sun,
With plains adjacent and Thessalian peace,
Pherae, where King Admetus ruled the land.
Out from the portico there gleamed a God,
Apollon—for his bow was in his hand,
His quiver on his shoulder, and his shape
One awful beauty. And he hailed the place,
As though he knew it well, and loved it well.

No! a thousand times! not ‘Thessalian peace,’ but Cotswold peace! The long Cotswold stretches, the park-like plateau before ruined ‘Tinker’s Castle’ (Tinker? yes, Tancred’s Castle, the antiquarians surmise, which Tancred de Boinville built when he returned from crusading), perched on the edge of its steep ghyll! At any moment, and most of all in the season of primroses and spurge laurel rankly flowering in the coppice, some form divine might step out from those ruins,

Lord of the ground, a stationed glory there!

3

This last half-year, which John did not know was going to be his last half-year, was the only real ‘education’ he ever had. Raeburn was too good a classic, too fine and deep and subtle a mind, to be at such a school; he had gifts which would have been paid far better, not merely in cash but in the after-careers of his students, at a wealthier school. But he was a Methodist, unorthodox in doctrine but in loyalty unswerving; he gave his life where he believed he was called to give it.

In his scholars, too, there was more to repay even such service than a casual glance at the school’s record would suggest. For everyone in the school, service, not achievement, was the aim inculcated. It is not an aim which encompasses a school with clouds of glory. But it knits the spirit with its own astringent quality; and if the vision of human life ever calls out an exultant cry, it is because not even its miseries and blunders and crimes, endlessly and monotonously repeated in every generation afresh, can obscure the truth that character is its own reward. Behind these three hundred boys, destined, most of them, to be poorly paid preachers, clerks, chemists, occasionally actuaries and lawyers and shop-keepers, were homes where self-sacrifice was the rule of life, and the salvation of others life’s only duty and its unseen renown. Let us by all means shake away the absurdities which even now, for so many, are much more religion’s essentials than honest thinking and unfaltering labour are. But there is no harm done in telling boys that under this course of days and nights that flow into nothingness there is a reality which is judging us.

The belief that this is so was a stamp set on all who passed through the school. In later days it might be revolted from, or vigorously denied; but it was set deep, in the secret places of character and resolution. The lives lived by Grammand boys have been often stupid and ineffectual, but they have been sacrificial. Of this proof was given in the World War, when a larger proportion of the school’s sons died and a smaller proportion won ‘distinction,’ than in the case of any other school in Britain. You may call that a fine record or a merely silly one. Perhaps it is juster to call it a characteristically Methodist one. In this case it carries nothing to be ashamed of. The lives went; and the name and rumour of majestic service were denied them.

4

Raeburn, like some of the other masters, was a local preacher, and a very remarkable one indeed. This was the great age of the Nonconformist pulpit; yet John Arnison has testified to me that he has never heard any ordained minister who was Raeburn’s equal. Yet one might be permitted to wonder if it were not the man’s exaltation of spirit, rather than any words he actually said, which produced such a hush. He never suspected (or else was elvishly and deliberately negligent of it) the low level of culture of those before him. In school, taking quite a junior form, he would suddenly, when some unusual verb had arisen, shoot at an outstanding dullard the question, ‘Oh, you remember that passage in Catallus where this verb also occurs. Quote!’ (running round the form) ‘Quote! quote! quote!’ Then (in disappointment at having drawn all memory’s coverts blank of that which no one had ever had opportunity of hearing), ’O Danaides! O sieves!’ Even so, when preaching, he would fix with earnest eyes the red-haired girl in the gallery, and, awed, she would forget to giggle; and he would tell her, ‘You are thinking of that astonishing passage, in Pindar’s Fifth Nemean Ode, which is the despair and delight of scholars, where the poet has used the very same word as the Apostle Paul has here—but with what a difference! What a difference!’ Or he would bend over the side, a graceful willow above those exceedingly shallow waters, and assure the grocer who kept a village shop which sold also string, stamps, stationery and some literature (Horner’s Penny Stories), ‘And you, my friend! you are thinking of Browning’s picture of the Risen Lazarus, and you are saying——’

But it does not matter what the grocer’s mind was alleged to be saying. What does matter is that suddenly, as if a god had walked negligently into a garden party, dull spirits had been awakened to glimpses of a loveliness beyond this earth of bills and clothes and hats and precedence. Red-haired choir-girl and little grocer would go away vaguely comforted and strongly sure that the unseen life was worth all you could give for it.

And how superbly would Raeburn quote poetry! Those swiftly, confidently running stanzas of St. Paul, beginning

Scarcely I catch the voice of His revealing,
Hardly can hear Him, dimly understand,

and closing in the defiance of

Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny!
Yea, with one voice, O World, though thou deniest,
Stand Thou on that side—for on this am I!

Claptrap, you say? Well, that all depends on how much you are willing to pay for your ‘gestures’—will you die for them? Will you, when you feel the Spirit of the Highest, for the sake of serving that Spirit give up ease and reputation, and waste your life on trivial and even silly little people who are never going to get anywhere? Puritanism which races about like a hen, in one petty fuss after another, is not the Puritanism which stood there in Raeburn, who knew his Homer and Lucretius as well as Milton did, yet was preaching to agricultural labourers with the same deep respect that he would have given to my readers. There was once a Puritanism which possessed a good old cause for which it was ready to be butchered on scaffolds—no harm came because you saw it once again stand erect and unquivering, against a world in arms against it! You saw that Puritanism again—in a Methodist chapel.

Chapter V

1

The Arnisons had passed through these years, as their mother predicted that they would, according to God’s will. But their guilty opulence in Clerkenwell lasted only a short time—in fact, less than one year.

While it lasted, it was an agony of humiliation to John, in the three vacations which fell within it; and for the younger children it was intense discomfort, not compensated by the better table which the presence of paying guests necessitated. Nor was it as helpful to Mrs. Arnison as the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte had kindly hoped. There was little profit in Mrs. Heppenstall, who came as a queen comes to her kingdom, long desired and to throbbing welcome; she occupied automatically the best three rooms, a sitting room and bedrooms for herself and her dear little girl. The Arnison boys were unfortunately not able to appreciate female companionship. It took all of them years to get over a feeling, first established by contact with their cousins, Uncle Hamlet’s daughters, and then built up strongly by Mrs. Heppenstall’s dear little girl, that girls were a blot on the fair face of creation, something to be avoided as miasmas, rattlesnakes, and rotting fungi are avoided.

Then there was Miss Dorothea Daniels, a social and religious (mainly religious) worker whom Mrs. Blathwayte introduced. Miss Daniels was a middle-aged spinster who looked (and always was) desperately hungry. At meals she sat like a cormorant exercising gigantic self-control. She had large sorrowful eyes which expanded almost as if they were a parlour trick. She did not live under the Arnisonian roof, she merely had midday dinner there. This was her one meal of the day, apart from an occasional cup of tea picked up from other religious and social workers, or from those on whom she religiously and socially worked. Mrs. Blathwayte brought her herself, and introduced her to Mrs. Arnison as a fellow-toiler for the Kingdom, expatiating in her own unique magnanimous style, on dear Dorothea’s devotion. Then she left Miss Daniels (after a tactful observation that ‘one extra’ would make no difference in cost, while what Dorothea paid would ‘be a help’), to make her own terms alone with Mrs. Arnison. Mrs. Arnison accordingly asked what Miss Daniels thought she should pay for midday dinner. Miss Daniels with a holy bridling said she would leave Mrs. Arnison to suggest that. ‘A shilling?’ asked Mrs. Arnison hesitatingly. The large eyes shot out into rain-swept sunflowers—as immense and mournful— and Miss Daniels faltered, ‘Oh, no! I couldn’t pay as much as that’. Mrs. Arnison, feeling she had been guilty of a grasping and grinding avarice, blushed, and still more hesitatingly suggested ‘Ninepence?’ No. But Miss Daniels thought she might pay sixpence. Sixpence she paid accordingly.

Miss Daniels, besides her intimate knowledge of sin in our wretched city areas, was able to bring her fellow-feeders information of a world of wickedness beyond these. She was much horrified by extravagance, and especially, by the extravagance of the working classes. The widest expansion of those eyes came when she told in hushed tones what a fellow-worker reported from Manchester. ‘Do you know, Miss Coupland says there are factory girls who actually have as much as sixpence every week to spend on sweets and their own idle pleasures!’

Tennyson criticised Scott’s ‘Maid of Neidpath’ as more pathetic than any man has any right to be. The reminder is salutary; it is no business of an author’s to harrow his readers’ feelings. From time to time Miss Daniels had other scandals to report, some as grim as the one we have just set down. But they shall remain in oblivion.

Mrs. Arnison had boarders rather more lucrative than the Heppenstalls and Miss Daniels. But in one way or another the establishment steadily sunk money. Debt always terrified her, she had no resources, and no credit to fall back on. After ten months of struggle, she wrote Mrs. Blathwayte an apologetic letter, blaming her own lack of business ability, telling her she must give up the job. Mrs. Blathwayte dictated to her secretary a brief note of acquiescence:

My dear Friend,

Of course, if you really feel it is His will you must give up the work you have undertaken! We must all, in so far as strength is given to us, do that will. I am sorry, for I had hoped that in serving Him you would have been able to serve your own needs! But of course I do not judge another! We are all servants in the one vineyard, and responsible, separately, to the One Lord.

Yours in the Master’s service,

Eleanor Blathwayte.

2

Mrs. Arnison accordingly gave up the boarding-house in Clerkenwell. She was aware that she had done this just in time, and the narrowness of her escape frightened her and made her ill—except that she could not afford to be ill, so had to carry on. The ten months had drained away every penny of Mother Phipps’s legacy, and in the settling up and withdrawing she had to borrow the enormous sum of forty pounds. When she was at her wits’ end as to where to get this, a queer thing happened. In the neighbourhood was a chemist, Thomas Wilson, a Methodist, and as such known to her. His business was a poor one, for even thirty years ago Clerkenwell did not take drugs for its ailments but preferred quack medicines, and Wilson had a most unbusinesslike way of selecting among these, declining to stock those he considered arrant frauds on the public’s credulity, let the public clamour for them ever so. The public he regarded as a brainless and irresponsible child, whose whims must be censored. Mrs. Arnison had had comparatively little to do with Mr. Wilson, and was astonished beyond measure when he called one day. He seemed embarrassed, kept making little starts and stopping again. At last he said, very humbly, ‘Mrs. Arnison, I do not know how to say what I have come about. But I believe it is God who put the idea into my mind, and I pray of you not to be offended if I am making a fool of myself. Are you in need of money?’ She was too overcome to answer, and he saw that she was, and went on quickly. ‘I am a single man, with no dependents. And I have enough money for myself. I could—without inconveniencing myself—lend you forty or fifty pounds. I would take no interest, and you could repay me, you or your children, whenever it suited you.’

At this unexpected kindness she broke down. Recovering, she told him, before she finished, more than she had ever intended—how she had come to London at Mrs. Blathwayte’s invitation, and had hoped to keep open a home for Christian workers, but that somehow—here tears came again—it had been her own fault, she had proved unworthy, she had no business training or ability—she had been defeated.

Then her visitor became more surprising still. His eyes flashed with an indignation unchristian in the extreme, and certainly not Methodist. ‘The sanctified mean old cat!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s the Blathwaytes who are the curse of religion. They’ve nothing that would make them important anywhere, except their money—and they take that to religion, because it’s the best market. It makes them able to lord it over little people, and to strut and swell and show off and get the nearest they ever can get to notoriety. This infernal Blathwayte woman has never done a single good deed except at other folks’ expense, as she has done now. Mrs. Arnison!’ (earnestly) ‘if you never do another thing for religion you’ve done enough to last you this life. Don’t you ever dream again of keeping a home for all the greasy old cats that Mrs. Blathwayte wants to plant out! Keep one for your own children—they’re worth all the Blathwaytes who ever imagined they were going to cheat the Devil in the end!’

So Mrs. Arnison, with a debt of forty pounds that she painfully insisted on paying off (and she did pay it off ultimately), left her guilty opulence, which was taken over by Mrs. Heppenstall. Mrs. Heppenstall, after a talk with Mrs. Blathwayte, astonished Mrs. Arnison by saying she would succeed her. She asked a number of searching questions about the lodgers. When she heard that Miss Daniels paid sixpence apiece for her dinners, she was unladylikely incredulous and outspoken. ‘Sixpence! why, she eats as if she had just come out of Mafeking! A shilling wouldn’t cover her coffee and cheese alone! She doesn’t feed at my expense for sixpence, for all her saucer eyes! She can go and steal elsewhere!’

Mrs. Heppenstall, with a good and free conscience, delivered herself thus on the ethics of getting cheap boarding. She drove a hard bargain for the things she took over, and became chatelaine of Rosy Prospect, Clerkenwell. The Arnisons moved outside London, to the rapidly growing suburb of Bottolstowe—into a house exiguous even by their previous standards and to a rigorously impoverished existence, but to an immense heightening of happiness, as from the swamps of Styx to ‘an ampler ether, a diviner air.’ They were their own masters and mistresses again. Though poor, they had the house to themselves.

3

The Rosy Prospect episode had an importance beyond its immediate discomfort. Those who are religiously brought up suffer from retarded development. They move about owlishly and musingly, seeing mists and visions where there are in truth firm outlines and clear prospects, long after the rest of the world is aware of bright daylight. What had happened to Madge Hendred, the gallant little child in whom her father’s gaiety had risen into a spring of unfailing happiness? Religion had not changed this, it had only deepened its beauty, as with the effect which the sun achieves, casting long arrows through thick-shading trees on to a forest brook. In her mission station by the Ceylon sea, that place magical with old memories and palms and sands and lonely wastes of slow-insweeping waves and of moonlight wrapping even this strange world apart in still remoter dreaminess, she had grown to such perfection of charm as is possible to a spirit whom none of life’s graver issues has touched. God could never have taken her away from this, unless He had in mind some nobler fulfilment yet, some experience lacking which His child could not be made complete.

No one had ever doubted that it had been His will that she should marry the Reverend Matthew Arnison. Mr. Arnison was a promising and most able young missionary, a fine administrator, an accomplished vernacular scholar. And when it came to preaching—well, of course the mission field gave little opportunity, and a North Cornwall parish not much more. But ‘A Word in Season’ (to use the pen-name with which the greatest religious journalist of our generation veiled his fame) has stated in his memoirs, in his chapter on ‘Preachers I Have Known,’ that of all he ever heard none so impressed him as a young minister heard accidentally, when ‘Word in Season’ was holidaying in Cornwall. His tribute invokes such names as Dr. Parker and Richard Roberts—yes, Richard Roberts himself! So great was the promise of this eloquence which Providence, inscrutable as ever, allowed to be poured out on Eastern mission-rooms and a small Cornish audience! The sons of Westmorland may have done nothing noteworthy in literature or learning or statesmanship, but by all that is holy! they can preach! Look at Wordsworth, for example. Preach and sheep-farm, these are the activities in which they excel. And in this we may, surely, see an allegory. They make the perfect pastors—Sons of Thunder in the pulpit, gentle protecting arms outside it.

It had never struck the Reverend Matthew Arnison that his wife had a brain at least the equal of his own (and his was a good one): that her individuality was precious, and indeed of that exceptional kind which makes the spirit cry out with affection, as Wordsworth’s cried out at memory of his Highland Girl. To him she was his ‘helpmeet,’ his wife. Her opinions were discouraged, her uniqueness was planed down to the level demanded by the People called Methodists. Methodism’s Founder had a way with him rigid as a ramrod. ‘You have nothing to do but save souls,’ he told his preachers. Matthew Arnison told his wife that her sphere was equally clearly defined.

She accepted it; it was what her age and class believed. Not until after her husband was dead did she begin, by degrees and timidly, for long with sense of guiltiness, to realise that under acceptance her spirit had resented and chafed. Her life was incredibly hard, and much that made it exceedingly bitter was privation felt only in the mind’s subconscious depths. There was no place for that little extra, which can bring beauty, order, peace. It was all huddle and strife, a struggle to get bodies fed (coarsely and all but inadequately, but still—the word can pass—they were fed), to get them clothed so that at least each had ‘a Sunday suit’ or dress. But, strangely enough, after the first sense of irreparable loss there began to come a feeling of freedom. Yes, of freedom. In poverty such as hers freedom is precious little use. True, but freedom is freedom; and it might be of use presently. No longer had she humbly to submit to another’s dicta, meekly to accept it that she was the inferior brain, the lower personality—woman made for the man. Madge Hendred began to wake up in Madge Arnison, Derbyshire and North Ceylon and a line of ancestors who had not been dourly clogged down in Westmorland clay began to return. This House of Nine Doors in which we dwell for a season is also a House of Many Mansions; and in some of the mansions are spirits of fire and power and brightness and loveliness. These spirits began to peep out, and to watch for a time when there would be a welcome for them.

When God called the Reverend Matthew Arnison home He did it for His servant’s sake. Of course. And that servant had been very brave and hard-working, and in his manner—which necessarily was a manner flowing out to the world and not turning deeply in to his own family—excessively unselfish. That servant was very tired, and it was time he should know rest. But God, thinking of Matthew Arnison, may have been thinking of Matthew Arnison’s wife also when He took him to Himself. For His ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts.

Perhaps the first definite awareness of a new freedom, an unexperienced rebelliousness, came to Mrs. Arnison when her unlooked-for friend Mr. Wilson broke out in abuse of the Honourable Mrs. Blathwayte. No one who cares about Methodism will ever forget that consecrated woman’s long and wonderful life. She was indeed ‘a Mother in Israel,’ as the President of the Conference remarked in his address at her funeral. All over the world there are mission stations founded in her name, or by her efforts during life. At the Last Day countless will be those who will rise up and call her blessed; and their gratitude will be a babel of many tongues. Nevertheless, Mrs. Arnison, though knowing she was hearing blasphemy, heard it unresentingly, and even with pleasure. It gave her bitter hours of repentance afterwards, that Satan should so have entered her heart and held delighted possession of ears which should have been open only to holy things. Yet even the repentance left reservations. Mrs. Blathwayte was a wonderful woman, a splendid woman. All the same—Mrs. Blathwayte of course could not have foreseen it, she was such a deeply spiritual woman that she could not be expected to understand how much it cost to run meals and a house, she had meant well—yes, but she had planted on her a snake and a cormorant, to whom she, the rich and stately woman, had been generous at someone else’s cost.

Chapter VI

1

It was the spring of 1905. Two years had passed since they left Rosy Prospect, and the children were growing up into individuality and separateness. Bottelstowe, by comparison with Clerkenwell and Oakenshaw, was tolerable. It had still—in parts and sections—a suburban air, and those who decry things suburban do not know what horrors succeed them, when this stage has been swamped by the outflooding populace. It had Epping Forest within a short rail journey, and the fragmentary southern end of the Forest quite close to it. And the Arnisons’ house, though small and packed and uncomfortable, was at any rate free from the denizens of Rosy Prospect and from Uncle Hamlet on the doorstep and from an Oakenshavian outlook.

Robert was at a near-by grammar school. His mind had deepened in docility, and he was simply and devoutly religious, the one member of the family who by choice as well as compulsion attended all services. Robert was an authority on the movements of Methodist ministers, to him the most interesting beings in the world. Mention the Rev. Jabez Murgatroyd, and Robert at once would inform you, with grave eagerness, that he was now stationed at Swallow Road, Liverpool, as second minister in the Danby circuit; and that his previous term was spent in Grimsby. And before that? Robert knew this also, and seemed surprised that you did not. The Rev. Jabez Murgatroyd had been at Halifax.

It was long ago plain that his scholastic course was destined to sterility. But at any rate he was passing away the years until adolescence. He could read and write, not intelligently or legibly, his mind taking no imprint from his studies, except irregular impressions. But after all, of what a large proportion of us must the same sorrowful testimony be borne! Through his confusions and disabilities loomed indistinctly, yet decidedly, the shadow of a brain that was intended to be fine, and a character that loved goodness and humbled itself, as well as endured humbling by others.

Trixie’s childhood had been the usual one of a girl plunged in a family of boys and possessing a temper. She waged a hugger-mugger battle with Harold, two years younger, in which in earlier days Robert was sometimes Harold’s auxiliary. Trixie probably harked back to some foreign ancestor, whose presence has somehow eluded the chronicler of the Arnison pedigree, for none appears in that severely English record. In no other way can we explain her un-English unsporting fashion of waging war, in manner contrary to all Geneva conventions. ‘Ah, Kicker!’ both her brothers would exclaim with severity; and until the offence had dimmed in memory she would be left apart as unworthy to be fought with. ‘Girls can never fight fair,’ as Harold observed, generalising thus early. As he grew older, Robert withdrew into his own increasing perplexities and into religion, and Harold continued his educative campaigning alone. Then, at twelve, in the autumn of 1904, Trixie had gone to the feminine counterpart of Grammand School, and her and Harold’s warfare was temporarily accomplished.

Harold, a pugnacious little person, stocky and energetic, very engaging in the square-set fashion in which he confronted the world, had been a year in the lowest form of the school which Robert attended. It had been arranged that in September he should join John at Grammand. As John would then be a prefect, he would begin his new career under the wing of a great protection and a great wisdom.

Peter was still at a cheap private school, too young for the Sir John Berneaux Grammar School. Trixie would have thought it sacrilege to fight with him, and he desired to fight with nobody. He was one of those naturally sunny-tempered children who seem to move impersonally towards manhood. He sought nothing for himself, he grumbled at nothing, he accepted the days and nights and grew up, normal in his desires, unusual only in his sweetness and kindness.

2

I was premature in stating, early on in this story, that the Westmorland Arnisons put their unwelcome sister-in-law and her children right out of their thoughts. Time, as it passed, had the effect usually ascribed to it, of softening remembrance of wrong done to us. In 1904, Martha, the sister who had been so impressed by her brother’s provision for his widow, sent them a Christmas card, of the pre-War lovely kind which had snow actually frosted on to the cardboard, a crinkly place beneath the two red-breasts. It expressed poetically a hope that the season would be jolly:

May you and yours have all good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year.

Thereafter, every Christmas brought a card.

Uncle Hamlet also kept in touch with his sister. From time to time he wrote her rambling letters about his affairs, which still called for small loans. But God was doing for her what He did for Pharaoh, as explained by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. At the third application she herself hardened her heart, and sent nothing, thereby calling out an austere rebuke, her brother expressing his earnest though far from confident hope that ‘the god of this world’ was not ‘blinding her eyes.’ This appeal was wasted, for some power outside herself now began to harden her heart still further for her. She conscientiously kept alive old memories, of her husband and his splendid work, of Hamlet as a pathetic little boy who accepted all that anybody would give him and expected everyone to stand between him and trouble. But life has more rigorous masters than pious memories. And Mrs. Arnison had five children, each of whom in differing fashion seemed to be more promising, even more interesting, than Brother Hamlet.

Brother Hamlet still continued to write (‘Dear Sister, God has been trying me and chastening me. For whom He loveth He chasteneth, and times have been very hard lately. I think we are living under the Fifth Dispensation, and that at any moment we may expect to hear the Lord descend as with the sound of a trump and the elements to melt with fervent heat. O that then we may all be found watching! But as I say have been having a hard time by His will, and if your cheque has come it would be like a sister if you could manage to let me have for a month or two . . .’). He grew increasingly sure that the End of the Age was at hand, and he found it increasingly hard to understand how people, Christians especially, could be so blind to the signs of the times that they clung on to money, the love of which (as he often remarked) was the root of all evil.

3

For some of our flaggings we are not to blame. To everyone come periods when flesh and blood and brain have done all they can, and droop. Mrs. Arnison’s pathetically unimportant life had more heroism in it than there is in a thousand more spectacular careers. But as the ninth year of her struggle began, with her two most dependable children away at school—John her eldest, and Trixie, on whom she had come latterly to depend more and more for companionship and help in the work of the house—her spirit cowered at the days before her. She was forty-nine. The influenza epidemic that carried off her husband had struck her down also, but she had recovered from it, with a weakened heart that she disregarded. It now became liable to sudden agonising seizures. Neuralgia and sick headaches, old enemies, grew more frequent and overpowering, until at last her doctor told her she must have her teeth out. Her heart made anaesthetics impossible, and they were taken out eight and nine at a time, in three operations, without any pain-deadening. It broke her down temporarily, and a neighbour came in and saw to her children’s supper and breakfast. Then she carried on again.

There is no dignity in pain of such a kind, and it is really not worthy of mention. But it happened, and perhaps it was the last straw which made her feel she could not go on alone for even one year more. She did not wish to return to Uncle Hamlet’s vicinity, often and affectionately though he urged this, and her only other man was her eldest son, John, now nearly sixteen. She did not realise that her mind was moving towards thoughts of having John home again, until her friend Mrs. Earnshaw, a Congregational minister’s widow, called. Mrs. Earnshaw had a son Montagu. Montagu was about John’s age, and had just got a nomination into a bank. Mrs. Earnshaw was very proud and pleased, and indeed, her Monty had done well. He was technically literate, that is, he could cipher and write letters and read the Daily Mail. But his desertion of the groves of scholarship involved no real loss to knowledge. Mrs. Earnshaw urged Mrs. Arnison to get some of the now well-known ministers who had been acquainted with her husband to persuade some devout and influential layman to nominate John also to a bank. Mrs. Earnshaw ‘did not believe in all this education that they now give to boys.’ What good did it ever do them? Made them stuck-up, she said, made them think a lot too much of themselves. Now, her Monty . . .

The temptation was great. It would bring John home again. He would be earning money—forty pounds a year they started at, in the Grand Bank. When Mrs. Earnshaw had urged this course of action, and had insisted (which was true) that Mrs. Arnison could get the same nomination as she had got for her Monty, Mrs. Gentle, wife of an insurance agent, had also been in to tea, and had exclaimed in frank jealousy, ‘Lucky you! Why, your John will be sure of going right on until he’s getting two hundred a year!’

‘Besides,’ Mrs. Earnshaw concluded, ‘if your John gets a call to it, ’e can enter the ministry from a bank. You don’t need all this Latin and Greek and ’Eaven knows what, to enter the ministry. My Jimmy never went to college, and ’e got into the ministry all right. Because ’e could preach. My word! but ’e was a good preacher, ’e was that! You should have ’eard ’im at ’Arvest Festivals! And if your John can preach ’e can enter the ministry from a bank, same as others have done.’

This was profoundly true. And John could ‘study’ at home, to fit himself for the ministry. Mrs. Arnison, unlike Mrs. Earnshaw, considered study important and not one of the mere frills of life.

4

Then in June 1905 came Aunt Muriel’s devastating letter. Hamlet had for some time been increasingly insistent in his appeals for help. It was the Fifth Dispensation: the righteous were suffering in unprecedented degree: times were hard, and he was in distress for his wife and two dear little girls. Then he began to hint at some graver trouble. Mrs. Arnison wept over the letters, and took them to the Lord, but nevertheless responded with only expressions of sympathy. So Aunt Muriel, an infrequent but startlingly effective writer, took up the pen. In a few savage ungrammatical sentences she blasted her sister-in-law, for her greed and worldliness and her unnatural want of feeling. Living in great luxurious London (a name never to be spoken except with contempt, by the stern unflinching unindulgent North), she cared nothing what happened to her own flesh and blood! While here was Hamlet, who did so much for everyone else and for whom no one else did anything, whose right to Mother Phipps’s money had been filched away from him, who was now in imminent peril of having ‘his name disgraced.’ She herself had been that ill that no one knew how near to the grave she had been—but there, there were some people who would never care, whatever happened to their own flesh and blood! And the children had been ill, too, and poor Hamlet most of all. As a result, seeing no other way, he had had to use money obtained by things he had sold for his firm—it had gone in doctors’ bills and necessary food. And now it had to be repaid, and his own sister was willing to see her own flesh and blood sent to prison! Uncle Hamlet added his own despairing postscript, ‘Dear sister, do not let me be served a summons.’

She had not guessed it had been as bad as this, and at that dreaded word, ‘summons,’ panic in one vast wave overswept Mrs. Arnison’s being. She wept in an agony of remorse for her unfeeling selfishness. Then she saw her Bank manager and tremblingly explained that she had had a very special call for money, and that her quarterly allowances were due in a fortnight. The manager, who was a Methodist, shared her distress, for he respected and admired her courage. He smoothed things over, and said, Of course she could have a small temporary overdraft. She thankfully and tearfully wrote out and sent Uncle Hamlet a cheque for ten pounds.

But she had no sooner despatched it than panic overswept her again, and more terribly than before. She was overdrawn at the bank, that is, she was in debt, a thing terrifying and shameful: she had anticipated and spent half of her next allowance, including the children’s money as well as her own. And it was now that the pinch was coming hardest, of all the money which Uncle Hamlet had eaten away before. Her circumstances were stringently drawn, in any case, but that drain on her resources had meant life-sapping penury. She felt appalled almost to loss of reason, as she stood there, facing this unknown vast expensive roaring London, with no money and five small children. In sheer panic she acted on Mrs. Earnshaw’s advice. John was a man now—at any rate, almost. She must have him home. He would be a great comfort to her, and would help to steady the younger children. He was old enough to be beginning to prepare for the ministry; she longed to be able to watch this process, an ample reward for all the privations and labours she had undergone. And, having made herself worse than penniless, in actual debt, she dared not face the continuance of his school bills, small as these were. She visualised the ‘saving’ it would be to have him at home—earning money, too. She saw now, she could never afford to send away Harold to that terribly expensive school, Grammand. She scrapped all the plans of this last year, and wrote letters, feverishly, desperately.

Chapter VII

‘Once only did my soul aspire
To scale the Orient dropping fire;
Once only floated in the ways
Of heaven apart from earthly haze:
And then it was a foolish soul
And knew not how the heavens do roll.’
— Inscience

1

The Cotswolds are a bad place for the education of a Methodist.

Thrust between the Celtic and the Saxon kingdoms, they remain debatable land, where the Old Gods hold the ridges; and hold them, reckless of John Wesley and all his works. Calvinist and Arminian may frown at the high plateau and its shining warders; but they and their quarrels have no foothold there, and never will have. For, if threatened, the Powers that guard it can summon from beyond Severn, the gleaming mystic lovely river, kindred Powers of a past more distant than even theirs, British and not English at all; and these will help them to defend the common rampart.

After Easter, 1905, John had a summer term so lapped in happy quietness that he was forgetting ancient miseries, and was coming to feel that never since Adam was turned out of paradise had the human spirit lived in such a place as Grammand. Every energy and ambition was rising to satisfying expression. The future beckoned, a musician piping in Arcadia as though he would never be old.

He had made friendships. The closest of all was with the captain of rugger, Thornhill, whom we have seen contemptuously booting a soccer ball away, because he had caught a winter sunset and the dancing Northern Lights on his face full, just as he was about to score another goal. What was a goal, a mere soccer goal, to a boy who had scored innumerable rugger tries and had twice played as left wing three-quarter for Gloucestershire? By that action he set the material in its place, and unconsciously and ecstatically showed the mettle of his Methodist pasture. For if Methodism has meant an unnecessary century and a half of social and economic slavery for our people, it has also meant an indifference to the world and its dying voices, which has made that slavery endurable.

Their friendship had begun, as schoolboy friendships often begin, in tribulation. Thornhill was one of those boys whose inward happiness Nature has chosen to mirror forth in a face that always seems cheerful. He often smiled unconsciously. He did this, disastrously for himself, one morning in his second year, when the Rev. Henley Haslam was giving out the hymn at morning prayers. Devotions were interrupted abruptly, by a demand that ’that boy go to the far end.’

I must explain. The Rev. Henley Haslam’s roving eyes were always wide awake. Even when addressing the Almighty. For example, there was that occasion when the whole school, kneeling, heard the petition: ‘O Lord! I see a boy doing up his boot at the bottom of the Third Table. Let him come to me afterwards.’ He would unhesitatingly break the opening verse of a hymn half-way, or the benediction itself, to order some offender to ‘go to the far end.’ The boy so instructed stood apart from his fellows for the remainder of prayers, and at the ‘Pause’ (as the ten minutes’ interval in the morning’s work at eleven was styled) he had to present himself at the Headmaster’s study for further treatment.

Thornhill, unconscious of any crime, stood still in his place, while other boys, with consciences less easy, one after another started forward, only to be bellowed back. ‘No! no! not that boy! The boy knows very well who I mean.’ So in the end, by a process of sifting and rejection, Thornhill found himself at the far end.

If he had been a little older and wiser, he would not have visited the Headmaster’s study at eleven. For Mr. Haslam had this merit, which all Headmasters ought to have, that he often forgot entirely some incident that had annoyed him, even some incident that had annoyed him excessively. Thornhill, however, duly appeared at eleven.

The Headmaster was in an unusually affable mood. He had just had a letter from the Methodist Publishing House, telling him they were very pleased with the manuscript of his book on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. It was not the growling tiger that confronted Thornhill; it was the purring, successful author.

‘Well, my boy,’ he said mildly. ‘What do you want to see me about?’

‘Please, sir, you told me to come to you now.’

The Head confronted him with blank uncomprehension. ‘I told you to come and see me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What had you done?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

But this was too much for the Rev. Henley Haslam. If there was one thing that more than anything else aroused him to insane unreasoning ferocity, it was any sort of wriggling or pretending innocence. At such times his whiskers twitched, his ruddy face grew purplish, and he fell into his native Doric in his emotion.

‘Na, na, my boy! We can’t have that spirit! Fetch me that chair.’

So Thornhill fetched that chair. A very spirited performance followed; and the beauty of it was that to his dying day neither participant would have the slightest notion of what the fuss was all about.

John happened to be outside in the passage, when Thornhill emerged, tingling and dancing, full of pains but even more enraged. He found a sympathetic listener, in a boy younger than himself, and forgot the solecism of a third-year boy talking on equal terms to a second-year boy. Out of this shared sorrow and injustice they became friends, and continued friends.

2

They had both now risen into the school’s upper regions. Thornhill was a star athlete, and ought to have been a mere hearty, but was not one. John was bookish, and ought to have been a fool at games, but was not. What drew them most together was a tenacity of will and purpose—in Thornhill persisting slowly and patiently, in John liable to moods of exaltation and depression. Thornhill was older by a year, and a prefect, a splendour which would open up for his friend when the new school year began in September. Then the Olympian ranks would enfold them both, and already John’s place in the school’s immediate future was plain. He was marked out as the next full back, in Thornhill’s second year of captaincy, and next summer he would be in the cricket first eleven. They both now played in the second eleven, in a strong year, and rejoiced in each other’s success, which was considerable. And both had discovered a delight in the mind’s imaginative movings, and in the rhythm which that delight demands from the words which express it. You lived on this Cotswold upland—you endured its lashing savage winters, and saw its sweet unfolding of spring, its enormous banks of white fragrant violets such as England nowhere else possesses—-you walked vastly and stridingly afield, twenty miles, on a whole holiday thirty miles, to Bath, Castle Combe, Painswick, the Forest of Dean—and you discussed together such deep questions as whether Tennyson was a greater poet than Swinburne or Byron greater than Shelley.

‘About that argument we had, John—I asked Raeburn yesterday, and he told me that Arnold says Byron is the greater poet, but Saintsbury says Shelley is. I said, “But what do you think, sir?”’

‘What did old Raeburn say?’

‘He said, “What do you think, Thornhill?” So I said, “Oh, I know my opinion isn’t of any importance, sir, but I rather like Byron. Arnison is all for Shelley.”’

‘That’s right!’ said John with enthusiasm. ‘Three cheers for Shelley! Shelley every time! Why, Byron—Byron——”

But his powers of appreciation were in excess of his powers of expressing appreciation. So he picked up a pebble and shied it, skimmingly, into the hazel copse which crowned the slope where they were walking. It startled a baby squirrel, who emerged, pausing daintily as he skipped and ran among primroses. He sat up, and looked gravely at them, considering this question of Byron and Shelley. He wanted to come up nearer to these giants, and investigate them more closely. Slowly, deliberately, glancingly, jumping this way and that, he came down the long bank towards them, right towards them. Both of them delightedly stooped to take him up. But when he reached them, in the neatest fashion imaginable, without fuss or hurry, he quietly went through them, his pace unquickened, and was making his way to another copse. They shouted with laughter.

‘By Jove, Alan! he’s done us both! And you a famous three-quarter and I hoping to be the school’s next full back! Did you see how he did it, Alan? If you did—and can catch the trick—you’ll be an International, and the other countries will find there’s no holding you.’

Alan agreed. ‘Cunning little beggar. But then Raeburn said another thing. He said, “Well—advise Arnison from me to read all the Byron he can—now. For he’s one of the poets whom everyone ought to read—as an experience—and if you don’t read him at the right time you’ll find, later on, that you can’t read him. And then you’ll have missed something.”’

So that was that. You must read Byron when you could read him, for he was worth reading. We are seasonal and deciduous spirits, and must flower and fruit when life commands us.

2

John and Alan debated much who was the greatest living poet. Just as to-day we have argument between the devotees of Auden and Spender, and as yesterday it was between those of Graves and Eliot, so then there was question as between William Watson and Kipling. As I set the names down, I am conscious of the absurd picture they call up. That there should ever have been a time when presumably intelligent and forward-looking youth took seriously such authors! Took them as seriously as we take the authors of The Orators and The Express, or as we took yesterday the authors of The Waste Land and Mock-Beggar Hall!

Still, it happened. Brains were excited, and beat to the rhythm of

Never the lotus closes, never the wild fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England’s sake,

or the statelier rhetoric of

For, not though mightiest mortals fall,
The Starry Chariot hangs delayed.
His axle is uncooled, nor shall
The thunder of his wheels be stayed.
A changeless pace his coursers keep,
And halt not at the wells of sleep.

The South shall bless, the East shall blight,
The red rose of the Dawn shall blow,
The million-lilied Stream of Night
Wide in ethereal meadows flow,
And Autumn mourn; and everything
Dance to the wild pipe of the Spring!

How John used to declaim these lines, as in godlike adolescence he and Alan walked those Cotswold ridges! All thoroughly bad, of course; we see that now. Stuffed with tired properties, with capitals sticking up in the verse like so many sore thumbs, with talk about coursers and lilies. And Alan’s quotation full of lotuses and dying for England’s sake! Bad, bad, beyond redemption or defence, bad. Still, pleasant in a juvenile manner. I mean, pleasant for minds that functioned in the late Victorian Age.

The problem was referred to Raeburn.

‘Raeburn says,’ John reported, ‘that we’re both wrong. He says there is no question that Swinburne is the greatest living poet, out of all comparison with either Kipling or Watson.’

Swinburne!

‘But he added, as if to himself, “Watson certainly has the gift of style. One has to admit that.”’

‘Well, but hasn’t Kipling?’ asked Alan indignantly.

‘Yes. I think he has, and I told old Raeburn so, and he didn’t absolutely deny it. But then, Alan, even you yourself must admit that when you come to compare Kipling with Watson—or with Swinburne, for that matter——’

And so the war was waked afresh, and they argued their ridiculous theses as they strode, mightily refreshed and happy, to the Roman camp where John had found the pasqueflower three springs in succession. They found it now: deep-purple-blushing where its large dark suns clung to the hillside. John knew the legend that it grew where Danish blood had been shed. Danish blood must have been shed in a tremendous lot of places on the Cotswolds! Three cheers for the Danes! They did more for England that some of her more recent invaders have done.

3

Here the past was all about them, with its voices and its hints of memory. Leaning low, it whispered to them, and made them one with a life and memory and tradition that are English of the English, before ever they were enriched from Italy or France or Germany or Hollywood. It spoke to a mystic spirit that lived within their spirits, and to the dead still watchful and awake within their blood. When it is too late, we shall make the Cotswolds a national possession, because we shall be deciding that we ourselves want to be ourselves, just as much as the other lands whose people are making such a noise about self-determination and the value of their own indigenous character and culture.

There were ancient British barrows, and the warm swamp where Prince Bladud, keeping swine, was cured of his leprosy by seeing how those sage animals conjured scabs away by taking the waters. There was ‘the Roman camp’ at Kelmdyke—not Roman at all, said the antiquarians, but perhaps marking the place where King Arthur bathed the strong white horse in his own heathen blood—that is, if Arthur ever existed, or if he ever did this, or if the strong white horse ever came here. Another suggestion of the antiquarians was that perhaps this encampment marked the spot where Saxon invasion swept like a tidal wave, and severed once for all the fleeing Britons of Wales from those of the south-west country.

But what did the antiquarians know, anyway? Imagination rejected their theories as the quibbling of sciolists. The Roman camp, said tradition; and the Roman camp it doubtless was. Of course the Romans came to the Cotswolds. They knew Bath (why, they loved Bath, and made it one of their greatest cities), they knew Gloucester, they knew Cirencester. They had an unequalled knack of finding out and occupying the best places. You never found them settling at Blackpool or Southend or Oakenshaw or Margate or Walthamstow. But the Cotswolds—so wise a people certainly settled in the Cotswolds!

4

They were nearing the end of an epoch, though no one guessed this. Before these boys were middle-aged, England was going to be a clamour of horns and burr of engines, and its roads merely so many pipelines shooting people as quickly as possible between petrol-pumps. Looking back on those years, we can see our country as if it had slept for all the centuries between Alfred and Lord Nuffield. In essentials it had remained the same; Arnold’s lament for his Gipsy Scholar and the changed hillside had been extravagant. Cotswold uplands dim were still with mist engarlanded. St. Margaret’s Valley still contained the wood which hid the daffodil. The dark red-fruited yew-trees grew as peacefully as ever in Cotswold church-yards. At Sapperton, for instance. And on these Cotswold fields, where the hay was three part flowers—orchis and cowslip and yellow archangel—the Lityerses Song would have been as much in place as ever it was in Greece.

Their favourite evening walk, in the hour of half-twilight before prep in summer, was to a battlefield that looked down on Severn and across to the Forest of Dean. Royalist and Roundhead had fought here, and the Royalist leader had fallen in the moment of triumph. A queer monument, built in a baddish time, memorialised his death; it lifted high, against a background of elms, some kind of Queen Anne creature, some beast signifying victory or immortality or something of that sort. But it had been cloaked over by ruin and lichens until it was adequate, and more than adequate, a sombre grotesque merging with the place’s memories and the haunted close of day. On the body of the plinth were eighteenth-century verses, all capitals and abstractions, yet somehow suitable:

When armed Rebellion, at Ambition’s word,
By Envy, sin of fiends, and Tumult stirred,
Against the Lord’s Anointed marched in war,
The craven lookt aghast and fled afar.
But thou, unfearful spirit, who in peace
Didst serve thy land and bid her terrors cease,
Thou, brave Sir Walter. . . .

They were conventionally written, and in themselves meant nothing, except that courageous lives had been laid down here. But in conjunction with the time and place—the dusk of shadowy fliers, owl and eve-jar, and the hill-crest lifted into mounds of burial—they meant exactly that—that courageous lives had been laid down here. John and Alan, earnestly talking as if all life would be too short for the discussion of problems whose solution they must find here and now, would pace the hill-summit to the Monument, and there trace over again the lines of battle long ago. Here Sir Walter came, up this narrow road, with his handful of Welshmen stormers from Monmouthshire. No, this road did not exist then; besides, the slope was probably all pasture, and not densely coppiced as now. But hang it all, there must have been a road here, some sort of a road, for this was a main way from Dean Forest to Bath.

It was all part of a past which was living into their own lives. The wounded from this battle had been taken down into that hamlet whose lights could be seen beginning to show, and among its people were traditions which the historians had not yet gathered up, which made those far-away events not far away at all but only of yesterday. When the tide of war had swung again to the side of the Parliament, Sir William Waller, who had been defeated on the hill-crest, had come back, and hearing of the kindness which the village had shown to his wounded, had rewarded their benefactors. John and Alan often had tea in a little shop there, whose proprietor had an antiquated pistol and a halberd, relics of the battle. They had handled them, and imaginatively recreated Sir Walter Reynauld’s final desperate charge at the hill-top, after two charges had been bloodily repulsed.

‘And my grandfather told me, when I were a child, sir, that his grandfather told him that one of the King’s men, whom they had here wounded—a nice tall young man he was, and very well spoken—a gentleman he was, and not a real soldier, if you know what I mean—he said, this young fellow that they had here, “It were like push-push-pushing at a great heavy stone”—three times he said it, just like that “push-push-pushing at a great heavy stone, to get the rebels away from the top. And if we hadn’t at last succeeded, just when we did, just when Sir Walter was killed”—and at that, my grandfather always said, he got that sad and heavy in spirit that he couldn’t say any more, not for a bit, until they’d asked him to—“if we hadn’t succeeded, just when we did, and push-push-pushed the stone away a bit back, so that we could get a place for ourselves on the top, why, then we should have gone rolling right down the hill, all the way to the bottom, like a stone ourselves.” And when he said that, he always laughed, my grandfather said.’

It gave you roots in English soil; you heard the voice of past centuries. It was a bad education for the new age which was to be like Melchizedek, without ancestor or ancestral inheritance, and instead, broken off and new begun, and satisfied to be thus.

Above all, I repeat, the Cotswolds are the wrong place for the education of a Methodist.

Chapter VIII

1

John had known that his mother was under some increasing cloud, but he had not realised how insistent was her longing to have him with her again. So he was numbed when, late in June 1905, he received a letter from her, telling him she had been unwell for a great while and was feeling the strain too much for her—that Peter, who was delicate, was not well. That she had written to the Reverend Jonathan Gent, ex-President of the Methodist Conference, and he had replied: Yes, he thought he could get her son a nomination to the Grand Bank. She was so humble and apologetic, so willing to struggle on if John really felt deeply about it, that her brave puzzled face rose before him with almost a physical clearness.

Yet it is idle to deny that the proposal dulled him, as by a severe blow. A bank was understood to be the destination of those less learned Thebans who sank into the repose of the Fourth Modern, a stagnant brook which John had overpassed two years previously. Everyone took it for granted that John would ultimately become a minister, perhaps, but in the interim would get scholarships and go to a ’Varsity. The proposal was just destruction to the best classic of his age and form.

2

The letter reached him on a Saturday, at breakfast. Saturdays were always memorable because on that day Raeburn took his own form, the Sixth, in Greek Testament. This was work which looked to no examination, and which in no way interested the Methodist Conference. It was Scripture, it was religion; but it was Scripture taught pausingly and creatively, it was religion that was life and truth. It was taken not in any class-room, but in Raeburn’s own study, seated not on benches but in chairs. Discipline ceased, and civilisation took its place. If it were warm enough, the windows always lay open.

It was the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel. An old man thinking aloud, recalling events which had laid their hand on him when he was a young man and changed his course for eternity. What he considers important, either for himself or for you his overhearer, he keeps saying over and over again, or with a change of utterance, that you may see how wonderful it is. ‘All things were made—through Him. And apart from Him—-was not any one thing made that was made. In Him—was life. And the life—was the light of men. And the light—shineth in darkness—and the darkness—apprehended it not.’ Or was it comprehended it not? Or, overcame it not?

There was light—the true light, which lighteth every man coming into the world. It was shining on, bravely, invincibly, in every age and land, and the darkness, gross, incapable, did not take hold of it.

That was the point. If the darkness took hold of it, then it would instantaneously cease to be darkness, it would destroy itself. That was it. There was, in the world, light; and that light was God’s purpose— for every man and woman. And that light, if you made yourself a child of light, would transfigure your whole being! There was a job to be done, and it was worth doing—to help the light, to be on the side of light!

Religion was speaking, not in the clamours of ‘Only believe,’ but in the infinitely more thrilling accents of quietness—as philosophy, and not as the voice of corybantic unreason. And how dangerous religion is, when it speaks to some minds in this fashion!

No sentences that he had ever heard or read moved John as these bare quiet phrases did. Of course this was because he was in a deeply emotional state, with that letter in his pocket and with what had been a long delightful vista turned suddenly into a blank wall. But he hung on those phrases, as Raeburn almost intoned them in their wonderful Hellenistic music. Elementals were gripping him, and gripping him through that austerity which is the last phase of imagination and had no business to awake so early in an adolescent boy. Life—light—the Word, the eternal pre-existent speech of God, uttering itself from aeon to aeon. The Word was the fountain of life; and that life was the light of men.

3

Raeburn was a pioneer in a Methodism which had long ago clean forgotten that it had any message to the poor, except that they ought to repent, or they would pass from hell in this life to everlasting hell after it. He was suspected as a heretic, because he sat loose to the more grotesque details of accepted Christian story; and was hated and feared as subversive, because he insisted that service, and not salvation, was the Christian life, that something more than a prospect of Glory hereafter was what men were entitled to ask from a God who without their consent had created them. He was one of the leaders of a handful who saw that evangelical, no less than Anglican, religion had drifted out of touch with the common people, and with reason was regarded by social reformers as their enemy. One thing that made his teaching living was its irrelevance, as unexpected as life itself. Pindar or Xenophon might at any moment be illustrated by the Corn Laws or the filching of the common lands. And why not?

Roses were climbing in at the open windows, and a warm breeze blew in wandering scents. But they and their pagan message were lost—or rather, that message became itself thrillingly Christian, the whisper of a world that was expecting a stand to be taken by one John Arnison. It was a supremely good and just and lovely world, full of sweetness. Because of this morning, it would remain somehow Cotswold to the end of time, and not Oakenshaw, not Clerkenwell. But it looked imperiously, for all the softness of its utterance.

This last year with Raeburn had made John, vaguely and less than consciously, aware that Methodism was a religion of straw. It was potent to shake men, it could save their own souls and make their drab lot endurable, momentous with eternity and tremulous with love and ecstasy. But we are living, not in eternity but in time. It was insufficient to make its votaries of any real efficiency in a world which needed infinitely more than to be ‘saved’—for something after death! John accepted the Plan of Salvation, as his orthodox preceptors (but not Raeburn) styled it. But he had been made aware of things that needed a blazing furnace of sifting and shattering—now, and long before ‘Eternity’ wrote Finis to the whole sorry story of mankind. Oakenshaw needed more than hymns; Clerkenwell was short of boots and garments and self-respect and knowledge. And on this June morning something tremendous in its sublimity of demand was offering itself to him, for acceptance or rejection. It asked him to sacrifice everything, while it offered only itself in return. Offered itself, casually and seemingly carelessly—as the Immortals’ way is—toying with his senses, in warm airs and rose-fragrances and hints of the rich season when every panicle was beginning to talk of summer. But offered itself with what mind-shaking seriousness, if you looked not at straying, playing fingers and indifferent gestures, but at the eyes which were searching you through and through, and wondering and asking, ‘Is this the man I was looking for? Is this, after all, the man I thought him?’ ‘There came a man—sent from God—whose name was John.’

4

Raeburn had pushed the Greek Testament a little from him, as on that morning in Nazareth the young man preaching his first sermon pushed away, ever so gently, the roll of the prophet Esaias from which he had just read. And he was talking of this same John, with the tenderness and affection which the memory of brave men evokes. Of how his supreme success came to him in failure, as he himself would have chosen. Of the way God flung him aside remorselessly, though he was the greatest son born of woman; and of how ineffable was the trust so shown in him, God having seen that this man, of all the millions then living, had a spirit so sublime that it asked for nothing except to be used ruthlessly and unpityingly.

And Raeburn was thinking aloud now, and baring his apocalyptic mind to them. It was the End of the Age, as in Christ’s time; it was one of those periods which come in the story of mankind, when God says to men, speaking to them almost as some puzzled leader might, ‘I have nothing to offer this generation except martyrdom. You have got to be content to be wasted, that men and women yet unborn may have the fulness of life which I cannot give you. Things have got into a mess—perhaps by man’s fault, perhaps by mine—and they can only be mended by sacrifice.’

‘This happens,’ said Raeburn. ‘It happened when men beyond all praise for their valour and simplicity and kindness, men like Stephen, whom they selected (we may be sure with good reason) to supervise the distribution of food to the poor, and John the Baptizer had to be thrown away, because God could not help it. I believe it is going to happen now, when to outward seeming everything looks so prosperous, when we have the vastest Empire history has ever known, and have only a few years back celebrated its greatness at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. It is going to happen. . . .’

His voice faltered, as though the prophetic mood was leaving him. ‘However’ (he recovered himself), ‘this is the message which Methodism has forgotten, and which John Wesley made it forget very early, practically from the first—that it is not the will of our Father in Heaven that any one of his little ones should perish. And by perish Christ was not thinking of Hell—his mind was not that of a Methodist preacher, obsessed with visions of a ghastly hereafter! It was a mind pitiful with sight of a ghastly present—of men crucified, of children starving, of women used as mere chattels and tools, of slaves who had not the slightest claim of control or possession of even their bodies. And because men—because you and I, and those who went before us—have not been pitiful at the same sight—then from time to time it happens that a whole generation has to pay for the sin that has been accumulating down the ages. I want you to be scholars—some of you I want and expect to be great preachers and pastors—some, I hope, will serve the State in important secular ways. But to some of you the message will come to give up everything—everything’ he repeated with immense earnestness, ‘for the sake of those who have nothing—nothing at all.’ And then he quoted poetry:

‘Forgo thy dreams of lettered ease!
Put thou the scholar’s promise by!
The rights of man are more than these!’
He heard; and answered, ‘Here am I!’

He set his face against the blast;
His feet against the flinty shard;
Till the hard service . . . grew ... at last
Its own exceeding great reward.

Had he been told that he was inciting the best classic in his form, the one boy for whose future he secretly hoped something more satisfying to a scholar-teacher than the Presidency of the Methodist Conference or a reputation as a pulpit orator, to fling down his chances and become an automaton casting accounts, Raeburn would have passionately explained that his words were being twisted, that this was not what he meant or could wish to mean, that it was nonsense. But so it is, and so it must be. The things which God asks us to do (if it is God) have no sense in them. A passion is aroused in us, which can endure the utmost of valour and difficulty that can be laid on us; and it is all cast away on tasks which have neither dignity nor beauty nor common usefulness in them. The spiritual world which watches us must be a place filled with silent bitter laughter.

The choice over which John was wavering was trivial in the extreme, involving only an utterly unimportant family and an unimportant boy approaching the climax of his days at a second-rate school whose sons played no part in the State thereafter that mattered. Nevertheless, God troubled to single him out, and spoke to him: not in the way of conversion, but of mere morality, of mere duty. ‘There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John.’

Chapter IX

1

Raeburn was a bachelor, and his thoughts had not in essentials changed since his student days. He believed, as we all do, that he ‘understood life’; and life remained to him a battle, it had in it dramatic moments, voices and trumpets and fiend temptations. It was not a sordid dragging unintelligible inevitable impersonal process. The ardours of the heavenly path called him, and their sternness and warnings most irresistibly of all.

His dream was intensely civic, for this is not the least part of the gift of Athens’s sons to those who learn from them. You can learn from Wordsworth or Goethe, and be (doubtless) a noble creature, yet caring nothing for seeing any ordered just scheme of human existence brought into being. But you cannot learn from the great Greek poets and continue to think that life is a matter of narcissi and laurels (still less of mere developing of your ego) or even of communion with Nature. And when Athens and Jerusalem combine to throw their deep enchantments over a life, that life is dedicated to a strenuous forgoing of ease which makes the life of the typical ‘evangelist’ look like luxurious self-indulgence in comparison.

Raeburn was a dangerous teacher; he made the dedicated life ‘dare’ you to accept it, for you were not adequate to accept it!

Yet take thou heed . . . for, so thou pass
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become
A thrall to his enchantments, for the King
Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep.

2

John knew his decision was being made for him by forces which seemed to be outside him. But for a while longer he hesitated, knowing well that he could not hesitate. It was no attraction that Monty Earnshaw had already taken the path now recommended to him, and was, his mother reported, wildly happy in it. He could just imagine Mrs. Earnshaw’s report. ‘My Monty, ’e’s quite the city gent. My, when ’e comes ’ome, with ’is nice bowler on, it’s quite like ’avin’ a little man about the ’ouse again, ’avin’ my Monty is. And you’ll feel fine, Mrs. Arnison, when your Johnny’s the same as my Monty.’

His fists clenched as he resolved that nothing should make him the same as Mrs. Earnshaw’s Monty. Oh, he had nothing against Monty Earnshaw, he told himself—nothing whatever! Except that he was a bounder and an oaf and a noisome pestilence, and a tout and beazel generally! He was quite a decent well-meaning chap otherwise, in his malarial fashion, and John admitted it.

They had met mostly as fellow-revellers, during the Christmas holidays, in the dreadful parties of middle-class Victorianism. Monty, from infancy almost, had been the accomplished exquisite, and John (or, as he always called him, Johnny) he considered unpolished. Games in which victims were condemned to such forfeits (‘Who is the owner of this pretty thing?’) as to ‘measure six yards of love-ribbon with the girl you like best,’ to John a loathsome ordeal, to Monty had been a field on which he could display his virile adolescence and witty gallantry. Oh that I had a Dante’s powers! I should now be writing a new Inferno, not a quiet domestic story! I would imprison in dens of screaming misery the spinsters who invented the amusements of those iniquitous days! I would banish mercy and pity from my mind.

Monty had been good enough to send him a special message. It reached him in Mrs. Arnison’s gentle gracious words, and was given with apology. ‘He means well, John, as you know. He isn’t a bad sort of boy at all. He’s always very good to his mother, and she has been always so kind to me.’ All true, and John admitted it. But his mind, bent on tormenting him, insisted on translating the message into Monty’s vernacular, as transmitted by Monty’s mother. ‘My Monty, ’e says, Tell your Johnny to chuck wastin’ ’is time on all that Greek and Latin and I don’t know what. It doesn’t ’elp you in the business world. ’E says, Tell your Johnny we’re both goin’ to be young gents in the City. My! but ’e and I will ’ave such times to gether! I’m goin’ to teach your Johnny somethin’! Somethin’ ’e ’asn’t managed to learn, with all ’is Latin and Greek!’

3

But not even the re-creation of Mr. Montagu Earnshaw’s appearance and evocation of his kind message in its ipsissima verba (slightly, ever so slightly, vulgarised by the speaker’s mother) could dismiss the presence of demanding fate. The glow of renunciation leapt into renewed blaze with Raeburn’s sermon next morning. His text was those words already emphatic. ‘There came a man—sent from God—whose name was John.’

John flushed with inner compulsion of certainty. There were only two persons present, himself and the tall swaying fervent figure.

But what was Raeburn saying now? What was it that was making him tower with that superb majesty of controlled excitement? He was making you a Happy Warrior, placing you far away from a dingy Methodist chapel, in some awful moment when men were choosing between the embattled hosts of Good and Evil. And you were choosing also, as you listened. ‘When the Turks besieged Vienna—-in sixteen hundred and eighty-three—the last great danger that threatened the whole of Europe, from outside—when the cause of European civilisation—of that civilisation which God’s infinite unwearying grace has been slowly making Christian——’

Yes, yes? When the Turks besieged Vienna—when heaven was falling, and earth’s foundations fled? What happened then?

This is what happened. ‘John Sobieski—King of Poland—took command of the Christian forces—and with a handful of men—defeated the Turks—and saved Vienna—and saved civilisation. And at the great Thanksgiving Service—which was held in Vienna Cathedral after the battle—the hearts of the vast multitude—thrilled within them—as John Sobieski—advanced up the aisle—and the choir pealed forth the solemn strains—“There came a man—sent from God—whose name was John.”’

4

The next week was the last. The school was going down on Wednesday.

Mrs. Arnison had written to the Headmaster, and he sent for John. He considered John idle, for he did not shine in such science as the Grammand curriculum included, and his mathematics might be described as sporadic. But he could not be blind to the fact that he had abilities, which other masters, Raeburn most of all, ranked highly. He now—for Mrs. Arnison’s letter had come when he was harassed with end-of-term work and had scant time to spare—scolded John savagely.

‘Your mother writes to me that you are going to be a starving clerk.’

Mrs. Arnison had written nothing of the sort. However, the interpretation would pass—must pass, indeed, when the Reverend Henley Haslam made it.

John said only, ‘Yes, sir.’ The glow of noble renunciation faded from him.

‘But what’s the sense? What’s the meaning of it all?’

‘I think my mother hasn’t been very well lately, sir.’

‘But how will your throwing away your career help her?’

John was not able to explain this.

But Mr. Haslam had already given him all the time he could, and dismissed him with repetition, contemptuously and angrily. ‘So you are going to be a starving clerk!’ He suggested no help in the way of a scholarship, so the interview can hardly be said to have done anything beyond filling up ten minutes. Mr. Raeburn’s brief question and comment, a little later (‘They tell me you are leaving this term? I’m sorry’) touched John more deeply.

Instinct, however, which can be a guide when it is too soon for thought, told John that it was his mother’s chance, not his own, that was more definitely at hazard. It was hard to answer the Reverend Henley Haslam’s question—hard to say how his throwing down his career would help her, yet it would. He wrote back enthusiastically that he wanted to be home and that the bank nomination was too good a chance to be lost. Mrs. Arnison quieted her own wretchedness by reiterated assurance to herself that from a bank, as well as from a ’Varsity, you could enter the ministry—which was what she had dedicated it her son to, even before his birth. It was the summit of human ambition. Let others boast of their power or fame or influence. Her own boast was in Cowper’s lines, the boast her own children already had in part and would one day have in full:

Far higher yet my proud pretensions rise—
The child of parents passed into the skies!

Uncle Hamlet wrote, when he heard the decision, commending it. ‘It should have been done long ago,’ he said austerely. ‘All this modern so-called education is the root of the infidelism which we see around us, wherever we cast our eyes. Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance, and show us Thy peace! It unfits us to tread the strait and narrow way that leads to Zion’s City. The mind grows worldly and turns away from truth. It no longer loves to lie down in green pastures, but it turns aside to the dangerous fruit of science, falsely so called, and to fables which lead only to destruction. We are living, dear sister, under the Fifth Dispensation, when all who would live godly must suffer persecution. The cheque which you sent us was something, and every little helps, and no doubt it was as much as you then felt you could spare. I find business very very difficult, dear sister, and if your cheque from the Mission House comes presently, as I remember it used to come about this time of the month, then,’ concluded this remarkable man, possibly throwing allusion very far back, to when Madge had heard his first bewildered and bewildering sermons as a local preacher, ‘remember that as I have ministered to you in spiritual things so you should minister to me in worldly things. Those, who are rich in this world’s goods should minister from their abundance to others, particularly to those who are of the household of faith. It is the Fifth Dispensation. Watch, therefore, lest He come suddenly and find you wanting.’

So John came home, and after an examination which he found farcically simple was appointed to the service of the Grand Bank, a soundly middle-class and Nonconformist organisation, whose managing director was Mr. Jeremiah Oldham (not yet Sir Jeremy Oldham—the Liberals did not come into power until 1906), ex-local-preacher and ex-Methodist. Grammand broke up in late July, and his new duties were to begin on the 7th of August 1905.

Chapter X

‘This orb is darkened to the distant watch
Of Saturn and his reapers, when they pause,
Amid their sheaves, to count the nightly stars.’
— The Quest of the Sangraal

1

His mother accompanied him when he went to buy a new suit, ready-made on the best business fashions.

‘All the young gentlemen are wearing suits like this, madam. They are the very latest fashion for the young City gentleman. A walking-cane, sir? Yes, madam, we are complete young gentlemen’s outfitters. You’ll find this kind very popular among young gentlemen, sir. It adds what may call a note of distinction. It signifies, as it were, taste and unusualness—in a word, distinction, sir. We are selling a great many of these. An increasing number, as young gentlemen come to realise how much an air of distinction is essential to success in the City.’

His mother’s anxious pride and eagerness sustained him (while revolting him through all his nerves of adolescent shyness).

He had to buy a bowler also, to replace his discarded school cap; and was pronounced to be a very well-turned-out City gentleman.

2

The Earnshaws came to see the finished product. They passed it as adequate.

‘Well, and aren’t you glad to think you’ve done with all that perfectly ’orrible Latin and Greek and I don’t know what else it is that you boys ’ave to waste your time on nowadays! My Monty, ’e said to me—’e didn’t ’ave to do no Greek, my Monty didn’t, but ’e did an awful lot of Latin, a tremendous lot of Latin——’

‘Amo, amas, amat—amamus, amatis, amant,’ corroborated Monty, speaking with the unthinking incredible speed of finished scholarship. ‘Hic, haec, hoc. Stulius es, Johnny, eh? That’s what we used to say—under our breath, of course, to old Barmy when he thought he was teaching us Latin.’

‘My Monty,’ continued that good and patient woman, ‘’e said to me, my Monty did——’

‘Amo, amas, amat—amamus, amatis, amant,’ repeated her Monty, in tearing spirits. ‘Fancy thinking it necessary to teach me to say love in Latin! Or teaching you, either, Johnny!’ He dug him wittily in the ribs. ‘Johnny’s always been a terror with the girls. Oh, you don’t know, Mrs. Arnison! You don’t know half the things your Johnny’s been up to—on the sly!’

He disappeared into the little hall, and returned complete with stick and bowler. He wore the one, and held the other at a jaunty fetching angle.

‘Young gentleman in the City!’ he announced. ‘Early nineteenth century. Finest and most perfect model.’

‘Let’s see your Johnny side by side with my Monty!’ urged his mother. ‘Johnny, you fetch your ’at and stick, and stand by my Monty. Your ma’ll be right proud to see you.’

‘My! but aren’t they just the perfect picture!’ exclaimed Mrs. Earnshaw, her heart swelling with maternal exultation. ‘They just look as if they were runnin’ the ’ole bank’ (she pronounced it ‘benk,’ which is quite a good pronunciation, except that we are not used to it). ‘As if my Monty and your Johnny were the managing ’eads of it! And you mark my words, Mrs. Arnison. My Monty and your Johnny will be, some day—as sure as eggs is eggs.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Generosity took possession of her, and drove out even pride. After all, this was her friend’s hour of triumph, and not hers. She must not insist on halving it.

‘You stand away a minute, Monty, and let ’is ma see ’er Johnny by ’imself. There! Why,’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands, ‘if you’d seen ’im a week ago and was to see ’im now, you wouldn’t know ’im! Isn’t ’e just the perfect little business gentleman!’

The End