Preface

It is four years since Introducing the Arnisons was published. By Methodists, and Nonconformists generally, it was received as an outrage and ungracious misrepresentation; by the rest of the public, with a surprise that brought out the obscurity in which what used to be half the nation lived its life. I might have been writing of another planet!

The book contained some understatement, for artistic reasons. But no misrepresentation. Outside our nation there is nothing like British Nonconformity; nothing in any other nation can enable that nation to understand ‘the Nonconformist conscience’ and outlook, which must always remain a mystery outside ourselves.

In the last four years, no book has brought me so many, and often such moving, letters as Introducing the Arnisons. From Nonconformists, of course; but also from Catholics, and men and women of no religious beliefs or affiliations. John Arnison would have been published long ago had I guessed that its predecessor had found so considerable and scattered a public. I want now to explain what was in my mind.

At the Elizabethan settlement, Puritanism, the real Protestantism, was submerged. It had a moment of power (it was no more, as history considers time) in the Age of Cromwell and Milton and Vane, a temporary success that frightened the ruling classes of Church and State. At the Restoration, accordingly, Puritanism was clamped down and put in chains, expelled from every higher walk of national life, and driven from school and university. It accepted its submergence, and fixed its eyes on an unseen world that would bring reversal. Numerically half, or more than half, of the nation, for over two centuries it contributed nothing to politics or the commissioned ranks of the Army and Navy, to art or drama or literature. Between Milton and the death of Tennyson it is hard to think of more than two or three Nonconformist writers of the slightest importance. Catholics (who are also ‘nonconformists’) were in touch with a great cultural tradition outside this island, and did a little (but only a little) better. That is, for over two centuries this nation took less than half its intellectual strength into every activity that makes a mark on public life.

Catholics and Free Churchmen entered the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, when these were freed from religious tests, seventy years ago, Free Churchmen at first very sparingly. Twenty years passed; at length, after two centuries and more of silence and impotence, in the nineties of last century Catholic poets of importance emerged. A few years later Nonconformity also entered literature, and presently even politics. There was one brief period, the ten years immediately preceding the War, when this submerged half of the nation, which had been content to have no say in affairs of this world, became alive to the fact that ethics and conduct generally were not governed solely by exposition of the Scriptures. It built up not Liberalism only, but the Labour movement, in days before the trade unions had strangled democracy. Many of the I.L.P. leaders came directly out of the chapels and the work of the lay preacher.

The War came, and took the flower of my own generation. It took also the heart out of the Nonconformist half of our nation, and all its distinctiveness and vigour. It would be wrong to say that Nonconformity does not have its effect on our public life to-day. But it is a different kind of effect. Nonconformity, forty years ago, stood for an explosive force such as England had not known for more than two hundred years. That has gone as completely and mysteriously as the Chartists went; Nonconformity is impotent and uninfluential again, and listless and discouraged. It may be that the day when its protest was needed is over, and that it should die away and leave the field to Catholicism, and to secularism in all its varieties. That is not my concern just now.

Something of that explosive force must remain somewhere, and it may matter again. I have tried to show how it influenced the age that preceded ours, and how it worked in suppressed lives and starved minds that carried a load of inhibitions which, because they were sublimated into religious belief and emotion, led to no disturbance outside themselves.

Lastly, of the first fifteen years of the present century we know less than of many more distant periods. That time was cut away so sharply that its people seem far and strange; we pass clean over its years to earlier years. We know more about Coventry Patmore than we do about John Davidson; yet Davidson was a man haunted by dreams of the world about to be born, and his dreams were strangely prescient, for all their confused and nightmare quality. To men and women of my own age or older, I come as remembrancer of a period that saw two distinct epochs and civilisations, the folding away of one and the unfolding of another.

Some of my correspondents began, ‘Dear John Arnison.’ I do not mind that, of course. But this book is not autobiography, though many readers take every novel to be autobiography. Nor need a writer be debited with his characters’ unsatisfactory opinions. Men and women of the last generation could not foresee that time would sweep away their beliefs and disprove their generalisations; that the books and authors they considered important were important only in their own minds, and thirty years later would appear gesticulations on a wall, and the wall itself illusion. The chronicler of the pre-war era is only

The transitory being, that beheld
This vision;

and his readers themselves are so much fast-wasting experience and power to experience. Yet the vision may have some meaning for us, since our own vision succeeded to it.

E. T.
Boars Hill
Oxford
August 1, 1939

Part I

The Grand Bank

1

As a junior clerk of the Grand Bank, John was getting forty pounds a year. Out of this he kept four shillings and sixpence weekly, for lunches, daily paper, and private expenditure. A quarterly second-class season ticket cost another twelve pounds; and his employers mulcted him of six more, under the head of insurance.

Insurance—not against his own possible misfortunes, but their own. Shortly before he entered their service, an enterprising Shetlander had used large sums, listed as their customers’ property, to finance sporting ventures which failed. He had gone into retirement, and the faulty book-keeping which permitted him to cloak his misdemeanours had been remedied. The system was now fool-proof and knave-proof, the clerks being so padlocked about with check and countercheck that it was all but impossible for the most trivial defalcation to occur. Nevertheless the Bank, being trustees for Britain’s financial credit, which is so important to those who have a share in it, collected from each employee a proportion of his salary from which to reimburse itself for any dishonesty. In the present year of grace this sum, having accumulated through more than a generation, should be considerable, and should have earned a tidy profit.

So by John’s leaving school the Arnison finances were the better by about ten pounds a year, less the cost of feeding him. It may not seem much. But he was at hand, a boy of nearly sixteen, with in certain lights a comforting semblance of being a man about the house. In that house were his mother and four younger children.

2

After a fortnight in the City, he was transferred to a branch office in a noisome ghetto of north-east London. All around it ran a circuit of pleasantly rustic names: Cambridge Heath, Green Street, Bethnal Green, Hackney Downs, London Fields. The natives lived with the fine jolly abandon of old-time Edinburgh. They discharged slops from upper windows (refraining, however, from Gardez-lou! or any other unseemly shout of warning); they ‘fought until the watch arrived’ (and took them into custody). Their ladies were as martial as their lords, as quick to resent by open duel any slight or disagreement.

Thirty per cent of the Grand Bank’s customers were publicans (ten per cent of the others were fried fish and chips). John’s usual train home went at a time that coincided with the visits of the cat’s-meat man; and he made his way to the station through a wilderness of cats of every shade and shape of evil, excited, whining, tail-lifting.

A bank clerk’s life is visualised as one of opulent ease and leisured dignity. Punch caught this impression in a reference to him, thirty years ago, as ‘not lost but gone by four.’ The belief was excusable, since to its customers the bank’s doors close at four in the City, three in the Country.

But pre-War England was a cormorant for dividends. There was never a meeting of the Grand Bank’s shareholders without some old gentleman or shrill-voiced public-spirited lady rising to denounce the expense of its operations, and demand why it was overstaffed and its clerks overpaid. And at its head was that great captain of industry, ‘Jeremy’ Oldham, baroneted a couple of years later for outstanding services to the Liberal Party and British business. He had worthy lieutenants, with whose aid he waged unrelenting war against overstaffing and overpaying; and this is the one war in which British generals have never failed.

The shareholders contained a wisely balanced selection from our soundly common-sense nation. Against the gentleman or lady who was worried lest his money be squandered was the twittering being who mildly desired—simply for renewal of satisfaction, not because anyone doubted how humanely and considerately Mr. Oldham (‘in whom we all have the most complete, the most absolute, confidence’) ran affairs—to be assured of what was being done for the employees’ welfare. Mr. Oldham always found it a pleasure to answer this question, and his replies were so honourable to himself and the shareholders that they must be repeated. First, there was an absolute rule that no clerk must stay after five o’clock (two o’clock on Saturdays), except during three days at the end of each half-year for stocktaking, exceptions for which there was generous payment. Once in a while—you could not prevent this, however carefully you ran a business—some unforeseen emergency would keep a clerk an hour, or, more usually, half an hour after five. In such cases, overtime money was scrupulously paid, so that clerks not only had no cause to resent this occasional staying, but would have liked it to happen far oftener than it did (appreciative Laughter). Mr. Oldham pointed out that as under-staffing would obviously lead to very heavy overtime expenses, it was sound finance to keep up an adequate staff. How well he and his colleagues succeeded in their double endeavour, the dividend they were enabled to announce showed on the one part, and on the other the remarkable fact that, except for the two half-yearly settlements, only forty-one instances in a whole year had been collected from the whole of their branch attendance books (which he need hardly say were open to any shareholder’s inspection) of clerks staying after five o’clock.

During his first two years John’s duties kept him at the office until six o’clock every day, and often until seven or even later; on Saturdays he left at four, or, very occasionally, a few minutes earlier. When he left the office he took ‘the charges,’ packets of cheques and papers made up for other London branches, to Head Office, Lombard Street, where another young slave signed for them. Then he was free to make his way home.

He scrupulously signed next morning (as the Rules required) the time when he left Head Office, after handing over the charges; Providence had seen fit to curse him with an almost pathological sense of truth. The next step was taken by his manager, who would come along, a little after nine in the morning, bend over the attendance book, grumble to himself, take up a pen, and write. If you had gone along and examined the book then, you would have noted the remarkable regularity with which Mr. John Arnison finished his work at 4.55 p.m. or on Saturdays at 1.55. After his corrections, the manager, going by John and the other junior, would say in a loud scolding voice, ‘I’m not goin’ to sanction any overtime money. It’s been too much aboosed.’ Since it never was sanctioned, except at the two six-monthly stocktakings (when the Staff stayed on three successive nights, to nine o’clock, eleven o’clock, and midnight, and received twice-yearly the sum of eleven and sixpence), it is not easy to say when or by whom it had been abused. But the manager’s memory went back a very long way, and no doubt he was referring to something that happened before Jerry Oldham’s reforms.

Chapter II

1

When you enter a dark room, at first all is hidden. As you grow used to it, outlines grow visible. John presently became aware of differences and individuality.

They had a messenger whose name was Harold Fantom. He too was a dreamer, and endured pangs of disappointed ambition as real as John Arnison’s. As he went about the Bank’s errands, a top-hatted solemn figure, he was dreaming; and his dreams were of dogs. ‘Oh, if only I ’ad ’ad money, Mr. Arnison! Me name would ’ave been in all the dog papers in the kingdom!’

It was true. Dogs were his study; dogs accompanied his thoughts on bus-top or in hansom or when he worked the lift down to the Bank’s vaults. Nothing annoyed him more than customers who knew of his knowledge and tried to tap it for nothing.

There was a horrid pursy little knave, one Passcombe, the Bank’s star customer. Messrs. Passcombe and Passcombe held a Government contract for shoddy. Mr. Passcombe Senior (not yet Sir Marmaduke Passcombe—the Liberals did not get into power until 1906) had a hound of which he was inordinately fond. Dogs were always following their masters into the Bank, and Fantom loathed dogs that added to his work. Of such dogs the most consistent offender was Mr. Passcombe’s. Mr. Passcombe could read (not that he wasted much time doing it), but he was far too rich and sure of his importance to bother about the notice, ‘Dogs must be left outside.’ He assumed, and was perfectly right in assuming, that if he led in bevies of dogs, the Manager had more sense than to object.

Mr. Passcombe liked getting hold of Fantom and questioning him about his beloved dog’s points. One day he asked him outright, ‘What kind of a dog do you reckon she is? I bought her for a terrier—Skye terrier. Couple of quid I gave for her.’ The dog connoisseur, eying the brute distastefully, told him she was ‘a sooner.’ Mr. Passcombe was pleased to have got his pet identified free of charge; he gave Fantom a cigar, which was received without excessive thanks and slipped away into a drawer for a more convenient season. John Arnison, who happened to go into the counter just then with the Passcombe passbook, overheard him proudly telling another man, ‘See my dog there? I’ve just found out she’s a sooner. That Bank fellow has just told me. He knows a lot about dogs.’ John, returning, saw a look of some placidity on Fantom’s face as he sniffed the cigar previously to encacheing it, and asked him what a sooner was. A couple of weeks later Fantom explained the term to him, but not just then.

Most of Fantom’s spare time was spent turning over pictures of dogs that had won prizes at shows. Most of his conversation was about dogs. Most of his jokes turned on people’s ignorance about dogs. He rippled with delight for a whole month, because the chief cashier once asked him what a first-rate bull-dog would cost, and when the answer astonished him exclaimed innocently, ‘Why, I thought I might get one—a pup, I mean—for half a quid!’

There were two ledger-keepers who were midway between the cashiers and the juniors. One was Gurney; a good chap Gurney, altogether a sterling chap, but John did not realise this properly until later. Methodical, strictly conscientious. His only foible was his health. This was excellent, but he gravely doubted it. He would retire behind a pillar at intervals and tilt a bottle of liquid, some tonic or quackerade, and then would persuade himself he was better. As of course he was.

The other ledger-keeper was FitzAndrew, a fragile little Irishman, nearly ten years older than John. He was so frail that you felt a sudden blast, such as often came through the swing doors, might blow him away. This impression was heightened by his habits. He always reached the office exactly on time, except when his trust in the South Western Railway proved displaced, when he was varyingly late. Then he would come flying in, his raincoat, a thin, nearly threadbare thing, streaming out in his flurry. His elvish puckish face often seemed wizened and aged.

He had outbursts of happy irresponsibility which greatly annoyed better-balanced people. He knew all the Falstaff passages and much other Shakespeare by heart, and had a sense of the absurd and incongruous which his surroundings nobly nourished. The general management had their eye on him, as he was to find out later.

John’s companions, with one partial exception (FitzAndrew), were uninterested in anything that he cared about, and mildly derisive of his enthusiasms whenever he was careless enough to let them escape. The manager was illiterate, beyond the ability to write a copperplate hand and do accounts; the two cashiers were long ago bored.

The senior cashier, after being kept at the salary of £200 for five years (‘the profits of your branch do not justify a larger expenditure on the Staff’), had been ill-advised enough to write direct to Jeremy Oldham asking why the annual increment had been stopped. He was accorded an interview, which he reported himself. ‘So I glared at him, and I said, “Are you aware that I haven’t been given a rise for five years?” And Jerry glared back at me, and he yelled, “Yes. And if you are not careful you won’t get a rise for another five years.”’ From this interchange of courtesies returning dispirited, Joad now took no interest in his work. His next colleague, Garlock, aware that his own salary was nearing the point where the profits of the branch would begin to creak under its weight, was also beginning to lose the first fine spring of zest.

The local natives, as I have said, were mainly drinkers or purveyors of drink (or fried fish). There was also a vast army of children who appeared to hold strong opinions about the way the Bank staff were overworked. Continually, even in bright noon, there would be a darkening of the office. You would look round, and see that the Bank had prematurely closed its doors; some imp had stealthily crept up and pulled them to. Mr. Hunston, the manager, would then reopen these, and would bawl to the misdoer (delightedly watching him from the other side of the road), ‘Look out! There’s a great big dawg coming!’ ‘So I’ve warned you,’ he would add, with a pathetic attempt to clear himself of any ensuing blood-guiltiness. FitzAndrew would cover pads of blotting-paper with sketches of this Baskervillian hound, and he and John would consult Fantom as to its probable species.

Mr. Hunston had a little cubby-hole near the door where he spent a great deal of time in hiding. Occasionally these vigils were rewarded. He would be aware of shadows beginning to steal across the outside-as-yet-unclouded day; and rushing out, swifter and more terrible than any tiger, he would seize a little ragamuffin. Then would be triumph and cries of conquest, mingled with tears and entreaties and promises of the captured. ‘Now I’ve got you! now I’ve got you! Mr. Arnison, where is our great big dawg? Mr. Haslam, fetch a policeman! The great strong policeman whom they keep for murderers and burglars.’ Howling in dismay, the prisoner would point a grubby finger across the street. ‘She told me to do it.’ She,

The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive She,

was there right enough! woman always on the safe outskirts of trouble, into which she has thrust unsuspecting trustful truthful man.

2

The office was lacklustre and low-keyed. Work was always in arrears, passbooks being written up as customers demanded them. The only time any liveliness was shown was when Mr. Oldham ordered them to send one of their two juniors for a month to the Stepney branch, as that was understaffed at this time of the year (May), and must be helped out by more fortunate branches. This iniquity was resented quite fiercely, but the manager dared not protest. So John had the pleasure and change of being junior to the Stepney junior for one month, welcomed there as someone they would not see again for a whole year and therefore need not show any consideration.

But the Grand Bank was not a bad bank. It was just average; there were worse, as well as better. And John was lucky, one of the aristocracy of respectable middle-class folk. The great majority of his fellows had a harder life.

If he found it hard enough, this was because it was a return to a wretchedness he had just begun to forget. Two months earlier, he had been a boy neither unpopular nor unadmired. Another year would have seen him in both First Eleven and First Fifteen, and a prefect—wielding authority, a god walking on the cloudy crest of Olympus.

What more felicity can fall to creature?

Then, suddenly, he had waked up and found himself a junior clerk on to whom every drudgery was unloaded.

Chapter III

The autumn of 1905. An epoch was drawing to its close.

A Conservative Government still nominally occupied the parliamentary stage. But no one was watching it, except with occasional glances of disgust. The real fight was outside Parliament, between ‘Joe’ and his opponents. Its resounding preliminaries had run through the last three years.

Joe, the genie who had broken from his bottle and overshadowed his titular masters, stalked through the land with an alluring message. We were to raise immense revenue by excluding the foreign goods which threw our own people out of work. In Joe’s wake, from city to city, trudged rather than stalked a sledgehammer in trousers; and in the North most effectively of all, where men and women still remembered the terror of the hungry ’sixties. Mr. Asquith’s exposure of the fallacy involved in raising taxes on what you kept out startled by its simplicity. There must be a catch in it somewhere! Perhaps there was a catch also in the hardly less simple Liberal creed, of easy steady progress to prosperity for all.

John was an enthusiast for Joe. Joe was going to break up stagnancy, and to build the Empire into a majesty that would make Rome seem tinsel and tawdry.

One day in October, 1905, Messrs. Passcombe and Passcombe dumped a heap of bullion on the Bank at half-past three. Fantom was out, so Haslam and Arnison, the two juniors, were sent together in a cab, their hands chained to the bags of gold, to take the precious stuff direct to Lombard Street Head Office. They would be just in time to deliver it, and would then return to their interrupted work, which to-day, thanks to this break of an hour or more, would keep them till seven or later. They were cursing Messrs. Passcombe and Passcombe.

As the hansom rattled up Shoreditch, the drab day suddenly brightened. They were held up by a host with banners, led by musicians braying and drumming. The banners addressed them stridently. ‘Keep the Empire which Keeps You!’ ‘Tax that Foreigner’! (swat that fly). ‘Why should he Dump his Rubbish on You?’ ‘Guard England’s Prosperity!’ A crowd of down-at-heel slatterns were looking on.

The banners lit a fire in the two boys’ brains. The idea of a change—-of the Empire knit together by that change—of England stirring at last, and cocking snooks at those dirty foreigners who had yah-yahed at her in that South African War which their envious little bratty papers had misrepresented, excited them. A challenge and the name of an enemy were lifted up before adolescence; and before adolescence that was ignorant and poor and weak, yet burning to be part of something better.

England’s rulers, John explained to his companion, were nerveless unimaginative cowardly men. And indeed, this was what most were then thinking, and certainly many of the rulers themselves. They dared not respond, John pointed out (having read the Daily Express carefully in the train that morning), to Joe’s ringing gospel. Everything was breaking up while they did nothing.

Haslam grunted agreement. ‘Myke those foreign swine pye. Myke them pye, I sye, and tyke their vile shoddy awye.’

John proceeded to expound those features of a true imperial policy which appealed to him most. Because of early memories he took a special interest in our Eastern Empire, and most of all in the brightest jewel in Britain’s crown. He wailed how it was being lost, by the same nervelessness which refused to tackle the foreigner at home. The mighty veterans who had won it and saved it were one by one sinking to their rest, and rising to their reward elsewhere. The funeral of one of their greatest had recently given the papers occasion for elegiac on the days when men had been men, and laments for the dearth of ‘paladins’ to-day. Now there was only Bobs. But once there had been Edwardes and Chamberlain and John Lawrence and Hodson and Havelock—and Nikal Seyn! ‘O for another hour of that Dundee!’ John had been moved to write a sonnet on him:

Warrior, whose arm, when Britain’s need arose,
Was swift to smite! ah, spirit tender and stern!
Whose watchful valour Chilianwala in turn,
And swift chase taught the flying Khalsa foes. . .

A stirring exordium, which sank to a finish menacingly and impressively gnomic:

Too soon the land for which thou gav’st thy life
May crave—who knows? an hour of Nikal Seyn!

The sight of those banners and that crowd gathering to learn how they were to prevent the jealous foreigner from filching Shoreditch and the rest of their prosperity from them brought John and his companion unwontedly together. John, to his own amazement, repeated the lines, first explaining who Nikal Seyn was. Haslam said that they were ‘naice,’ but admitted that he himself had no strong turn for poetry. He advised John, however, to send the poem to Great Thoughts, a wittily named magazine whose editor wrote about ‘woman, her charm and power,’ and gave criticism free.

And John might have done this, if he had not presently been enabled to give himself criticism at the same price.

His enthusiasm ebbed suddenly, and he subsided into silence. That final couplet haunted him unpleasantly, as reminiscent of some other poet, quite apart from its deliberate bow of courteous acknowledgment to William Wordsworth. Racking and straining memory, he could not discover who it was, until, on their return journey after depositing the gold, they passed a theatre where Hamlet was being performed. The name brought solution of his problem. Sweetly and appallingly, Uncle Hamlet’s master-work slid into his soul:

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

Recollection of Uncle Hamlet was always like the dull thudding pain of a sandbagging. And Fate had a particular down on this sonnet—a bad one, as its author knew, one written to order, when the Saturday Westminster Gazette Problems Editor asked for sonnets on national heroes. It received a final knock, when John read in an anthology of patriotic verse another poet’s chuckling account of a boorish piece of overbearingness by this same Nikal Seyn, ending

‘When the strong command,’ he said,
‘Obedience is best.’

Even a boy could see that this was caddish—especially a boy conscious that neither he nor his could ever rank among ‘the strong’ whom it is best to obey. That evening, though he did not know it, God began to convert him from Victorian imperialism. The new age had begun in his soul.

Chapter IV

1

Uncle Hamlet at this time was thinking a lot about the Arnison family. He wrote to Mrs. Arnison about John in particular:

Dear Sister,

So your John has left school and gone into business. Me and Muriel always thought you were keeping him at school a great deal too long. Nowadays every boy should be up and doing for the Master’s sake, and all this modern teaching only unsettles the mind and makes it worldly. I suppose he will be entering the ministry, ministers’ sons usually do, though I myself never heard a minister’s son who was equal to a good local as a preacher and in my judgment the ministry is being ruined by these so-called cultured preachers who care nothing for the glorious Gospel. We are living in the Last Dispensation, and at any moment may expect to hear the Trump of the Archangel summoning us all to our everlasting weal or woe. You must keep a special watch on your John. It is just at this age that a boy grows worldly. He grows worldly first of all in what he reads. Tell him to study Matthew Henry’s Commentary, there is none better, and Arthur’s Tongue of Fire and the sermons of Morley Punshon.

John did not strike me as fitted for the ministry. However, I suppose he will enter it, since he is a minister’s son. So you must try to cure him of all worldliness. Let his lamp be lit and his loins girded, for we know not at what hour the Son of Man shall come. Let him, above all, read good books, and let him, above all, be constant in prayer, diligent, not slothful in spirit, serving the Lord.

Things, I am sorry to say, have not been going very well with me. I have had many crosses, and many disappointments. Muriel was saying to me, if we do not get help I do not know what will happen to us. But I said to her that I knew the Lord would soften somebody’s heart, so that we shall get help. I know, dear sister, that it is about this time of the quarter that your cheque comes, and if you could spare us a few pounds I could pay you back on the first of next month. Do not let the god of this world blind your eyes, dear sister. Worldliness is a very besetting sin, and we must all guard against it. Pray that you may be strengthened against it. Muriel and I are also praying for you, and for your John.

That is a good letter, and I should like to be able to say that this good man’s prayers for John were answered. They were not answered immediately, however.

2

Not only social and political values were changing. John overheard a religious argument, between Harold, aged eleven, and Peter, two years younger.

One of Mrs. Arnison’s habits was to present Bibles—or, sometimes, what must be styled Bibles-and-water—on the slightest provocation. On Peter’s conversion, at the age of five, she had presented him with a New Testament, and with a succession of other Bibles since. He spent fascinated hours poring over the Scriptures; he was the only one of her children who gladdened her by voluntary study of the sacred text.

It is true that she was disappointed when she found that these studies were almost solely in the Books of Joshua and Judges. And a little shocked as well, when she discovered the picture that impressed his mind most deeply. It came from the story of the king whom Judah caught, and cut off his thumbs and great toes. The sufferer makes the sportsmanlike admission that it served him right, for a number of kings whose thumbs and great toes he himself in happier days had removed had ‘gathered their meat under my table.’ ‘Meat’ in the Arnison household meant only one thing. Peter, horrified, pictured the mutilated kings sitting under their conqueror’s table, and gathering together in little heaps their ‘meat,’ the still bloody members at which they sadly gazed. It is a scene which some great Victorian religious painter should have put on canvas.

Joshua and Judges were in the Bible, so must be good, Mrs. Arnison comforted herself by reflecting, while at the same time correcting Peter’s misconception, and suggesting that he would get more profit from the Psalms and New Testament.

Peter, however, had continued to explore the Old Testament, and when puzzled drew in Harold to his theological studies. This did not always bring a flood of enlightenment, but it always brought firmly delivered opinion, which is one of the most consoling things in the world. Both students now (John discovered, listening while not seeming to listen—they were in the room’s furthest corner, and after supper he sat down with a book) had been startled by a statement which a preacher had roared out at intervals of a sermon whose other portions completely evaded them. ‘The Lord swore, and would not repent,’ they had been repeatedly assured. The theme was the immutability of the Divine Promise, once given. But these two worshippers heard only of Divine obstinacy, and persistence in conduct which surprised and distressed them. Swearing was something that sent you infallibly to Hell. You shuddered when its accents fell on your ears, and hurried on lest the earth open and engulf the swearer while you were still in his vicinity. How shocking of the Lord Himself, then, to take advantage of His own immunity from the Hell which He had created, and to commit the offence He forbade to all others! And what an example! from the Lord Himself! To swear; and to stick by it! To refuse to say He was sorry, surely the very least He could have done!

Peter and Harold had pondered on this vision of sin unrepentant and unreluctant, on the very Throne of the Universe. Speaking in low tones, as he moved a train about, Peter set out his puzzlement.

Harold listened gravely. ‘Oh, well,’ he said at last. ‘You have to remember that the Lord has a lot to put up with—with all these wicked people in France and other countries, swearing and drinking and all that kind of thing. He’s bound to get cross sometimes,’ he concluded generously, ‘and I daresay that then He says things that afterwards He’s a bit sorry for.’

‘But it says He wasn’t sorry!’ Peter pointed out.

‘The Lord swore and would not repent.’

‘Yes, that’s bad,’ Harold conceded. ‘But supposing He’d seen people doing something dreadfully wicked—like taking money out of collection boxes for the heathen or eating sweets during prayers—why, then, He might feel so cross that He’d not only let out a wicked word, but He’d say afterwards, “No, I’m not sorry! I meant it, and what’s more, I’ve a good mind to say it all over again.”’

This did not convince Peter. ‘S’posin’ you were cross, Harold, oughtn’t you to try and get uncross, soon as ever you could?’

‘Ah, but that’s just what God doesn’t do,’ said Harold, and said it sadly, yet with a note of triumph somewhere, for he had made a point and meant to prove it. ‘It says, Forty years long was I grieved with this generation.’

‘That seems a dreadfully long time.’

‘Yes, but you see,’ Harold pointed out, ‘it means that those people kept on being wicked all that time. They never got any better! That was why God kept on being grieved with them. He is always grieved with us when we sin,’ he concluded piously.

‘Yes, but what about Himself?’ asked Peter, returning to the original problem. ‘It says, Unto whom I sware in my wrath. I heard it last Sunday in Chapel. And I’ve heard it before.’

Harold admitted it, and sighed. ‘God seems to do an awful lot of swearing,’ he summed up. ‘And He is always being angry with someone or other.’

Ex ore infantium. The age was turning, and in the minds of its children almost first.

3

The discussion left an uneasiness. Swearing, you see, was not an ordinary sin (and even an ordinary sin is enough to send you to Hell). It brought with it a sulphurous blast straight from Satan’s own burning throat. It was definitely appallingly wicked—there was no question of that.

The poser was beyond even Harold’s powers of complete explication, and Peter perforce dismissed it.

Not John, though. The great mass of religious people still thought of the Old Testament—‘the Bible, the whole Bible, and not a tattered Bible’—as the inspired Word of God, an inspired tale of religion and devout persons. It was true, Mr. Gladstone was understood to have raised this question, of the ethics of the conduct related in Joshua and Judges, of the God Who was ‘a jealous God’ and commanded wholesale massacre of tribes that happened not to belong to His own chosen tribe. Not atheists and German theologians only, but our own Mr. Gladstone had been upset by this. But (it was felt) there was doubtless an explanation. At any rate, anything was better than to begin to admit flaws in God’s Book.

Yet when he heard grave quiet voices, whose possessors knew nothing of the ingenious and devout Mr. Gladstone, and approached the problem for themselves, noticing what their elders were too wise to notice, it somehow stuck. There was no getting over it, there was a terrible lot of sheer bad temper buzzing about through the pages of God’s Word. That was all you could call it—bad temper! And its results in action were cruelty and ferocity. The newspaper he happened to be reading contained a review of a new book by a living poet who had once believed as John did. The reviewer quoted from a poem that was beginning to have a vogue among the younger preachers: The Unknown God.

Not him that with fantastic boasts
A sombre people dreamed they knew;
The mere barbaric God of Hosts
That edged their sword and braced their thew;
A God they pitted ’gainst a swarm
Of neighbour Gods less vast of arm;

A God like some imperious king
Wroth, were his realm not duly awed;
A God for ever hearkening
Unto his self-commanded laud;
A God for ever jealous grown
Of carven wood and graven stone;

A God whose ghost, in arch and aisle,
Yet haunts his temple—and his tomb!
But follows in a little while
Odin and Zeus to equal doom.

He found the passage troubling him. Was it true that what men and women still believed was God—the God who was always so angry, so quick to take offence and to keep offence—was a ‘ghost’—‘haunting’ his ‘temple—and his tomb’? And when this ghost went? The Universe would be empty!

Chapter V

1

The long seesaw of Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, was to know one immense depression to the Liberal end, more startling than genuine; and then pass into an equilibrium which Labour would finish, by pushing over the plank’s Liberal occupant.

The Government went into dissolution almost with the effect of a film cartoon showing comic fadings out and reconstructions. One Minister after another vanished, and (for a moment only, as time counts in politics) another transient embarrassed phantom took his place. Several former Conservatives crossed the floor, among them Mr. Winston Churchill, who became not merely a Liberal but the rising hope of democracy, the friend and battle-comrade of that already risen hope, Mr. Lloyd George. Presently Nonconformist circles were whispering, in a hush of delight, that Mr. Lloyd George had taken him to a House of Commons prayer-meeting.

Passive Resisters grew more resisting and considerably less passive. Dr. Clifford thundered defeat to their enemy, and that enemy more scrupulously than ever printed his Dr. inside quotation marks, to drive home his iniquity in not having acquired it at one of the two authorised shops. Endless lines of Chinese slaves clanked their way across the imagination, and showed drably lurid on the posters. Then, at last, at last, at last—

After long aeons passed,
Long weariness amassed,
Lover and friend downcast,
Comrade and foe aghast—
At last—at last—at last—

after interminable lingerings and dyings—the Government resigned, amid one final shout of derision when it was discovered that they had neatly divided up among themselves all the available political pensions. And once more the Sovereign People had the chance to tell their masters what’s what, and felt uncommonly in the mood to tell them very plainly.

The Time-Spirit descended, to make a vast sweeping-up of leaves. We know that every battle of the warrior is with shouting and with garments rolled in blood. The garments rolled in blood were to come later, but the shouting came now.

2

Bottelstowe in the allocation of candidates seeking the free and independent suffrages of the electors was lucky. Liberal headquarters sent a candidate of whom those in the know predicted a race of ever-brightening glory. He was, however, himself also fortunate in being sent to Bottelstowe at a time when the tide of Liberal success was flowing in a veritable Bay of Fundy. Even a convict, flaunting Liberal colours, would have been swept into harbour, (Several gentlemen who later on became convicts were.)

For his effect on the audiences which packed Bottelstowe Public Baths (emptied of liquid contents for the winter) was chilling. His imagination dwelt too exclusively in a world where you were arguing to send to jail or to acquit people accused of the graver misdemeanours. By implication this was the world to which you belonged, and the only world that would kindle your excitement. ‘I show you this watch,’ he observed in an expansive and trustful moment. ‘It is a good watch and I value it. Do you suppose that I would pledge it to you except on what I considered good security? If this were your watch, would you, my friends, pledge it except on good security?’

Tactless this—stressing his belief that when you were not wondering whether you were going to escape prison you were wondering what Mr. Isaacstein would let you have for your watch.

‘Very well, then. Mr. Chamberlain asks you to accept his statement that if your food is taxed the cost of your food will not go up. His statement! his word! Before you pledge your vote, my friends, look very very carefully at the security! Mr. Chamberlain pledges you his word—his word—that your food will not cost you more.’

3

This meeting in the Bottelstowe Baths was on Saturday night. The time may have been subtly chosen for its association with the thought of weekly cleansing.

An inspiring session opened with massed chanting of war-songs. These for some reason gave the ‘democratic’ candidate a ‘Mr.,’ and to his opponent no such distinction.

Roll on, Mr. Jameson!
Mr. Jameson, roll on!

and

Vote! vote! vote for Mr. Jameson!
Boot old Chumley down the stairs!
If the Tories get an inch,
They will get you at the pinch!
And they’ll always try to get you unawares!

Man is a social animal, magnificent in his public amusements. These musical and poetical exercises were very enjoyable. Politics are now like a week-opened ginger-beer bottle. All the fizz and effervescence have gone out of them.

There was even a moment of battle during these preluding exercises. A body of malignants essayed the singing of a rival lyric:

Vote! vote! vote for Charley Chumley!
Free Trade he will soon repeal!
Slimmy Jimmy rolled away,
Chummers in on polling day!
If you only put your shoulder to the wheel!

This would not do at all, and they were ejected.

Yet they were ejected good-humouredly. Democracy was jubilant, about to rise to its long-deferred triumph.

John noted another tiny group of dissidents, too strategically ensconced (at the Baths’ deep end, with railings to which they could cling for support) to be lightly tackled. With a thrill of awe and half-horror he saw that they were Socialists, so proclaimed by red ties flauntingly worn and once by an almost successful attempt to sing ‘The Red Flag,’ superbly organised and led. From time to time voices from their midst asked the lawyer candidate loudly, ‘What about the parasites of society?’

Demos laughed gaily at the question; and paid even less heed to voices suggesting—for the most part they were women’s voices and suggested it timidly—that even democracy was not enough, or at any rate not democracy’s current mode. ‘Votes for Women! cried a shrill voice. And Demos, seated in his own public baths, laughed a kindly chuckling laugh. The women, God bless them, were always up to some game or other; but, bless them again, the great majority, like his own Marjorie and Ann and Kate, were too sensible to take up with such foolery.

When, however, a guardedly phrased question was sent up on a slip of paper, asking if Mr. Jameson were in favour of ‘complete adult suffrage,’ the candidate cocked his eyes alertly. He saw the snare—and neatly jumped aside, with immense decision answering an entirely different question. ‘ I believe that every man,’ he said in ringing tones, as he brought his fist down on the table, ‘should have one vote, and no more.’ And amid a riot of cheers passed to the next question, ignoring a feeble protest which urged him to answer what he had been asked. After all, plural voting was also a crying wrong, and must come before votes for women. One thing at a time.

At this point the foreign body which had been causing intermittent irritation ejected itself. The Socialists rose; and John again noted that they were not horny-handed or clad in smocks or corduroys, but a group of young men and women who carried themselves with gay defiance.

They seemed what they were: middle-class and above the actual poverty line. Seemed, too, as if music, poetry, art, even athletics, were not counted alien by them. As they looked down, they appeared amused by the sight of Bottelstowe massed in a tight sunken box and around its edges—and amused by the candidate, who was again, for the nth time, beseeching Bottelstowe to be very very careful about the particular political pawnshop to which it took its custom.

They halted; and their leader, a young man whose effect of keenness was heightened by the knit tall fineness of his body, his whole being a poised enthusiastic challenge, seized a moment when the speaker had paused, his gold watch out again for illustration. He shouted his still unanswered question: ‘What about the parasites of society?’ The speaker, bemused, was caught, and gazed at him nonplussed, and took the audience’s gaze with him. ‘And you’re one of them,’ he was calmly assured.

‘Order! Order!’ demanded Demos, outraged.

‘Chuck ’em out!’ Bottelstowe urged.

A girl laughingly turned the interrupter round to the door, rebuking him. With majestic leisure, the group went out, their order of marching obviously prearranged. They were not a group to invite manhandling. The young men looked too eager for a scrap, and had thoughtfully come provided with sticks.

4

John saw the group again, at a special meeting which the suffragists and their supporters had the daring to hold. It was a gallant effort. But their time was not yet.

Not that Demos was unwilling to listen to them. He was only too willing; the good fellow, tired after his ages of serfdom and aware that freedom was dawning, was shaking numbed limbs and was ready for a frolic. Again Bottelstowe Baths were crowded, tight as Brighton Parade on an excursion day. One gentleman who appeared just on time, carrying a trombone, was turned away at the door. ‘You can’t bring that in here, sir!’

(Surely a harsh decision! Very likely he was a member of some Glee Club, and had had difficulty in getting away on what was practice night. Rather than miss an important meeting, he had come instrument and all, without going home.)

A lady, attractive of person, was the chief speaker. In a deceptive quietness she was allowed to speak her opening paragraph to a conclusion. She stood there, pausing, with eyes flashing and right arm raised in emphasis. ‘O Gertie! naughty!’ a voice reproved her. Demos dissolved in ecstasies, and the rest was hilarity.

One question, and only one, got through to the platform. Mr. Winston Churchill was having trouble in his election; a girl with a bell, standing opposite him at outdoor meetings, had been trying to silence him by ringing it. This, as the People thought, showed the Suffragists’ inherent foolishness; it was daft to think you could silence Winston Churchill with a bell.

So a shout swept up. ‘What about ringing bells at meetings? Interfering with the right of free speech!’

The Cause was at the timid and ingratiating stage, pleading and not yet raving. The chairman was anxious to reassure the audience. ‘We allow no bells in our movement,’ she said.

‘What about Christabel? ‘ bellowed a humorist. And for five minutes the room was bedlam. ‘ What about Christabel? Christabel! Christabel! No belles! But what about Christabel!’ The man with the trombone, for whom friends had opened a side window on which he could rest his toy, bleated an accompaniment. It would have been wiser to have let him in at the start. There is no wrath like that of a friend whom we have snubbed!

Looking back over the tangle of thirty years that lie between us and that beginning of appeal and agitation, some of the brave women who endured so greatly may wonder whether emancipation has achieved all that was predicted for it. This is a wonder that haunts every victory. The Secret Ballot, Extension of Suffrage, Abolition of Religious Tests—how cumbrous is the machinery by which democracy moves forward! and how little it accomplishes against the walls which it assaults!

The group that John had noticed before strove to win a hearing for the speakers. And in himself adolescence, not yet in possession of the knowledge that would clarify thought, was stirred with shame. ‘Damn funny show!’ his neighbour assured him. ‘I’m simply dying with laughter, aren’t you?’

Yes, it was funny, of course; and in his heart he felt a prejudice against the Suffragists. As he explained at the office, when they discussed the problem, this was because he honoured women too highly. They were too fine to be dragged into ‘the rough-and-tumble of politics.’

Yet his heart, stressing all this, paused unwisely to listen to some voice which interrupted. ‘Yes, of course that’s all true. But are men always and all of them oafs in their real permanent selves?’ There could be no doubt as to which stood for the nobler civilisation, the leering yelling audience or the handful of plucky women on the platform. With them were a couple of men, one of them the young man John had watched at the other meeting. He had tried to address the mob, but had been submerged in a chorus of ‘Put me among the Girls!’ He had dismissed them in answer with a gesture of contempt, that had in it no atom of fear. John had felt that the gesture was dismissing him also.

5

In those days polling always began at Ipswich.

Ipswich showed that its heart was soundly democratic, and led the way to victory.

But Ipswich was a skirmish to the smashing triumph that followed. It was on a Sunday morning that John saw a knot of fellow worshippers whose manner suggested inebriation. Mr. Mayhew, local preacher (and a very good one) and Sunday School teacher, had the news in all its glorious details. Balfour—the Prime Minister!—was out by two thousand votes! That would teach him what the British people thought of his Chinese Slavery and his Popish Education Act! Manchester (has our nation ever sufficiently thanked God for Manchester?) had gone solid for the righteous cause. Its wards and divisions—Salford, Oakenshaw, Levenshulme, Stockport—had one and all smashed the Tories. Mr. Mayhew, as near an imitation of David dancing before the Lord as his exact physical resemblance to Mr. Pickwick permitted, was displaying a cartoon he had already made (it must have been by a breach of the Sabbath, since the results of the polls had not come in until just on midnight of the day before) and was going to send to the Daily News. It illustrated the late Prime Minister’s fall by a well-known legend, that of Humpty-Dumpty. The idea, Mr. Mayhew explained, had come to him all of a sudden.

In its storming enthusiasm the Sovereign People toppled over enemy after enemy, in what seemed the safest strongholds. The Owd Rabbitmucks themselves were routed. Even their king and chief, Mr. Henry Chaplin, was ousted from his eyrie and warren. When the dust and scuffling died down, England’s eyes, ‘wet with tempestuous joy,’ saw that the long long night of aristocratic and plutocratic domination had passed away for ever. Nothing that could ever happen could bring it back! The people were represented by a phalanx—glorious, unprecedented—of democrats. Bob Reid, Harry Fowler, Wally Runciman, Reggie McKenna, Jack Simon—these were but a few; and there were three hundred others like them! Cromwell and Hampden had returned to the House of Commons.

What fun those days were! Mr. William Lever, elected for the Wirral division, largely by Church votes, thought it might be because the Prayer Book said something about ‘opening the Kingdom of Heaven to all Bill Levers.’ At Battersea was swift battledore and shuttlecock of light interchanges: ‘Benn he fits Battersea. Battersea benefits.’ ‘Burns will give Benny fits.’ Burns did.

Chapter VI

1

The Psalmist complained that the wicked lay in wait for his soul. Since his day the wicked have grown careless. John found it was the righteous who lay in wait for his.

A mild April evening of 1906. Pretoria Street Methodists had finished their Sunday worship, and a group were drifting together to hold the first open-air service of the summer. John did not want to join it. He knew that he ought to want to join it. His mother noted his look, misinterpreted it, and said eagerly, ‘Yes, stay, John, while I go home and get supper.’

She was always hungry for signs that the Spirit was working in him, for it was increasingly evident that his early conversion had passed off. (It had done this years ago; but he had been away at school, and in the absence of direct knowledge the best might be assumed, as it could not be assumed now.) He was not a wicked boy, except in so far as all who are not in an active state of grace are technically wicked, and therefore booked for the same dismal hereafter that awaits those who have taken their wickedness out in joyous vigorous sinning. He attended church regularly. But he had steadfastly declined to become a ‘worker,’ he had put by requests that he should take a Sunday School class, he showed no keenness for those extras, the week-night services.

Mr. Hawkins, the Sunday School superintendent, had felt it particularly that young Mr. Arnison, with that splendid mother of his (and son of a minister too), had not become one of his teachers. Mr. Hawkins was in charge of the forlorn hope now gathering to assault the streets’ massed indifference, and he loomed up like a cloud over some hill it is going to make verdant (if you can visualise a cloud waving a hymn-book, and urgent, reproachful, respectful). ‘Won’t you join us, Mr. Arnison?’ Mr. Arnison joined them. His mother, with a grateful look at Mr. Hawkins, said that there was no need for John to hurry home.

Mr. Hawkins and his handful, reinforced by John, moved slowly down to where Pretoria Street, debouching into Bottelstowe’s main thoroughfare, widened out like an estuary. They selected, as open-air meetings always do, the noisiest corner that could have been found by any search, so that speakers may have to shout with a desperation that will doubtless be taken to be zeal. Mr. Hawkins suggested the singing of ‘All hail the power of Jesu’s Name.’ Prayer followed, and then an address on the End of the World—-‘The elements shall melt with fervent heat.’ An interesting subject.

But the speaker did not make it interesting, though he tried hard, from time to time lightening the awfulness of his prognostications, by coming on to a homelier level, with incidents and illustrations all tending to show how natural and entirely British the Gospel story really is.

Then an opposition show began. It was not meant as such. After all, this corner was the strategic centre of Bottelstowe; and the Christians, kindly taking the side which gathered up every hoot and shout (as well as the flood of normal noises), left vacant the other bank, which curved widely into a region that was quieter. A small army now occupied this pitch, chanting ‘The Red Flag.’ Mr. Bernard Shaw considers this a lugubrious hymn. But it has its moments; and attention wavered from the Christians’ meeting, as the arrivals sang, marching the while:

Then raise the scarlet standard high!
Beneath its folds we’ll live and die!
Though cowards flinch—and traitors sneer!
We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here!

To listen brought a sense of guilt; it recalled what you would like to forget, the hosts of atheistic Midian who were prowling and prowling around the citadel of sound Victorian Christian Liberalism. Luckily for our peace of mind, the years are hidden from us. No one could then foresee that Moscow was to replace Manchester, and Lenin Bradlaugh. It seemed merely a choice between Asquith (or possibly Lord Rosebery) and Balfour.

Yet already voices which, like those ancestral ones heard by Kubla Khan, prophesied war, were sounding.

Half unthinkingly John left the Christians’ meeting; half unthinkingly he halted on the outskirts of the other.

The change was not for the better. No public meeting ever accepts the ruthless technique necessary for efficiency. To take Parliament at its deadly best, how elaborately and verbosely the official speaker builds up his theme! He has infinite time, and an audience of restive bores eager to follow him, in their own turn checking and jerking and halting, to pick up finally the dull heavy word which anyone with a light inside his skull would reject like a serpent.

A religious meeting is better, only because there is less time. (Even so, there is far too much time!). It is better. Astonishingly better. Yet usually fearfully horribly bad.

John’s new meeting was not a religious one. But it was an English one, which means that it was something which ought never to have been brought into being. A soap-box was ascended by a middle-aged soldier of humanity, who mounted it like Matthew Arnold’s ‘our wisest’ ‘taking dejectedly’

His seat upon the intellectual throne.

Seeming all beard, he became a fuzzy bush, with a moor-kelpie’s visage gleaming from it. Ragged boughs shook to some internal disturbance, and gave forth a rumbling noise whose burden was apparently complaint of a mournful depressed kind. Hard to hear, and when heard not inspiriting.

Beneath him stood a young man, perhaps twenty-three years of age. Hatless, his hair verged on a reddish tint; his hands ran impatiently through it, as if the speaker’s gormless dither filled it with needles.

The mentally starved are keenly sensitive to manly fineness, and John’s eyes were drawn back to him again and again. This was the fellow who had led the Socialists into the Bottelstowe Public Baths meeting, and out again. There was urgency and belief in every nerve of his body; and fire and eagerness. You expected him to pounce, to throw himself hawk-fashion on something or somebody.

This was precisely what he did.

The speaker was a smoky smouldering wick that gave no light. But he wasted the candle of his hearers’ kindness, and those hearers were dripping away, like the lower snows of some spreading fir when thaw sets in. He came to an obstinate check. ‘And,’ ‘and,’ ‘and’—a man beats so round a bush which he suspects somewhere hides a rabbit. ‘And,’ ‘and,’ ‘and’—each ‘and’ was the stroke of a stick that produced nothing. ‘And what do we find, Comrades?’ he asked at last, but despairingly, as one who expects to find nothing. ‘We find you bloody dull, Ferguson,’ was the unexpected answer from a listener who said it quite loudly, spat, and began to move away.

Ferguson, disconcerted, stood with mouth half open. He was gently, but very decidedly, handed down by a girl who gave a grace to the action, as if she were advancing him to higher service. John had noticed her too; she was obviously accompanying the young man of the passion to be flung forward and onward. The unable orator had extended an arm in the aimless manner in which he extended his ands. The girl took it—perhaps in mistaken kindness, but in kindness, for the deed was as beautiful as it was firm. No one could possibly resent it. Ferguson found himself one of his dwindling audience, and by the same magical shifting of the scene his place on the soap-box was occupied by the young man. He was speaking. ‘As Comrade Ferguson was saying——’

But it was not what Comrade Ferguson had been saying. It did not remotely resemble what Comrade Ferguson had been saying. That unhappy orator had been bumblingly general. This successor was crystal-clearly particular, with a scathing exactitude that found out the secret places where self-respect was wounded daily, and knowledge of helplessness burnt tormentingly:

Fallen cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering!

They were back again, he reminded them, in the old clash of Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative. Once again the air was filled with the old absurd battle-cries. They were being asked to support men whose difference and distinction among themselves were a sham. Men concerned only to keep the masses where they were—in their lifelong wretchedness of slavery, with for whip and taskmaster the ever-present terrors of unemployment and starvation!

He paused; and his face lit to some inner fire that brought delight, as from memory of an altar where men pray towards the sun-rising. And what fire should this be but the fire unageing and unexhausted, from which more than half man’s lamps have been kindled, more than half his dreams of freedom and of an existence which might make freedom worth holding? John had thought of Socialists as men and women who would sweep the past into oblivion. They had no aims but selfish and material ones. But this man’s face brightened most when he was speaking of a kingdom that was within the mind. He mentioned Athens; and in burning words was reminding them how, less than a century ago, Greece had been fighting for life. An English poet had lost himself in that cause; and he had warned the patriots that only their own hands could win their freedom. And it was by their own efforts now that the people of England must win their freedom—and not by the help of either Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Radical or Unionist—or whatever other name their comfortable masters chose as a mask to their unalterable selfishness.

‘Trust not for freedom to the Franks!
They have a king who buys and sells!
In native swords and native ranks
The only hope of courage dwells!’

‘This fight that you have just witnessed—in which you have been asked to “participate” and you will not be asked again until the time when your votes are wanted once more!—this fight is a sham one, and not the real one. In the real fight there will be no cries about “Tax the foreigner!” “Keep the foreigner out!” It will be a fight in which all nations are brothers, in which there is neither English nor foreigner, but only man and those who oppress him and keep him ignorant. Not this battle, Comrades, that is over, but the battle which will follow it, will be ours.’

The Christian service was ending. To judge by appearances, it had been a failure. Speakers, dull, unconvinced and unconvincing, had wasted a good spring evening, and their hearers had been their fellow church-goers, a handful of the devout, and a fringe of passers-by, halting with pipe in mouth or standing indifferently watching the pageant of the streets—drifting in momentarily and again detaching momentarily.

Mr. Hawkins, depressed and defeated, flung in his last reserves. However much the infidel may score off Christianity, asking where Cain got his wife or being witty about David, ‘the man after God’s own heart,’ there remains a core of something that is older than the Galilean story and may survive it. Before Abraham was, man felt the darkness coming upon him, and weakness closing down on his mortal powers; and he cried out for a helper, if peradventure the dimness held any helper.

To call up this primeval weakness, at the close of a dispirited dragging appeal to a careless world, was perhaps to throw up the sponge. At any rate Mr. Hawkins did it, asking for ‘Abide with me.’ And ‘Abide with me’ was sung, the singers gathering its consolation about them (as the man who wrote it gathered it, in the loneliness when he realised that his spirit was about to return whence it came).

The Socialist speaker was silent. Then he said, with an unexpected gentleness, ‘If our friends over there understood the teaching of the Master they worship, they would be with us. But the Church has made his message of liberty into shackles of serfdom. It has forgotten what he said, that first time when he preached: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord!” That is our message also, Comrades! to preach the acceptable year of the Lord—which is also the acceptable year of Man, who has been so long downtrodden and despised and pillaged! That acceptable year has come at last! This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears! A young working man came into a Jewish church one morning, in Nazareth, nearly two thousand years ago, and he told the people that! Rome seemed all-powerful, the forces that held down his nation looked irresistible. There was no sign of change anywhere, no stirring in the dead stagnant face of things! All things continued as they were! But he told them, speaking calmly and confidently, on that day so long ago, that a new world had actually begun, if only they had the courage and hopefulness to see it! And a new world has begun now, even as Liberal and Conservative have renewed their old battle, crying their old catchwords! as they prepare for their last battle, friends! They will never fight it again! So let the victors make the most of their spoils, and let us be watching and ready, for the next battle will be ours!’

2

It had all been crude enough; and it has long ago become the mere familiar stuff of yesterday, no longer stirring or even dangerous—as outworn as Huxley’s biological polemics, in a world which has forgotten his adversary Bishop Wilberforce and remembers even Huxley mainly because of other Huxleys who are busily with us. But John had listened to words that were not the words of Wesley: words that spoke of a new and fiercely secularist age, one resolute to make man’s earthly existence safe and to let his spiritual future languish in the shades of cold neglect at last. As he listened, his loneliness deepened, his unhappiness and his dread of losing God increased; yet what he had heard attracted, as well as frightened. There was a whole unknown world of friendliness in the way that young man and his girl had gone off together—he obviously flushed and half ashamed, laughing at the strangely fervent words into which his heart had betrayed him, she encouraging him against himself. John overheard him say, ‘What an ass I was, Thomas! I found myself suddenly talking as if I were a parson. And what right had I to butt in at all, when the fellows who live here were in charge, and I’m just a bird of passage down for the week-end?’ And Thomas had answered, ‘No, you weren’t an ass. You talked the first sense that anyone has talked at these daft meetings.’ She gave his arm a proud hug. ‘I liked it, Hugh.’

And what was this about ‘the real teaching of Christ which Christianity had forgotten’? Parody, of course; and parody of what Christ Himself had said, that He came not to destroy but to fulfil.

But the fact that a statement has been made before, that it is an echo and repetition, does not mean that it is necessarily untrue! This new dreadful Socialism might be doing what Christ had done; might be fulfilling, and superseding, what went before it.

Then what of Christianity? Must that go? No, answered loyalty, deep within. No, reinforced the voice of terror, gazing out into black depths of a universe that had been emptied of God and His angels. It could not go. It should not go.

3

It was later than his mother had expected when John got home, and she was flustered by his absence.

The reason was obvious. Mrs. Earnshaw and her distinguished son had dropped in unexpectedly, and Mrs. Arnison was worried that there were only the younger children to entertain them while she got supper.

Mrs. Earnshaw began loudly, as John entered:

‘We ’ad no idea of stayin’ to supper, my Monty and I, if your Johnny ’adn’t come in so late. We just thought we’d come round, because my Monty said ’e’d like a talk with your Johnny. ’E says ’e ’asn’t ’ad one for ever so long, ’ave you, Monty?’

Not the least of this painful woman’s defects in John’s eyes was her affectionate habit of referring to him as ‘Johnny’—worse, as ‘your Johnny.’

‘So,’ she concluded playfully, ‘since you choose to stay out so late, keeping your poor ma all of a twitter ‘—John, disquieted, saw that this was not one of Mrs. Earnshaw’s flowers of chatty conversation, though he could not guess what was wrong—‘why, your poor ma ’as to ’ave us two great greedy things to supper! Whatever kept your Johnny so late, Mrs. Arnison? ’E isn’t walking out with some young woman, surely—’e still so young and all!’ She shrilled with glee.

The archer who despatched this shaft of humour had the satisfaction of seeing it strike its writhing victim. John glowed with hatred—not of the vulgar brave little woman, but of the whole world that produced her, and in which she lived so complacently happy.

Her son was happy in it also. He was seventeen, a little older than John. He was, unlike John, a beau sabreur, ever in chase of fluttering giggling subwoman. His raven locks were oiled and sleeked, his walk held a captivating jauntiness. His mind was an open book which his companions grew somewhat bored of having to read. Last April Fools’ Day he had gone about his work bearing on his back the legend ‘Girl Wanted.’ The young gentleman who pinned it there had hoped it might abash him. But the Earnshaws of this world are made of sterner stuff; they can bear the discovery of their weaknesses. Monty had laughed delightedly. Of course his motto was ‘Girl Wanted.’ Hang it all, who wouldn’t want a girl? Young Beveridge, who put it there—or was it young Holden?—anyway, one of those two—why, everyone knew that neither of them could get a girl to look at him! Whereas he, Montague Earnshaw—or, as he preferred to style himself, Montague Spurgeon Earnshaw—was the pet of all the girls in sight. Jealousy, that was what it was. He kept the notice propped up on his bureau, before his mirror, under a sprig of mistletoe saved from Christmas, and often waved kisses to it.

The cavalier now smote his mother’s shaft powerfully home. ‘That’s it, ma!’ he cried. ‘Always around the girls, is Johnny. Well, Johnny, was she naice? Which was it? The little dark one or the little fair one?’

If John had done the right thing he would have unhesitatingly butchered both Earnshaws immediately, and this story would have ended here. All he did, however, was to go scarlet and say, ‘Oh, stow it, Monty!’ Then he found a way of escape, to help his mother to bring in supper.

In the kitchen he had a word of kindness and understanding from her. ‘You mustn’t mind their teasing. They don’t mean any harm. I don’t know what I should have done without Mrs. Earnshaw when we first came here. Though I sometimes wish,’ she sighed, ‘that she were a little less vulgar.’ As John said nothing, she added, troubled, ‘John, you aren’t taking Monty’s silly common way of talking seriously?’

‘No,’ said John shortly. ‘I only hate the fool.’

‘You mustn’t, John. He’s really kind at bottom. He’s one of those people who have all their faults on the surface.’

‘That’s why I hate him,’ said John, rising to his first epigram. ‘No one can afford to have all his faults on the surface.’

He found, however, that he did not really hate Monty Earnshaw. This evening, for once, Monty wanted his help. It was a convention that John was ‘a bookworm.’ ‘Always studying, your Johnny is! I wish my Monty were more like ’im. But then, of course your Johnny very likely ’as thoughts of the ministry.’ And this bookishness of John was in a way respected—as much as any habit obviously semi-imbecile can be respected by those soundly conscious of their freedom from eccentricities.

Monty wanted to use John’s scholarship now. ‘’E wants to talk to your Johnny about this Darwinism,’ Mrs. Earnshaw explained. ‘About there being no difference between men and monkeys.’

And indeed it was so. Monty had read an article in his daily paper which assured him that the late Charles Darwin was a real scientist. It had troubled him. There are statements so manifestly and wildly absurd that the healthy mind rejects them naturally, as a Muslim rejects idolatry. But supposing the Muslim should find an exhortation to idolatry printed in the very pages of his Koran? Would it not be his duty to seek further light on this matter of idolatry?

So, after supper and the miscellaneous business of getting the younger Arnisons to bed, Mrs. Arnison walked with Mrs. Earnshaw part of her way home along the well-lighted streets; and in the Arnison house the two maturely masculine minds thrashed out the problem of Darwin versus Moses (for that was how Monty put it, and that was how he understood it). John had vaguely believed that he accepted ‘Darwinism’; his instincts were all towards science and modernity as against legend and superstition. He tried to explain to his fellow philosopher the theory that the six days of Creation were six successive geological ages. That first chapter of Genesis was not meant to be taken as scientific fact. It was a poet’s vision. And, seen thus, how true it was! John waxed eloquent.

‘But I can’t see that,’ groaned Monty.

So John had to begin all over again.

Mrs. Arnison returned and said good-night. The argument continued with deadly punishing grimness; both felt that they had reached a spiritual crisis. They must settle this matter of Moses versus Darwin once for all, and now. And John was gradually beaten from his stand. Monty complicated the problem by dragging in the Apocalypse, though this, it transpired, was not a real difficulty. He had sought clerical guidance on it, and it had been explained to him that the Apocalypse was really a prophetic telling of history by means of a series of intricate puzzles—in fact, a highly elaborate anticipation of the crossword. Monty could believe that all right. But no, not this ‘ vision’ stuff, this explanation of the Bible’s first chapter as a kind of allegory. Hang it all, the statements had nothing nebulous or symbolical (I do not mean to imply that Monty used such words—he did not—but this was his gist) about them, they were all straightforward and plain. God said this, God said that; and the Bible says that what He said happened. And that it happened, in each case, on one day. Well, did it? or did it not? If it did not, then God’s Book had told a lie, a whole pack of lies.

It was close on midnight when Monty summed up. ‘It’s got to be either Moses or Darwin. It can’t be both. If one’s right, then the other’s wrong.’

John admitted that it looked like it.

‘Then which is it to be? Moses or Darwin?’

And again that terror of being driven into the black night and misery of being without God or religion took hold on John. Monty’s face, for once without a smirk on it, and deadly earnest, moved him. The two boys were fighting to keep their faith, to save their souls; and around them swirled the dense dark turbulence of insurgent atheism, a sea that had come to drown all truth and religion.

‘Which is it to be, John? Darwin? And atheism?’

‘No,’ said John hesitatingly. ‘It can’t be that.’

‘Then it has to be Moses! It is Moses! Shake hands, old man.’

John shook hands. ‘Moses it is.’

‘It can’t be both, can it?’

‘No. I see that.’

‘Then it’s Moses. Moses and the Bible and Christianity.’

‘Yes.’

The decision was rightly taken. They were both better authorities on Moses than they were on Darwin.

At parting, Monty was almost affectionate, he was so genuinely grateful. ‘Good-night, old man,’ said the one seventeen-year-old to the other. ‘I shan’t forget to-night. You’ve helped me no end. It’s always worth while talking to a scholar when you have difficulties. That’s what mother told me to do. She cried when I told her the Mail said there was something in what Darwin said.’

As John went to his room, his mother called to him.

‘What is it, mother?’ he asked, frightened.

She would not tell him at first. Then ‘Mr. Hawkins called this evening, to leave Trixie s new missionary collecting box. And—and—he told me you attended the atheists’ meeting instead of ours! Oh, John! if you knew how I’ve been praying for you!’

John found it hard to explain. It was no use saying that it was not an atheists’ meeting but a Socialist one; the terms were synonymous. Yet at last she saw that it had been only a momentary lapse, that he had paused by the other meeting as he was meaning to come home. She forgave him, having wept afresh over his apostasy.

Finally, ‘What did you and Monty decide about Moses and Darwin? ‘

Here he could speak with decision. The glow of a stand taken for truth was still upon him.

‘We decided to stick by Moses.’

‘Oh, John, I’m so glad! I knew you would come out right! “Other foundation can no man lay, than that which is laid already,”’ she added with soft fervour.

Chapter VII

1

The Socialists moved their pitch elsewhere, having the sense to see that open-air meetings are handicapped enough in their nature, without having to shout against neighbour meetings. The Christians met when the weather was mild, and John sometimes joined them.

Meanwhile the righteous did much more than lie in wait for his soul. Presently they laid steady siege. And they found reinforcements from the ranks of the semi-righteous. Not all the investing armies had the same plans for the citadel when it surrendered. But they beleaguered it simultaneously.

The semi-righteous who were most zealous were the FitzAndrews. Edmund FitzAndrew, the Bank’s senior ledger-keeper, showed John a kindness from which he tried to escape, it had so much that was worldly about it. FitzAndrew broke all the really important commandments of Methodism’s moral code. He was not a teetotaler. On the contrary, he drank enthusiastically, and would have drunk more if his financial circumstances had permitted. He attended music-halls. His speech was raffish, sometimes ribald.

Yet with all his sins went an engaging innocence. For all his parade of ‘knowing things,’ it was a surface knowledge. Such as it was, he placed it freely at his young friend’s disposal.

John was himself much busied with his soul. His mother, feeling doubts as to whether so much English poetry would really help to fit him for the ministry, had recommended Wesley’s Sermons and The Life and Letters of Robertson of Brighton. He chose the latter unenthusiastically. However, he read it, in the train as he journeyed to and from the office. What is more, he found it readable.

This may seem funny; but only to the class of readers this book is steadily shaking off. It is, of course, absurd that anyone should ever have been a Christian. Nevertheless, there was a time when most people thought themselves more or less Christian; and there was once a popular preacher who had a prescient and fearless mind. In 1852, when Christianity was ‘inferred to be in mortal danger,’ because it was proposed to open the Crystal Palace on Sundays, this preacher had the courage to ask why his fellow Christians were so shaken by such a proposal, ‘while they quietly ignore the fact, or are too polite to take notice of it, that four-fifths of our male population are living in a state of concubinage till they are married.’

‘Four-fifths’ of the men around him living in concubinage! John showed the passage to FitzAndrew.

FitzAndrew was very grave. ‘As a man of the world, Arnison, I would say it was rather more. Why, at the Rummitch Hippodrome, the music-hall I go to, “fourpence” is a recognised joke of the smutty comedian?

John looked unenlightened.

‘Fourpence is the rock-bottom price for a sleeping companion,’ FitzAndrew explained.

‘Mr. FitzAndrew,’ boomed the Manager’s voice, ‘are you now ready and prepared to help me to check the ledgers? ‘

It was a glimpse of a howling wilderness of sin so vast that the tiny rush-lights of organised religion were manifestly wasting themselves. How obscure and unimportant a life was this of Christian people! To many of them this was a source of congratulation, but to John of misery. The strait way and the narrow gate seemed to imply a bungler in the Mind that planned the Universe, if that Mind were really Love (as was asserted). If that Mind were not a bungler, but did what it did deliberately, then it was not Love. It was less Love than countless thousands of its servants who have passionately given themselves to save their race, and not merely a scattered hand-picked few.

2

FitzAndrew was importunate that John should spend an evening with him. John at last consented. He consented many times thereafter, though unwillingly. His unwillingness was wrong, for he was being educated. It was natural, however, for he was fighting to keep what Methodism called ‘the faith once delivered to the saints.’

FitzAndrew lived in rooms with an older brother to whom he was devoted. ‘There’s a mind!’ he used to say. ‘One of the master minds of this generation!’ It may have been. But from the data which came before him John judged it unlikely. In fact, one thing which made the elder FitzAndrew’s fervent assaults on his soul ineffective was his growing conviction that he was mainly humbug, and far inferior to his childlike admiring brother.

The two were Catholics. The elder had been intended for the priesthood, but had failed to enter it, for reasons which were left in a blur. They too, like Methodist John, were contending for the faith once delivered to the saints. Ignatius FitzAndrew, after the second whisky was in him, would grow majestic, minatory, scornful. ‘Luther!’ he would bellow at the boy before him. ‘It has been well said, The best that you can say of Luther is that he was a man, whereas Calvin was a devil. Now what have you got to say, Arnison? What, man? Out with it!’

Arnison had very little to say.

Ignatius strode up and down. ‘ They are worshipping—yes, now! Now, I tell you—in this so-called Christian England—in our churches! Which they have stolen from us! Stolen from us, Arnison! They were ours, I tell you—built with the money taken from devout Catholics. And the Church of England stole them! Can you have religion based on felony? What right, I ask you, Arnison—what right, I say—had they to take them?’

Edmund nodded approvingly.

Arnison murmured something about the country having ‘decided to give up the Pope.’

Yes. But why? That’s what I keep on wanting to know. Why did the country decide to give up the Pope, as you put it?’

Arnison said something about religious persecutions.

‘Ah!’ said Edmund.

‘I’ll come to that,’ promised Ignatius magnanimously. ‘But did I hear you—you, Arnison, who are a man of the world and an educated man to boot—did I hear you, of all people, say that “the country” decided to give up the Pope? You know of course that the country wanted nothing of the kind. It wanted only to be allowed to go on serving God in the old familiar simple fashion. It was Henry the Eighth——’

‘Ah!’ said Edmund. ‘Ever heard of Anne Boleyn?’ he asked facetiously.

‘Please!’ deprecated his brother. ‘Please! This is serious discussion.’ He poured himself out another whisky. John, who had promised his mother never to drink, had the doubtful advantage of keeping dreadfully sober during these debates.

Ignatius, having drunk his third peg, became mysteriously gentler. ‘Yes, but, Arnison—. You know I like you, Arnison,’ he said irrelevantly.

‘Edmund here told me, “We’ve got a new junior in the office—fellow called Arnison. He’s got brains Arnison has. Genius, Arnison”—that’s what he said. And genius is what I say. I’m a man of the world, Arnison——’

‘Man of the world,’ Edmund corroborated. ‘Meant for priesthood, but man of the world. Arnison man of world also,’ he added impulsively.

‘All our priests have to be men of the world,’ said Ignatius gravely. ‘But I was telling you—what Edmund saying. We’ve got new junior—in our office. Man of the world, this junior is. Also genius. Genius. And I say genius, Arnison. Genius is what you’ve got. That’s what Edmund saying to me. We’ve got—new genius in office. And he’s got junior, genius has.’

Edmund reminded Ignatius that the question on the agenda was that of the so-called Catholic persecutions.

‘Ah, yes. But what you Protestants forget, Arnison, is that the Catholic Church had a right to persecute. It had a right.’

‘It had a right,’ said Edmund.

‘It had a right to persecute. It was the Catholic Church. Whereas who were these Protestants? People like Cranmer——’

‘Yes, Cranmer,’ said Edmund darkly.

‘No one has a right to persecute,’ said John fiercely.

‘Then why did Elizabeth do it?’ asked Edmund triumphantly.

Towards their close, these arguments were conducted by the brothers varyingly. Edmund grew vivacious and hilariously contemptuous, Ignatius whisky by whisky more solemn and majestic.

‘Do you realise?’ asked Ignatius portentously. ‘Has anyone ever told you that Elizabeth—yes, Elizabeth——’

‘Good Queen Bess,’ chuckled Edmund. ‘The Virgin Queen!’

‘Edmund!’ said his brother, shocked. ‘This is—serious discussion—discussion—between me—brother Ignatius, who should have been priest—and boy who ish genius. Serious discussion, Edmund.’

Edmund apologised.

3

He had rarely anything to reply in these onslaughts. Why, then, did he not surrender? There are a number of answers, of which one will suffice. He was becoming aware of the absurdity of an education which had sent him out knowing nothing but some Latin and Greek; he knew he was fighting on a field where he was heavily overmatched in every way, and he resented what seemed the unfairness of getting him into a room and then beating him down.

The talks were not solely religious, however. They were often literary. It was accepted that Ignatius and John were both geniuses, in different ways. John’s line was poetry. ‘But prose, now,’ Edmund would say. ‘My sam, Arnison! but you should see my brother’s prose! He’s the greatest prose writer we have had since Macaulay. That’s honest, that is! Mind you, I say he beats Macaulay ends up. But Ignatius won’t have that. Won’t have it at all. Frightfully modest fellow. You saw that, didn’t you?’ he asked anxiously.

John assured him that he had indeed noticed it.

‘He says, The best prose-writer in the language, next to Macaulay, if you like. But not better than Macaulay.’

Chapter VIII

There is no question that if you take time and trouble you can crush the human spirit. But until physical enfeeblement comes, and clogging and clinging economic burdens—until every avenue and crack of escape is sealed beyond all possibility of reopening—that spirit will find itself an outlet. John found his where others, with brains greater than his but in circumstances similarly straitened, have found theirs.

His mother as a householder had the right to take out books from the Bottelstowe Public Library. She was beginning to have a little time for reading, and was revelling in the works of ‘Ian Maclaren,’ Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and the rest. There were also the novels of the brothers Hocking, now at the height of their powers and productivity, a shining Dioscuri. They gave Nonconformity what it liked, and what Nonconformity liked must have been a good thing. John, however, was not yet ready for it.

Mrs. Arnison, watchful, was dispirited because he was dispirited. He was not willing to talk about it, and she had wisdom. She guessed that his world was not exhilarating, and knew that for him (as for her) the only escape was through the mind. Perhaps a good book would help him. So she offered him the use of her library ticket over the week-end. John accepted, and in the long warm evening went out to choose one. At the library his eye was caught by a line of Mermaid volumes, and he asked for Beaumont and Fletcher. When he got home his mother, who had hoped he would get ‘a good book,’ was dismayed, but reassured herself that no doubt he was ‘studying,’ and if you are studying it is well known that you have to read some queer stuff. She said nothing, therefore, beyond registering a sigh of disappointment.

Why did he not go to the theatre, the reader may ask. Nonconformity did not go to the theatre. The theatre was Hell’s open door. Matthew Arnold thought that Burns’s poetry suffered from having to deal with a dull world—the world of Scots drink, Scots manners, Scots religion; he thought it an advantage to poetry to have a beautiful world to deal with. Like many of his observations, this one has got him into trouble; Scots have been astonished to learn that a world of ranting boisterous lusting tempered by bigotry and starving is not beautiful. Burns himself would not have been astonished, he would have told you he knew it, and did not like it, but how could he help it? If you live in a dull world, well, you live in it: and that’s all there is to it: and you must make the best and the most of it. And Nonconformity has given its children a dull world—dull, dull, unfathomably inexpressibly dull. It has not been made any less dull by being called religion.

However, John could read a play if he could not see one. He read The Faithful Shepherdess. It was improper and in its whole underlying texture idiotically and daftly indecent. A poor thing, but you will never get an imaginative boy of seventeen to see that. Its creaking machinery and structure, its headlong silliness and the insipidity of its lechery—what do these matter when the mind looks right past them to that exquisite image of the River-God, rising full of poetry, tenderness, chivalry, the one gentleman in the play, to restore half-drowned Amoret? No, there is another gentleman also; that darling Satyr, who comes fruit-laden down the glades. And throughout this absurd story blow airs of fresh poetry which make Camus beside it seem a modish stilted thing.

It was to John like the opening of a door into sunlit woodland. The play’s heart of vigorous eager life came singing to him and through him. Here was an Elizabethan keenness, before all was stereotyped and the classes tied down to their own separate thoughts and sins and pleasures. If outside it was a dour Puritanism, as we know there was, it did not matter greatly. Puritanism was in its early stages of rumour and ludicrous absurdity, like Nazism in 1933, when it was merely stuff for funny chaps to make cartoons on.

John became an Elizabethan—by a genuine birth and not mere shrewd imitation. He ranged ravenously through the poets, all the poets, all the dreary dirty formless dazzling Elizabethans. Their dreariness and dirtiness and formlessness slipped by him, as the banks slip by the man who is only his boat and the current. What he heard was this:

Astonishment,
Fear, and amazement, beat upon my heart
Even as a madman beats upon a drum;

and this:

Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked!
And shelter such a cunning cruelty!
To make his death the murderer to my honour!

and this:

He is great, and he is just;
He is ever good, and must
Thus be honoured! Daffadillies,
Roses, pinks, and lovèd lilies,
Let us bring,
Whilst we sing
Praise and honour to his name,
Who defends our flocks from blame!

His experience transfigured even London’s East End for him.

Luckily his mother, seeing him in his evenings ‘studying,’ did not realise that he was writing sonnets, now in Spenser’s mode, now in Shakespeare’s. His meagre lunches grew yet more meagre, often only a bar of chocolate, while he accumulated ninepenny ‘Canterbury Poets’ and shilling editions of this or that old author. You could buy, clothbound, for sixpence, A Song to David and A Shropshire Lad; and, queerly enough, for both there was a sale and a public.

This was as bad a training as his school one had been. It was hopelessly out of touch with the world he was in, and still more with the world his age was entering. Of what his contemporaries were writing he knew nothing.

Chapter IX

1

As each summer came, with its coming John’s dream of Saturday cricket died. There can be no cricket when you do not reach home until five in the evening. So unimaginative is the mind of man when visualising a new way of life, that he had not foreseen this.

He found it hardest of all. He remembered an evening of early summer, two years ago—only that, so swiftly can a century of experience glide by—when after a modestly successful afternoon of house cricket he had lain in long grass, with orchises and cowslips and yellow archangel and nodding quaking-grass all about him, and above him singing larks. It had been an insubstantial faery world! Cool yet warm breezes, gods invisible stepping down out of the ether, set light fingers on his brow as they went their viewless journeys.

He had felt pleasantly sad. He was beginning to see aesthetically that time passes, life flies, man grows old; but he himself and his bright companions were standing still on the hither side of their most golden years. There was no trouble here, only the exquisite feeling that trouble existed, but in such a solely mental fashion that you could rise above it, thrusting down your difficulties as Lancelot thrust down some lesser knight who had ventured to join in when the champion was settling some fighter not too far off being his peer. A couplet in the Alkeslis had haunted John:

εἰ γὰρ μετακοίμιος ἄτας,
ὦ Παιάν, φανείης.

It had instantaneously translated itself as it came:

O that between our waves of woe,
Thyself, O Paean, thou wouldst show!

Paean the Healer would have been at home on that sun-warmed Cotswold level; his herbs of medicine ran riot in its richly coloured grasses. And John enjoyed the sadness of the ancient pagan world, as he lay luxuriating in rhymes which the brain collected while it steeped itself in physical well-being and peace.

2

Though they came with a sense of guilt, thoughts of these Hellenic deities brought a deeper, more enriching happiness than the austere truths to which he was dedicated. And by a refinement of cruelty it was this one vanished glorious evening, of all evenings, which chose to come back to him, one rebellious unhappy dusk in May, when he was again Stepney’s temporary drudge. He thought of how his old comrades must be spending that golden going out of sunlight.

It would not have mattered so much if he had not felt that, after going through all the silly wanton misery of initiation into public school, he had become entitled to his period of poise and rest above the battle. Instead, he had been hurled back into a junior position in another school, one stagnant with undreamt-of stupidities. And to enable him to endure he had only a boy’s mind marred with refusal to accept life for the drabness that it is, and fresh from a divine world of poetry.

His Dweller in the Innermost looked out on Bottelstowe, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, a squalid darkness!

Not here, O Apollo,
Are haunts meet for thee!

But his late companions at school had reached the level where they were presented with a taste of the power and freedom which the mature man so often is never to enjoy at all. They were fledging their first epigrams and trying their critical claws; were wrangling and arguing at large, about everything in the universe and beyond it; weighing the merits of Gosse and Saintsbury as literary pundits; discovering Swinburne and Francis Thompson and Shaw. They were acquiring the lounge of the man of the world, turning with equal facility of accomplishment to such diverse questions as Tariff Reform and the bumping deliveries of the fast bowler in the latest Australian eleven.

Most important of all, they were escaping from the world of sermons and Christian duties which John Wesley had considered the whole work of man (making a notable exception in his own case—but then John Wesley never wavered in his knowledge that John Wesley was an exceptional man). John Arnison, on the other hand, had been driven back into subordination. Two, three years later, this would have been good for him. It was not good for him now, and it was not fair to him, any more than it is fair to the countless thousands of unfortunates who have to endure it every year.

It had been an undesigned but bitter cruelty to lead his mind through flowery paths of a wide humanism, a leisured world where you might play with visions of Pan and Daphnis and where a fine line of verse was treated as in very fact something to be brooded on with more potency than the death-day of empires—and then to clamp it down into the mere mechanic task of totting up columns of figures. No one here had ever heard of Pan and Daphnis. Verse was something mawkishly funny, ‘spring poets’ were in the same class with ‘calf-love.’ This was the world the boy had to be aware of as standing by him, oafishly witty and ready to toss his thoughts with the muck-fork of its humour. Poets, Haslam, his fellow junior, informed him, were ‘barmy.’

That, indeed, is the attitude which runs throughout our society. I have myself heard an Oxford don ask a poet of some fame, ‘Have you done any warbling lately?’

It is magnificent to be an Englishman. But for this privilege, as for every other, you must pay a price. Part of it is that you must be conscious of a half-witted twittering contempt for all beauty that comes from the mind and its imaginings. If you see that beauty you must conceal your seeing, or be ashamed in the fools’ cackle you have raised. No other land sets this disability on its dreamers.

John learnt repression, therefore, and at a time of life when everything cried out for expansion. It is at this time that the vast majority of our boys and girls are battened under hatches. But a lucky handful have a different experience.

It was not tragedy. We must weigh our words, and not use a dignified word for a mood and experience on everyday levels. But it was acute misery.

Chapter X

He had ceased to be a mind worth training; he was the boy who evening by evening carried the charges to Lombard Street, at an hour when the City streets were almost empty. The hurrying tide of home-going clerks had poured out to Liverpool Street an hour earlier. Now there were only a few belated ones, and the barrow and pavement merchants who were here always. The inflowing tide of pleasure-seekers would not set in for another hour.

Of what was John thinking, tired, repressed, hopeful? Of woman, of course. Perhaps; and sometimes. But as yet of woman only in the abstract, as a cloudy delightful adjunct to other dreams. In his dim sub-existence, shut down as in a grotto, undersexed, he was lacking in the energy that looks for a mate and in the vivacity that attracts one. This has happened to many men and many women. The Life-Force, making us beings of limited powers, looks down on such pityingly, but does not help them. They are full to their spirits’ and bodies’ extreme extent, and no cubit can be added to them, to enable them to expand and to enclose yet more.

Puritanism comes from repression. It was not of the ladies of the Court that the old Puritan dreamed. It was of Armageddon, when he would command a company—or even a brigade—even the whole right wing—in the triumphant battle against Evil dying himself in the moment of victory—to receive a crown of everlasting life as he fell. Modern Protestant missionary enterprise was founded by a cobbler; modern social reconstruction came from starving agricultural labourers and sweated miners and cotton workers.

As he made his way up Threadneedle Street, the boy was seeing himself in vision as the Puritans saw themselves. Religion, he had been taught, was the only thing worth living for. It was what God demanded of man in these fleeting earth-days. But religion, as it had been presented to John—its hymns and ‘first’ and ‘second’ lessons, the fragment of Scripture whittled into yielding a peg for half an hour’s sermon—had nothing to call out a young heart’s enthusiasm. Of the sacrifice and valour exacted from parish priest and dissenting pastor he could naturally see and imagine and understand—just nothing. There were no visible crowns for these gladiators, whatever crowns might await them elsewhere!

He must ‘serve humanity,’ he must ‘serve God,’ but (youth insisted) the service must have the glamour and beauty of heroism about it. He saw himself founding and guiding some missionary college in the East, like that one which Pantaenus guided in early Christian Egypt. He would send out his pupils to lands closed to missionary endeavour, to Tibet, Afghanistan, Turkestan. They would all look back to him, as to their centre of inspiration. The mysterious John Arnison, the man quiet, enigmatic, saintly (yet human—he must be that—not parsonical at all, not desecrated with those revolting clerical bands and collars and coats), would be a name whispered with interest, sometimes with hatred, always with awe and admiration, wherever those who really ‘knew the inner facts’ were talking together. He himself would take long strange journeys (though it would be hard for that college of his to spare him), up rivers as vast and unexplored as China’s Yangtze-kiang, over icy fastnesses where hardly a bird had flown, much less any European foot trodden. Last of all would come his own martyrdom, superbly borne. Always the martyrdom.

That was one dream; and it made endurable the dismal journeyings up Threadneedle Street. It made his eyes brighter than the sunset which was hidden from them. It made him pass through our modern Babylon unseeing what was there.

The dream of course took many forms. But always it embraced beauty as well as service; always the imagination was fired by something more electric than the drably terrific goodness which his teachers had inculcated; always the service closed in the martyr’s crown, the only crown which has ever excited the gentle heart of youth.

He did not realise that the martyr’s crown was over his daily life now. His mother was straining every nerve to ensure the fulfilment of her dedication of him to God. The autumn came, and the winter; and the younger children in the evenings—what was left of them, after John had delivered the charges and come home—were bidden to be ‘quiet,’ for John had to ‘study.’ It was a dreary life for them in that tiny house which could afford only one fire. It was not a sensible life for him. That it was the will of God does not alter these facts.

But there was that deeper nature within him which would not, even yet, accept defeat. If ever a human system has been cursed sometimes with teachers who should have been in a mad-house, Puritanism has been; and English Nonconformity most of all. Yet all these teachers have not been vicious lunatics. John Milton is a respected name, even in orthodox circles (which are happily unaware of his unsoundness on the Persons of the Trinity, and know only that he made a great poem out of the Story of Redemption). And Milton managed to get the best of both worlds—that is, of both the worlds which John was crying out to live in. He had been allowed to have that prolonged lovely youthfulness, and to write his Hymn On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity and Lycidas. Then the martyrdom came; and after it the grand return to poetry, the sublimest thing in the whole literary record of man.

Might not God allow him to do this also? To write his handful of poems, ‘soul-animating strains, alas! too few,’ and then put in his day of unflagging splendid service to humanity? And then—for a brief but sufficing eventide, before death came to fulfil greatly a life that had been so great, to return to poetry, as Milton and Dante had done, and to give his native tongue John Arnison’s Samson Agonistes, John Arnison’s Divine Comedy?

It would be a surprising concession if destiny did this. Yet—there were those two precedents for it! And John believed in his destiny. Every young man, until experience has taught him otherwise (and not always even then), believes that his destiny is somehow different from that of others. The insect whose leaf has not yet been sucked down in the swirling flood believes that his leaf is to escape, although he sees a thousand leaves as strong and firm going down before his eyes.

Of the martyrdom, at any rate, John was not going to be cheated. It was being prepared for his generation.

Meanwhile his imaginative life, so intense, so happy even in its frustrations and deprivations, supplied the place of the sexual impulse, and was itself a flame, rising out of mists and loneliness. The demiurge within each one of us, shaping and fashioning in us our own manner of soul and universe, gave him a world filled with beauty and a wild entrancing music.

Part II — The Coming of the Pagans

Chapter I

1

In April, 1907, John answered a literary query in the columns of the Academy, and was awarded a five-shilling prize. He was told that a credit for this amount had been sent in his name to a Mr. James Heaton, a Bottelstowe bookseller. Mr. Heaton’s shop was at the end of Bottelstowe where John, had he thought about it, would have doubted if any bookseller could exist.

This shop was one for second-hand books. Abysses of shelves stretched far within, from one room to another. When John introduced himself, the proprietor was amused.

‘I know. I was expecting you. The Academy sent me a postal order. I suppose they sent you to me because I sometimes advertise in their columns. But I’m not really a bookseller. I have only old books.’

John said an old book would suit him as well as a new one.

‘I’m afraid I have very few novels,’ said the proprietor, beginning to look. ‘Scott, of course. Miss Charlotte Yonge—can’t say I care much for her myself. Thackeray——’

‘I don’t want a novel. I’d like a book of poetry.’ Mr. Heaton looked at him with the dawnings of respect and interest. ‘Then come over to this corner—do you mind, Mr. Arnison? Let’s see! I’ve got Browning, Lowell, Longfellow—shelves on shelves of those old green Moxon Tennysons——’

John hesitated, from his schoolboy feeling that immortal poetry was something which belonged to the past. The age of gods and giants was over. Novels we should continue to have. Of course. But hardly poetry, apart from an occasional lyric that might, long afterwards, swim up into a niche in the anthologies. Yet he asked, ‘Have you—any living poet?’

Heaton’s eyes kindled. ‘Why, yes. Oh, and here are some William Morrises. He’s dead, it’s true. But he died only yesterday,’ he added, almost as if to himself.

‘Yes. But he did die yesterday!’ rang out a voice behind them, so startlingly that John almost fell over backward, as he was stooping to peer at the lower rows of books.

The young man and woman whom John had seen at the Socialists’ open-air meeting had entered. They bent down eagerly to help in his search. There was evidently going to be no introduction.

‘Here’s a John Davidson!’ cried the young man exultantly. He opened it, and began to read:

‘Upstream I went to hear the summer tune
The birds sing at Long Ditton. . . .
Never was such a place for singing in!
The valley overflows with song and chaunt,
And brimming echoes spill the pleasant din.’

‘“Brimming echoes spill the pleasant din”!’ the girl exclaimed. ‘Do you call that poetry?’

‘All right,’ replied her companion. ‘Let me read a little further. Hang it all, you don’t give a poet time to get his singing-robes about him!

‘High in the oak-trees where the fresh leaves sprout,
The blackbirds with their oboe voices make
The sweetest broken music all about
The beauty of the day for beauty’s sake,
The wanton shadow and the languid cloud,
The grass-green velvet where the daisies crowd;
And all about the air that softly comes
Thridding the hedgerows with its noiseless feet,
The purling waves with muffled elfin drums,
That step along their pebble-paven street——’

She stopped him peremptorily and took the volume from him.

‘Shiny gleaming words! That’s what you look for, Hugh! If they’re scooped together in some sort of metrical shovel, you think they’re poetry.’

‘But Davidson’s aren’t ordinary words,’ he protested.

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘They’re not. He collects words that other poets haven’t yet mauled into dinginess. But all the same, he’s a journalist, not usually a poet at all.’ She quoted:

‘And all about the air that softly comes
Thridding the hedgerows with its noiseless feet.

That’s a London journalist’s picture. The air’s like a policeman hoping he’ll catch somebody up to something. And what follows is awful, Hugh! I marvel that even you can’t see it!’

She read, with slow indignant emphasis:

‘The purling—waves—with muffled—elfin—drums,
That step—along—their pebble-paven—street.

‘Any poet who ever calls anything “elfin” again ought to be drummed down Parnassus and warned off its slopes for ever.’ She looked up. ‘Can’t you see, Hugh’—she entrancingly included John as one who could and did see—‘that it’s the picture made by a man whose brain is more brightly awake than a poet’s brain has any right to be? The thing didn’t start in his brain as music, and then blaze out into picture accidentally. No! It was all picked up neatly and coolly, word by word, and put together visually, not rhythmically. Why didn’t you read from the very page that is opposite to the one you selected?’

And she read, so gently and appreciatively that you might have almost suspected unfair practice, after the indignation of her former tone:

‘I would I lay beside a brook at morn,
And watched the shepherd’s-clock declare the hours;
And heard the husky whisper of the corn,
Legions of bees in leagues of summer flowers.’

Hugh had been routed. Yet even a routed army sometimes returns a dropping shot or two. ‘Is that so damned good?’ he asked. ‘Seems to me just lazy and drowsy.’

‘Exactly! It flows—naturally and quietly—out of a drowsy satisfied mood! Out of some brain movement that’s entitled to find a metrical expression, and one like itself!’

Gazing at John again for confirmation, she awakened to the irregularity of this pedantic wrangle before a stranger. She laughed, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Signy Heaton. This is my father. And this is Hugh Latimer.’

‘What a curse it is to have pious parents,’ said Hugh apologetically. ‘I hope you didn’t have them. Don’t tell me your name is John Wesley! Or George Whitefield!’

‘It is! Very nearly! It’s John Wesley Arnison.’

‘Oh, gosh! Shake hands again! I’m the child of many prayers myself, and know what it’s like. My father is a Dissenting Minister.’

‘So was mine. At least, not exactly Dissenting. He’s dead, but he was a Methodist. And Methodists never really dissented. The Church of England refused to have them.’

‘Oh, that’s all rot, Arnison!’ said Hugh, smiling. ‘Of course they dissented! I know that that obstinate ass John Wesley said they didn’t. But they did! And if he and they had had the sense to know it, instead of trying to pretend to be more respectable than the other Dissenters, they wouldn’t have gone on getting the worst of both worlds, and being a nuisance to God and man. But you and I’ve got to be friends, Arnison. My father was a Methodist preacher.’

‘Hugh’s a Methodist preacher himself,’ said Thomas. ‘It’s one of the things that make him tolerable.’

‘I know,’ said John, and smiled.

‘You know, Mr. Arnison?’

‘I heard him at the Socialists’ open-air meeting.’

They all laughed. ‘You a Socialist too!’

But John had not fallen so far—yet. He hesitated.

‘Don’t tell me you’re a Tory! I won’t believe it,’ said Thomas.

He remembered his mother’s story of the label that her father wore, as a talisman against the Owd Rabbitmucks of this world. He pinned it to his own breast. ‘I’m what you might call a Liberal Conservative,’ he said, and blushed.

‘I flatly refuse to believe it!’ said Thomas firmly; and smiled, as a girl of twenty-one was entitled to smile, at such a pronouncement from a young man of seventeen.

‘Why?’ he was emboldened to ask.

‘Because you haven’t a Conservative face. It isn’t even a Liberal one. It’s the face of a man’—ever so slightly, she wavered on the word, but it came; and John, unconsciously, straightened up, like one who rises from being knighted—‘who has already been through a lot of experience. But we’re stopping Dad from making one of his rare scattered sales. Bottelstowe does not buy many books.’

It was true. And is still true. Bottelstowe does not buy many books. In fact, books are not regarded as anything to buy in Bottelstowe. John was in an equivocal position.

Mr. Heaton extricated him, explaining the circumstances, and the book’s selection was taken up as a joint enterprise.

‘Why don’t you like William Morris?’ asked Thomas suddenly, John having passed by a shelf of that poet’s works swiftly.

John could be rapt into ecstasy’s heaven by poetry. But he had hardly begun to formulate his critical opinions. As a matter of fact, he knew practically nothing of Morris’s poetry. He had run through The Earthly Paradise and Jason—the skim-milk of verse, which had left his lips unsatisfied. He knew a lyric or two besides, and remembered one. He said something, lamely, about not liking Goldilocks.

Thomas stood erect from her search, with amused friendly eyes. ‘What!’ she cried. ‘You let Goldilocks put you off! That dear pair of nursery children!

‘And Goldilocks and Goldilocks
Shall dwell in the land of the wheaten shocks!’

John, also smiling, cited, disapprovingly, Miss Goldilocks’s suggestion that the young man should introduce himself:

‘“O thou fair man with the golden head,
What is the name of thee?” she said.’

Latimer laughed delightedly. ‘Not the way introductions are made in the best Methodist circles! A headlong impetuous lady! I agree with you, Arnison. But it’s Morris’s way, all over. You walk out unsuspecting in his woods. And suddenly you hear a whizz and feel a sharp pain; and there’s an arrow lodged in the flesh of your arm! You yell, expecting pirates or bandits. But it’s a girl smiling at you, as she observes archly, “I’m Bow-May, and men so call me because I am good with the bow.” It isn’t a world of ordinary civilised introductions at all!’ And he parodied Goldilocks:

‘“O thou fair man with the flaxen head!
I’m Bow-May, and going to shoot you dead!”’

‘They seem to me very nice woods, these of William Morris,’ said John. ‘I really know them hardly at all—only just a few poems, which I daresay are not his best. May I take something of Morris, Miss Heaton?’

His old-world manner amused and charmed her.

‘I’m not very fond of Goldilocks myself,’ said the bookseller, at last getting a word in. He looked relieved and pleased. He had looked hurt when it appeared that John disliked Morris.

‘Arnison doesn’t know,’ said Hugh, ‘how careful you have to be about Morris here. You mustn’t even hint that his earthly paradise was one of wallpapers and sham flowers. I take my hat off to him as a Socialist. But as a poet——’

‘Well,’ said Heaton composedly, ‘I’ve always lived in a city myself, so I don’t mind an earthly paradise of wallpapers, if they’re beautiful wallpapers. The country is no use to the people, anyway. It’s all shut up for shooting preserves.’

‘When you get your Merrie England again, Hugh,’ said Thomas, ‘you’ll find its woods and wild places inhabited by Morris’s men and women, But we won’t foist any Bow-May stuff on Mr. Arnison. He shall take The Defence of Guinevere’—she looked along the shelves, found it, and held it out to him—‘as a present from me.’

John protested. Unavailingly.

‘I won’t have you thinking that Goldilocks represents Morris the poet. Now for your Academy prize. You shall take a Davidson. Hugh’s in a way right. You ought to read the two together. They both see the way the world’s going. Only, Morris bewails it, whereas Davidson thinks it’s the Will of the Universe, with all the capital letters you can get hold of! You can’t be alive—not really truly alive—unless you read both.’

On this basis a treaty was made, which left all the belligerents well content. A ‘Mermaid’ Marlowe was included, to make up the five shillings.

2

They took him then to an inner room, where he learnt more about the proprietor of this queerly situated shop, who seemed so indifferent as to whether he sold his wares or not. Mr. Heaton had originally been an engraver, and the room’s austerity placed it at once as the home of an eccentric. There were no framed photographs, no reproductions of ‘Mother’s Prayer’ or ‘Wellington and Blucher Meeting after Waterloo.’ Instead, there were scenes from Norse and Hellenic legend, and books finely printed and bound.

Morris’s day was over, his fame and influence were waning. Men jested about ‘Wardour Street English,’ a useful cry to distract attention from the subversive character of this man’s lifelong aims. Besides, we do not want the England he wanted.

Heaton had not forsaken him, however. He had retired to Bottelstowe, which Morris had known in childhood, when it was a hamlet on the skirts of Epping Forest. It was now a vast London dormitory, and, as if out of perversity, Heaton had settled in the end which was most unlike the Bottelstowe that had vanished. This was ‘the Chute,’ a nickname you would understand if you watched the dragging trains, from five o’clock onwards, discharging tides of colourless humanity.

He had some private means, and amused himself by working a hand-printing press. He sold secondhand books as his excuse for continued existence in an age which did not want the engraver’s art. He made something—not much, but more than you might have thought—by selling finely produced and rare editions, by means of advertisements in literary papers.

Heaton held to that veneration which Morris, almost alone of recent writers, seems to have inspired after death. As in the days of Athens’ ruin might (no doubt, did) live on, in some village of Cithaeron or beside Ilissus, an old man who had once known Socrates, so Heaton lived on in Bottelstowe. Friendship with Morris had been responsible for his daughter’s name, as she explained to John. ‘That’s why I’m called Thomas. No one could be called Signy in Bottelstowe. “The white-handed Signy,”’ she said with a smile. ‘A blood-sister of Bow-May, of whom Hugh has warned you!’ Then she quoted:

‘No word spake the earls of the Gothfolk, but the hall rang out with a sound,
With the wail and the cry of Signy, as she stood upright on her feet,
And thrust all people from her, and fled to her bower as fleet
As the hind when she first is smitten.

Isn’t that Bow-May all over?’

‘It was Morris, who called her Thomas,’ said Heaton. “No girl could ever get over a name like Signy,” he said. “Why, you’d better have given her a boy’s name! I’m going to do it for you.” So he called her always Thomas.’

John was about to go. Mr. Heaton asked, ‘You said you lived in Bottelstowe, Mr. Arnison?’

‘Yes.’ Then—half defensively, even if the defensiveness was (as it was) entirely subconscious—‘I live at the Pretoria Road end.’

His hearers caught the not quite audible tone,

and the shadow of the half-taken attitude that accompanied it. Hugh laughed, but kindly. ‘Ah, the respectable end! So far as Bottelstowe has a respectable end!’

An ironic smile showed dimly in Mr. Heaton’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said, to himself almost, as John was one day to learn was his manner. ‘He setteth the poor in families—only too much so! And by some queer choice (if it is choice!) those families set themselves in places where even to live brings a blush to the face! Places like this end of Bottelstowe! Though I never see it, for I never stir out of the world’ (again his tones dropped, as if he were sending a whispered message to some listener far within his curtained house of life) ‘which my books have made for me—long ago—thank God!’ His voice trailed away into silence.

‘We both work in London,’ said Thomas, ‘but Hugh turns up here when there’s any good reason for it. I daresay you may have heard him mentioned as a possible Labour candidate at the next election?’

‘I’m—not sure. Yes, I think I have.’

‘So naturally I keep an eye on Bottelstowe,’ explained Hugh. ‘As a tiger keeps an eye on a calf that he hopes will presently stray within reach of the bush where he’s hiding!’

‘When we’re both down, can we pick you up, Mr. Arnison, and bring you back for supper?’

John flushed with pleasure. Then looked embarrassed. ‘I ought to say that I’m not a Socialist, Miss Heaton.’

‘That doesn’t matter in the least.’

Then what did matter?

It was those rival Sabbath activities. When the Hosts of Light and Darkness are nearly encamped, you cannot pass casually from one to the other. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’m a Methodist.’

Put thus baldly, it seemed an absurd thing for anyone to say. Methodist. One whose life is patterned, not in the glow of any inner illumination, but upon John Wesley’s dry-as-dust habit of chopping up his time and energies, like so much desiccated hay. That must be what the outside world thinks, every time it hears so singular a pronouncement.

What’s in a name? Often, a whole wilderness of misdefinition.

‘What’s it matter?’ asked Thomas. ‘Hugh was once a Methodist.’

Hugh cheerfully owned it. ‘We’ve a whole crowd of ex-Methodists. It’s a queer thing,’ he reflected, ‘but if you run over those of our people who really care passionately about social problems that happen to be also moral problems, you’ll find they’re ex-Methodists, Arnison!’

‘It isn’t that. Only—you see, if the weather’s decent—in spring and summer, anyway—our people hold an open-air meeting near yours—and—and, you see——’

They understood. ‘Well, we’ll hope to find some other time when we’re all free,’ said Thomas.

So he made friends with people whom (he was aware) his own people would consider hostile—worse than even worldly. But he had been offered friendship with no doctrinal strings attached, and he meant to grasp it. He took home with him the glow of this new experience; and under his arm he carried three books of verse.

Chapter II

1

If Mrs. Arnison were disquieted to hear that John had picked up with strangers, she was reassured by the fact that one of them was the son of a Methodist minister.

Latimer. The name presently wrinkled her face with questioning. ‘I wonder if his father was the Rev. Nehemiah Latimer whom we used to hear at the May Meetings?’

‘Bound to be, Mother, surely? The name’s not a very common one.’

‘Yes. He must be.’

‘What was the Rev. Nehemiah Latimer like?’

She hesitated. ‘Well—I didn’t like him much. But your father always said he was a most exceptional man.’

‘In what way—exceptional?’

‘He was very devout and earnest, and a very good preacher,’ she said defensively, and seemed willing to let it go at that.

John was too much interested in his new friends to be willing to let it go at that. ‘You don’t seem to have cared for him, Mother.’

‘Well—I didn’t. It seems a wrong thing to say, but what I didn’t like was what I may call his political attitude.’

She said it in the tones of a nun apologetically mentioning fox-hunting. The world passeth away, and the fashion thereof; and politics are warp and woof of its most perishable part.

‘He was terribly down on poor people,’ she explained. ‘He himself had been very poor. A miner’s son in the North, I think. He had to leave school and go to work when he was very young, and had a very hard time. And of course’ (brightening, for she had come to something she could unreservedly praise), ‘he really did splendidly. He used to tell us how he used to study by candlelight, down in the mine, in his spare moments, while the other men were just idling and laughing. He was very proud of it, and of what he had made of himself. And then he became a great preacher. And he always took the line that he understood the very very poor, because he had been one of them, and that they did not use their chances, because they drank and were too careless and without ambition. I myself thought he had forgotten how very difficult things are for those who are poor.’ She sighed, and both of them remembered that all poverty is not among ‘the very very poor.’

‘I suppose he thought they all ought to have become great preachers,’ said John.

‘I don’t believe in politics myself,’ she went on presently, ‘though of course I realise that we must have them, and that it’s very important to have fine God-fearing men like Mr. Gladstone to look after the interests of “the poor and needy, and them that have no helper,”’ she added, in the soft tones she always reserved for quotations from the Sacred Word. ‘But still—it did seem to me wrong that a man who had been so poor himself should be so confident that the poor are all wicked and deserve to be poor. Mr. Latimer was terribly against all Radicals, while your father and I always thought there was a lot of excuse for them. For things,’ she concluded, ‘say what you like, are terribly hard for the very very poor. It isn’t everyone who has Mr. Latimer’s gifts of preaching and studying, or can raise himself.’

Then, smiling, she quoted Tennyson’s lines—it was all right to read Tennyson, even if you were a Victorian Nonconformist; and in any case Madge Hendred had never died out in Madge Arnison:

‘’Tis’n them, as ’as munny as breäks into ’ouses an’ steäls,
Them as ’as coäts to their backs an’ taäkes their regular meals,
Noa, but it’s them as niver knaws wheer a meäl’s to be ’ad.
Taäke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.’

2

They left it at that, then, tacitly. But John knew his mother was troubled. And he himself was ‘sore adread’ lest he should be drawn into the outer darkness of secularism. He knew that this fierce raving madness to set the world right, after misery and cruelty and drabness and humiliation had been accepted for all the ages as inevitable and unchangeable, was going to be as pitiless and masterful as the vision that once came out from Galilee. That had gripped men and women and sent them to the death of the cross or the stake; this was gripping men, and sending them into the outer darkness where God is forgotten and religion considered superfluous.

The white-handed Signy said the best thing about her lover was that he was a Methodist still. But John knew that she was awarding that most deceptive of garlands, commendation of the ‘spirit’ of Methodism. Which meant that for Methodism itself—the new life, regeneration, the second birth, scriptural holiness—she had no use. She wanted only its fervour—which was to be squandered on what the Pretoria Street pastor called ‘mere social reform.’ The white-handed Signy and the comradely Hugh were emissaries of the God of this world.

Why has the God of this world been so lucky in his emissaries?

Chapter III

1

Meanwhile the family lived out their communal life—each in a self-contained island on which no other could intrude.

Trixie, usually away at school, gave least perplexity, and was probably the happiest of them all, next to the imperturbable Harold. She passed her examinations, she played hockey and rounders (the netball era had hardly dawned), she rose steadily towards prefectship. In her the Arnisonian independence flared, perhaps not so steadily and strongly as in John but with a more electric brightness. And she had every bit of his fierce sense of injustice. She could be ferocious at wrong done to others.

For wrong done to herself, she had a contemptuous tolerance. The family’s narrow and poor existence hurt her most, and in most ways; poverty is particularly cruel to a girl, especially to a pretty girl. But she early found in herself a stoicism that despised her own affairs. There was less of what Uncle Hamlet called ‘unction’ about Trixie than about any one of the others (always excepting Harold)—and Uncle Hamlet found precious little of it in the whole family, his sister included. Troubled by Trixie’s shortcomings, Mrs. Arnison prayed for her almost more than for the rest, she seemed so shut to the excitements of religion, so very far from God. But there was in Trixie a loyalty and staunchness such as men and women who have found friendship in desperation know. She did not love widely, but within her circle she gave all she had and was.

Towards the end of her own life, her mother began to wonder if saintliness can lie hidden all its days, and may be only another and baser name for selflessness and courage; and if her prayers had been answered better than she had thought.

Poor Robert’s life was in the shoals where, it was clear, the inscrutable will of God meant it should remain. He struggled on at Bottelstowe Grammar School, chiefly because Mrs. Arnison could not face his problem until she must. He stayed in the form where he had begun, while younger boys came and went. There was no use in continuing to pay his fees. Yet what could he do for a living? Mrs. Arnison, who had so much to worry about otherwise, began to be exercised by this problem most of all. She could not bear the thought of his sinking to be an errand-boy, and moreover admitted sadly that even an errand-boy’s job is one in which you can make mistakes. She could only pray that the Heavenly Father would open out His will for Robert.

She took comfort in the Psalmist’s assurance that, though he had been young and was now old, he had never seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread. No doubt the Psalmist’s experience had been a wide one. The Bible, moreover, declares passim that the widow and the fatherless have special mercies provided for them; and if the human record hardly justifies such optimism, we must remember that reality is something that we do not see until we are close to the grave.

Robert struggled on, until Easter, 1907. Then he left, and began a dreary course of seeking employment. The pretence of gentility was let go at last, he must be a drudge. A kindly Methodist stationer said he would try him for a year, paying him half-a-crown a week.

Harold, aged nearly fourteen, a foursquare sturdy creature, who very early in life decided what things were good for him, mainly settled his own destiny. He was the hermit crab that has wrapt something stiff and stocky about its unprotected hinder parts, and from that coign of vantage pulls its food to it. Pleasantly comfortable in the grammar school, he declined to be moved, and indeed it was over-late to think of moving him.

Harold’s hobby was wild life; he seemed to have the secret of some ducdame that drew beast and bird into a circle round him. When he was off on one of his forays, the family query always was, ‘I wonder what Harold will bring back this time?’ ‘Mercy on us!’ his mother would cry when he reappeared, holding a still dazed rabbit that he had rescued from a stoat, or proudly displaying a tin that immured lizard or vole. ‘I can’t have all these wild things about the place!’

She nevertheless did have them. Whoever was going to live with Harold, now or hereafter, must be prepared to live with the beasts of the field.

He possessed a captive hedgehog to which he was much attached, and generally a grass snake. Not always the same snake, for sooner or later there came a time when the two pets amalgamated, and he had to look for another.

His mother had few hopes of Harold. No doubt, if it were God’s will he would become a minister. But the signs were against it, decidedly against it. Probably he would be that only less useful thing, a lay supporter, perhaps a Sunday School teacher or even superintendent, perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—a local preacher. His love of Nature would help him to teach the love of Nature’s God. But such dreams, though they were vouchsafed to her passionate prayers, rarely looked convincing to Mrs. Arnison. Harold was so plainly a natural reprobate that grace (one felt) would have done pretty well if he remained a church-goer (even if only of the Sunday morning ‘oncer’ category).

2

The summer was a good season for Harold and Peter. It was not so good for John; through July, August, September the office was always short-handed, with nearly always one of the seniors away (a fortnight being left between holidays, for the work to recover). No one could go in June, because of the pressure of the half-yearly settlements; and the Manager was entitled to a month, and the Chief Clerk to three weeks. John, as the junior, had to choose last and to go when the work permitted; in 1907, his summer holidays would be in the last fortnight of November.

However, August brought all the Arnisons together. In the evenings John could get pleasure from watching Harold and Peter arrange the spoils of a day which, if fine, had usually taken them far afield, to Epping bogs and thickets.

But when it settled down in mid-August to rain for days together, in a house that was small and crowded Peter and Harold grew bored with being at a loose end. Mrs. Arnison—it was a counsel of desperation—wondered if they might not use idle time to some purpose. Harold’s school report, for example, had not been exhilarating. Perhaps their eldest brother might ‘help them with their lessons.’ They could do some good reading together.

John ought to have known better, ought to have known the gulf between them and him. But he was the first-born, and conscientious to the point of priggishness. So, one rain-soaked evening, ignoring discouraging responses to his interest in studies which Harold and Peter had put away till next term, he tried to enter the twilit world in which they groped (sometimes—and under adequate outside stimulus) towards scholarship. He offered to read some poetry.

The offer was noted, and when urged was received without zest. However, if a missionary allows discouragement to deter him, the heathen must die in blindness. John therefore read The Holy Grail, as combining moral worth and story of a sort with considerable poetical repute.

His auditors were restless and uneasy. ‘It doesn’t rhyme,’ Harold pointed out.

John explained that it was blank verse. Far far finer than rhyme, that ‘bedizened harlotry’ and ‘property of decadence,’ ‘rouge on the Muse’s cheek and belladonna on the eye’—that ‘exquisite adornment’ which ‘has corrupted the ear of the world.’

Harold remained merely confused. ‘Anyway, poetry has to rhyme,’ he concluded triumphantly, thereby giving John the chance to expose error very vigorously.

Harold listened to him in silence, and put the problem by with distaste. There were questions that interested him much more deeply than this one of rhyme or not-rhyme. Nor did the story of the Grail seem to him worth the fuss that was made about it.

What had set the lid on John’s unsuccessful reading had been a thing that reminded him of the theological discussion he had once overheard on the matter of swearing. There was a burst of shocked laughter from Harold and (in lesser volume) Peter when he came to the line,

‘And Gawain swore, and louder than the rest.’

Their stupidity had angered him; and his explanation, that Gawain had not let out a flood of damns and O hecks, but had taken an oath, only did what elaborate explanation always does—it killed such hearing as divine poesy can get only under favourable conditions.

A flash of dour northern common sense persuaded John to drop his educational purposes. They were doomed to waste and sorrow in any case. What have minds that are stirring in fresh unaesthetic animality got to do with the uneasy stirrings of adolescence, that is striving to sharpen both vision and expression and is wretched to be taken as the young effort that it is? For a while the Arnisons must inevitably draw apart from each other, and drive onward, each in his or her separate individual mist. Ten years later they might draw together again, and find that the driving forward had been on parallel lines.

Chapter IV

1

In September, 1907, came a new junior. John moved one step up. He was admitted to be promising. ‘Mr. Arnison is getting quite fast,’ said the Manager approvingly. This was the office prayer and ambition for each member, that he might become fast. When your staff is reduced to a minimum, every unit must fashion himself into eyes and hands swift and unerring.

The new junior took over the daily delivery of the charges. John no longer, evening by evening, made his way through the City, against the homeward-going crowds. He could now do often what he had hitherto done rarely, could continue in the train past Bottelstowe station, and reach Epping Forest, paying excess fare.

He learnt again how many moods the earth possesses—and the air!

The huge shadowy form of a white owl passed slowly along the bushes, beating them for prey. A red squirrel paused as he crossed a glade, then with hardly quickened glidings and leapings plunged into cover again. A family of long-tailed tits settled for the night.

The bramble thickets, ‘with mist engarlanded,’ carrying their high pink roses still amid their fruit-clusters: wet glades where no one wandered but himself: the green woodpecker busy against his tree, upon whom John came unexpectedly to watch him heedless in a tiny intimate world of his own. All these were nothing: were the merest commonplaces of the most commonplace of all English woodlands, the Londoner’s Forest. Nothing! Except that it was everything.

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

In John’s case, the world that was centred was the world of Heaven.

It might be only an hour or two of fast-dimming twilight. But in this hour or two there was silence: and wild birds’ sudden cries out of silence. There was mystery, there was eternity.

In his own body was a reawakening of youth and physical vigour—of a sense of leisure—even though it were not leisure as it used to come, in generous abundance and proffered armfuls, but merely this one hour snatched, at the end of a tedious drumming day. Tolerantly watchful and gracious, his Dweller in the Innermost, a being of secrecy and wisdom—and unuttered and unutterable ecstasies!—governed everything. And all things mingled, and made themselves and him a perfect world, of autumnal mists and weeping rain and cloistered glades—in whose depths was a boy forgetting all he should have remembered, and imagining that he was mind and soul, and dreaming that he was immortal!

John came to feel that in the Forest dwelt almost a living being, half god and half elemental mind. This autochthon looked out sardonically, from the satyr half of its self, on the mobs who disported on its borders; and pityingly, from the divine half, on those pampered fools who despised this region, as they sped through it on its rod-like central road, to what they considered ‘real country.’ Whenever John left the office—jaded almost to the point where he was ready to let life sag down into his limbs, as the body sags into a chair when it is exhausted—if he continued in the train till he reached the Forest, its simplicities came with freshness to a mind that had lost the Cotswolds. (Those hills were an episode which two years of drudgery and dulness had swept completely away.)

2

On one of those white October evenings, when the earth seems waiting, as a man waits when his work is finished, as he entered his train at Bishopsgate John bought his Saturday Westminster Gazette.

It contained one of John Davidson’s superbly individual and personal outpourings in prose. Each of these was already (as we can see now) a ‘fey’ utterance, by a poet so far withdrawn from the ordinary life and thought of men that he was not afraid to soliloquise, and was bold enough to assume that his own experience and his own deepening sorrow were in themselves interesting to others.

It was on Epping Forest.

To the town-bred mind the Forest comes with sharp savour of wildness. When Davidson wrote of it, he did it with the naivety and freshness of the mind which streets have oppressed, day after day, and the traffic’s clang has deadened. John Arnison, whose Oakenshaw had been worse than Davidson’s Glasgow, had known the Cotswolds also, so that to him a yaffle’s laughter or a jay’s rasped-out challenge were not the adventure they were to Davidson the journalist.

Davidson’s article passionately told what the Forest meant to the Scot exiled in London. If he did not visit it at least once in every year, ‘a monstrous cantle’ was cut out of his life. For the brain tortured by London’s stark impersonality and feverish from its noise and brightness, it had shadows and silences.

It had close individual beauty also. The year was standing still; autumn had ‘done little as yet to braise and brand the greenness of summer,’ that ‘had risen from the grave and usurped the world again.’ The fugitive plunged deep into a world of colour and richness, of ‘intricate, domed masses of foliage’: of coral berries of nightshade, blood-red clusters of holly, rud and russet of iron-fanged bramble and burnt-up fern. Yet the air and fragrance were that of June, saturating the wind like ‘the wild scent of stars.’

Then the poet glanced, as one of themselves, at the men and women of the London pavement, from whose ranks he had bought a flower and evening paper. He saw in them, though even to himself this cannot yet have been more than dimly guessed, some prefiguring of his own end in despair, which as yet he thrust from him. They, too, came daily to a battle which was hopeless, as they well knew; and yet came to it with an illogical renewing of courage. Night by night they confessed themselves beaten, and crept to some manner of sleep. Dawn by dawn the sun poured into their veins some manner of strength, and they went out to the useless struggle again.

3

A boy as young as John, and one belonging to the middle classes, ought never to have understood this alternation of courage and despair that were both so feeble. Yet he did understand it.

He lived before the god of common sense was born—at any rate, for the poorer sections of the middle classes. You sought first the kingdom of righteousness, which is not eating or drinking; the rest was added unto you. The current gloss interpreted this to mean, The rest will look after itself.

Of course it did not, and never does. His body took its revenge, and took it with an angry resentment.

At first Brother Ass tried to shift his suffering on to John’s mind. And Mind, being a fool and uninstructed, took on the burden. Mind turned to religion, which has always been held up as a miracle-worker. No matter what happened to your health, if you were right with God you were right everywhere.

John tried, with the self-flagellation which not merely Catholic contemplatives but the more inward kinds of Puritan know so well, to convince himself that he was ill because his religion was not ‘real.’ He tried next to convince himself that his religion was real after all; it was merely a wavering of faith that needed to be set right, and then all would be right.

Unfortunately, in his heart of hearts he knew better. For one thing, why this continual yearning towards the ‘worldly’? Towards the Elizabethans, who could hardly be classed as edifying authors? Towards poetry in which the natural world lived and sang so entrancingly that no place was left for pietism, and no need of it suggested? Why did his mind remember Hugh Latimer, of the plunging zest and physical perfection—Hugh, who was definitely headed towards destruction, having deliberately, and often blasphemously, abandoned the faith in which he was brought up? Why did his pulses quicken at memory of -the gracious carriage and charming friendliness of Thomas? He was ready to worship her, if they met again, merely because she was so unlike the circles in which he moved, and because—well, because she was good to look at, good to listen to, and because she had turned to him with a straightforward kindness that had no archness or coyness in it.

Most racking of all was John’s knowledge that his religion was without emotion. He had not ‘the witness in himself,’ the Holy Spirit speaking assurance to his soul that all was well between him and his Maker. Certain hymns would move him, but (as he was aware) only fallaciously; God did not come close to him, except in an artistic or semi-artistic fashion, which he distrusted, for to the roots of life he was Puritan of the Puritans, and his imagination was of the kind that is most at home in desert places, where no veil hangs between God and man. Rubric and curtain and vestment, pleading organ or desperate passionate Methodist singing, these things, though they could move him deeply, moved him only momentarily. Whereas a voice coming out of the intensity of cloudless sky and burning air, merely claiming allegiance, would make him a captive till all worlds and all existence finished for him!

4

Trying many things—religious services, Scripture study, devotional books—by accident, one day in December, 1907, in his luncheon hour he had entered a Friends’ week-day meeting in Bishopsgate. For a year John regularly attended these meetings, which took place every Tuesday.

They calmed and strengthened him unspeakably. He was alone with the Alone, and away from the fussy friendliness of Nonconformity. No one ushered him to a pew, no one handed him a hymn-book, no one gave him glances of the least interest. Those offices are all necessary and helpful, but just now they were not what adolescence needed.

Above all, no one seized Mr. John Arnison. afterwards, and expressed pleasure at noting his regular attendance. He was nobody, in a universe where he was meant to be nobody and must sooner or later become resigned to the truth that he was nobody. The sheer impersonality of it all comforted him and was a sea which upheld this swimmer who was growing so tired of struggling. He ceased to struggle, he trusted himself to its kindness and prayed, passionately and silently—one of a company who were each of them withdrawn from the rest of the world.

He felt that in this universe is a Spirit who can come close to the individual spirit and save it. The Universe itself cares nothing for any individual soul, but uses each and every life as straws in its never-dying furnace, and burns the strongest and bravest to grey ashes of dispersal. Yet—perhaps? Inside this grim pyre may live and move a Mind which is not its prisoner? which can come close to the individual mind, and persuade it that it cares for it, and cares with a passion beyond even that which we feel for each other? John’s mind felt that a comrade had found it. What he owed to these hours of communion he could never express.

Chapter V

1

It became widely known that John was a great reader. This winter, accordingly, the cultured young Mr. Arnison was elected to the Literary Committee of Pretoria Street Wesley Guild, and was asked to arrange two ‘Evenings with the Poets.’

He suggested an ‘Evening with Shakespeare’s Contemporaries’ as one. A doubting silence ensued, in which faces exchanged glances of ignorance and questioning. The minister, the Rev. John Fletcher Maddingley, ended it by asking gently, ‘But don’t you think, Mr. Arnison, that some of the Elizabethan writers are—-well, rather violent and in some cases even what we should now consider not altogether suited to a gathering of our young people? Remember, we get young people who have not had the advantages of your education, and such an evening as you suggest—though I have no doubt that with your knowledge and fine literary taste you could make it in many ways really helpful—might lay itself open to misunderstanding.’

Sense was on the minister’s side. A brawling noisy world, whose meanings are pikestaff plain, the Elizabethans themselves are not in the least open to misunderstanding. But a social-religious evening devoted to them, as part of the exercises and enjoyments of the people called Methodists—why, that certainly would be open to misunderstanding.

‘Remember,’ Mr. Maddingley persisted, ‘our people come to us to be fed. Now what food would they get from—shall we say?—Beaumont and Fletcher? Or even Shakespeare himself?’

Very little. The hungry sheep would go away with bellies swollen with rank mist and contagion, a struggle of wilder colic than the hill in which Æolus kept his captive blasts.

So John presided over an ‘Evening with Longfellow,’ and the second Evening with the Poets was emended into an Evening of readings from John Halifax, that blameless gentleman.

John tried to quiet his conscience by dutifully wading through Longfellow, and was rewarded. There was poetry there—in mild solution pervadingly, and sometimes in visible jets: the whooping billow that swept the crew of the Hesperus like icicles from her deck—blind Bartimaeus clamant at Jericho gates—The Slave’s Dream, with its landscape of the Niger in a peace and prosperity which it doubtless never had (but has now, for so long as poetry shall continue to be read). But he could do nothing with John Halifax, except blush to the invisible roots of his soul, and then curse himself for being such a snob as to blush, while presiding over that dreadful evening.

Yet much good was done by both divertissements. Votes of thanks were moved, seconded, and carried unanimously, to the cultured Mr. Arnison who had arranged the revels. His mother rejoiced in his renown and usefulness.

2

The second evening was in late March, 1908. That month Bottelstowe acquired a new jest, its first motor bus, a square box that rumbled drunkenly at the dizzy speed (under favourable conditions) of twelve miles an hour.

One night, emerging with the mob that poured out from the 6.50 train from Bishopsgate, making his way along the main street homewards John paused because everyone else was pausing—a crowd whose faces looked one way, in amusement or indignation.

A schoolboy had caught hold of the bus’s back rail and was letting it pull him along. Suddenly the conductor, a fat red-faced child hardly older, appeared on the platform, and with a whoop of delight seized the boy’s cap. Thereafter, crowing with glee, he kept him alternately running and giving up despairingly—to resume the chase when the cap was apparently offered to him. Finally, just as John’s attention was drawn, the boy burst into tears and gave up for good, throwing himself down on the pavement edge to sit and weep. Instantly went up a hundred-throated roar of wrath and command. The conductor in fright chucked the cap towards its owner.

John was standing outside The Bottelstowe Gazette’s office. ‘Come in here just a moment,’ said a voice at his shoulder. He turned and saw Hugh, and was haled into a small room fugged with smoke. A table was littered with MSS., various ordinary books of reference, pipes, and a tray of yet uncleared-away tea-things.

Hugh pushed two chairs nearer to the fire. Then seized unceremoniously a book in John’s hand. ‘Paradise Lost? Being read for its poetry or its theology? I suppose you know old Milton was heterodox? Didn’t believe in the Divinity of Christ!’

‘I like Milton better than any other poet,’ said John, with just a hint of resentment in his voice.

‘Better than John Halifax, Gentleman? ‘

John went fiery red. ‘Do you think I chose that foul book?’ he asked fiercely. Then, laughing, ‘Anyway, how do you know about it?’

‘Cigarette, Arnison?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Well, I do. But only a pipe. You’re quite right about cigarettes. How did I know? It’s my duty, as the editor of Bottelstowe’s principal organ of opinion, to know of every activity of the high-minded denizens of this noble dormitory, that by any misuse of the word can be styled intellectual. Didn’t you know I was a journalist? I’ve left Babylon for the time being, and am infesting this populous suburb, and have just taken on’—he pointed to it with sardonic self-raillery—‘The Bottelstowe Gazette, whose proprietor’s by way of being a Socialist.’ He puffed hard at his pipe, took it out of his mouth and looked at it, then puffed again. ‘A real Socialist. And also—a friend of the Heatons. And of myself.’

He had got his pipe going to his satisfaction, and leant back to look at his friend. His face quizzed up again with amused questioning.

‘What the devil were you, John—I’m going to call you John, by the way—doing with that most loathsome of all books? that aspidistra rotting in the fields of literature! Why, the thing’s rancid from cover to cover!’

‘Do you think I don’t know? Do you think anyone in his senses wouldn’t want to boot it into the nearest ditch? As I asked you before, do you suppose I chose it?’

‘No,’ said Hugh, growing conciliatory. ‘We knew you were only a victim. All the same, the evidence was dead against you! You’ve no idea how Thomas’ (John winced again) ‘and I laughed when your people sent in their para about the wonderful evening over which the cultured Mr. John Arnison had presided with such grace and skill! It must have been a wildly jovial affair! Someone sang The Holy City, didn’t she? Gosh! but when we Methodists start enjoying ourselves we do go the pace! And didn’t a bloke and his wife sing that touching duet, Excelsior?’

‘No,’ said John, laughing despite his vexation. ‘That was in the Longfellow evening. I couldn’t help that, either.’

‘I should think not! Shocking stuff to put before the people called Methodists!

“Oh, stay!” the maiden said, “and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast.”

Now, John!’ he said, holding him down in his chair. ‘You’re not to go off in a huff! Besides, I’m expecting Thomas at any moment, and she says she must meet again the man with the eyes of a poet. It’s my belief that she’s afraid they’re going to make a preacher of you! All is forgiven, John, really! All except John Halifax, Gentleman! That you must live down!’

‘Tell me how,’ said John, now in good enough humour.

‘Why, the very fact that you ask such a question shows that salvation has begun! All is now forgotten! and I’ll tell you why it seemed so damned funny—funnier than usual. Ever been to Tewkesbury?’

‘I’ve been nowhere.’

‘Ah, you should go to Tewkesbury! I had to go there, the very Sunday before the day when your folk’s para came into this office. I was out with the Clarion Scouts, one of a group of missionaries spreading the word of Socialism through England’s cannibal regions. But what was I talking about? Now, what was I talking about?’ he asked, rising to hunt for his tobacco-pouch. ‘Oh, hell!’ he cried, with a wide scoop of his arms gathering up a mass of papers and swirling them into a corner. ‘Oh yes, Tewkesbury! Tewkesbury. Jolly place Tewkesbury. Incidentally, John, it has a quite adequate sort of abbey. Yes, a really good abbey. But do the local savages care? They do not! All they care about is that John Halifax, Gentleman once allegedly infested the town!’

‘I should have thought they would have tried to keep that dark!’

‘One would, wouldn’t one? But then, you see, you and I are members of a civilised tribe, so naturally we are revolted by all these horrible mumbo-jumbos in pagan districts. Well’—and he fixed John with his hand, with his pipe held like a pointer towards him—‘this Tewkesbury place is placarded everywhere with “John Halifax, Gentleman.” Here John Halifax sneezed. There he first saw his wife. Funny, a fellow like that having a wife!’

He found his tobacco pouch and sat down again.

‘But God is very good to His English people,’ Hugh concluded solemnly. ‘He guides them safely home from all their strayings! Listen! Finally, from the town’s centre a signpost points you to “the mill mentioned in John Halifax, Gentleman.” I joined the line of seeking pilgrims, and we reached the mill—the ultimate shrine and altar of all true Halifacians!—to find it duly posted as “the Home of John Halifax, Gentleman.” And posted also with another notice, in larger letters yet. No one could miss it! It was the sublime single word, “GENTLEMEN.” I thought that fine, John. The rascal had gone to ground at last, and in the right place! I left him there, and came back and explored the Abbey.’

3

The door opened, and Thomas entered. ‘Why, John Arnison! I beg your pardon—I mean, Mr. Arnison.’

‘No. It’s John,’ said Hugh. ‘From now on.’

‘May I? And of course I’m Thomas.’

Hugh had risen in his tempestuous manner and swung a chair towards the fire for her. She took it, demurring. ‘I can only stop a minute, Hugh.’

‘Anyway, you must stop long enough to help me to wrestle for John’s soul. John, why the devil don’t you—a chap with brains and literary sense—pull out from all this milk-and-water Methodist literary-evening kindergarten, and come into our movement? We need writers—gosh, but we need them! Ask him, Thomas my dear!’

‘I think it’s entirely John’s own private business.’

‘Nonsense! Nothing is anyone’s own private business any longer! I tell you, if I get any more rot about John Arnison and the singing of Excelsior——’

‘Stop it, Hugh!’ she cried imperiously.

Hugh did not stop it. ‘I’ll print the para under exclamation marks,’ he concluded. ‘John, you’ve got to join us. What good can you do the Methodists? What use do you think they’ll ever be able to make of you?’

John for a minute or two had been angry. But he had been given a question to answer.

‘If I’m ever any good as a writer,’ he began slowly.

‘Of course you’re going to be some good as a writer,’ said Thomas.

‘I’m sure of it,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s why we——’

‘Leave me out of this,’ said Thomas.

‘That’s why I, anyway, want to rope you in to the only movement that matters to-day—the movement that for our generation is going to do what Christianity did for the world long ago, and the Renaissance half did, later—Socialism. And we want writers. Methodism does not want them. The Churches do not want them. They wouldn’t have the remotest idea how to use them if they had them. You know yourself that to Methodism writers, and poets and dramatists most of all, are suspect. Unless they consent to write hymns!’

This was true, and John did not deny it. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I believe there ought to be some sort of Puritan criticism of national life.’

‘Oh yes, there is! Far too much criticism! A half-witted imbecile commentary on things that don’t matter a straw! Barking about Sunday Observance and whether Christians ought to go to the theatre or play cards!’

‘Do shut up, Hugh!’ said Thomas. ‘You’re not giving John a chance. That isn’t what he’s thinking of at all.’

‘Thomas is right,’ said John, for the first time, greatly daring, using her name. It gave him courage and frankness immediately, as one who had graduated into the equality of friendship. ‘I’m thinking of criticism in Matthew Arnold’s sense, when he says poetry should be a “criticism of life.”’

‘And what the Hades did Matthew Arnold mean when he used that meaningless phrase?’

‘I don’t believe that Matthew Arnold did use meaningless phrases.’

‘Anyway, no one has ever known what that one meant!’

‘I think I know,’ said John. ‘He meant that, if you took poetry into your blood and bones—real poetry, not just verse—you would be able to recognise nonsense when you saw it—nonsense of every kind, even if everyone else was yelling loudly that it was absolutely first-rate stuff. I call that “criticism of life,” and I think poetry ought to do it for a man.’

‘Good for you, John Arnison!’ cried Thomas.

‘I call that criticism of literature, not of life,’ said Hugh.

‘Then you’re wrong! It’s by what they write and say that men go wrong, for what they write and say comes back on the mind again and gets a second hearing in quietness, whereas it seems to me, anyway, that what we merely think passes over our minds in such a misty fashion that it really leaves only a momentary blur. Writing or speaking fixes things—gives them a shape that makes you look at them and take an image on your memory.’

‘What has poetry to do with all this?’

‘Poetry is the kind of talking or writing that says most in fewest words——’

‘Like Swinburne!’

‘I was talking of poetry,’ said John, with so dignifiedly old-maidish an air that they both laughed. He laughed also.

‘You are very austere to-night, John!’ said Thomas.

‘Well, Hugh has made me fight him, and I’m not going to give him room enough to whirl that noisy sword of his! I refuse to let him beat down my argument by dragging in Swinburne. When I say poetry, I mean chaps like Milton and the Greeks, who could pack a whole world into a line or two. And that kind of thing, if you take it into the brain and blood, is going to make you jolly fastidious about accepting loose twaddle that sprawls all over the shop. And I don’t believe that literature is any use unless it saves you from being as big a fool as you might have been if left to yourself.’

‘So we come home to Methodism again!’ observed Hugh, but respectful and smiling. ‘Which is what we began with. And, to go back to it, what use can the Methodists ever make of a fellow like you? You’d waste your time if you talked like this to a huddle of Methodists drunk and disorderly on John Halifax, Gentleman!’

‘Then they need to be instructed,’ said John cheerfully.

‘No use, John! You’ll never teach those grandmothers to suck eggs. I’ve tried, and I know.’

‘I know, too,’ John acknowledged. ‘All the same, I may be a fool for doing it, but I can’t get rid of my feeling that there ought to be in our national life some kind of criticism—by which I don’t mean fault-finding——’

‘No. Of course not.’

He gathered encouragement from both their faces, and continued. ‘Some kind of criticism that really cared about style and hated sloppiness—and that had austerity of conduct behind it.’

They were all silent, while Thomas poked the fire thoughtfully. Then she looked up at John. ‘I’d like to see if the Methodists could use you, John. Like Hugh, I’m doubtful. And, unlike Hugh, I’m doubtful if the Socialists either know how to use a poet.’

‘What about Morris?’ asked Hugh indignantly.

‘Did they know how to use Morris?’ she answered.

‘They were willing to use his money. They were willing to take some pride in his fame. But did they care a straw about the things he cared for—-saving men and women not merely from poverty, but saving their minds and souls for beauty? You know they didn’t! You know that to-night you’re going to talk to a room full of noisy people—every window shut!—of whom nine-tenths think the best, if not the only, use for England is to make it into a vast building plot, dotted suitably with music-halls and lecture-halls and schools, and of course the necessary farms tucked away somewhere! But gracious! I meant to drop in for just a minute, and here John and you have kept me talking! John dreaming of saving a world for poetry and religion, as well as just eating and drinking in comfort!’

She sprang to her feet.

Hugh was bewildered. ‘You don’t mean you’re not turning up to-night?’

‘Afraid not. That’s why I came round so early, to let you know. I’ve promised Dad to help with a quite miraculously large order that has come in from Japan, of all places! Now I’ll leave you to get ready, Hugh. Good luck! John’ll see me to my tram. Won’t you, John?’

‘All right,’ grumbled Hugh, yielding reluctantly. ‘Then you’ll come back, John, to go with me. Half a dozen of us are knocking up a bit of supper at the place where I’m to spout. You’ll share it, of course.’

But Hugh was to encounter a second defection. John could not come.

‘You can’t come! Can’t is no word to use before the Vice-President of the Bottelstowe Socialist Union! especially when you’ve been talking like a good Socialist, not like a Methodist at all! Don’t you realise you’re the captive of my bow and spear?’

John was nevertheless firm, and he and Thomas went out together.

As they went, she said, ‘Now that Hugh’s living in Bottelstowe, I shall be here oftener. Can I call and get to know Mrs. Arnison?’

‘Could you both come this Saturday, to tea? I can be sure of being home in time on a Saturday.’

Thomas meditated. ‘No, not this Saturday. I tell you what. May we come Sunday week? And I’ll tell Mrs. Arnison we mean to carry you off to my father’s. Will that be all right, do you think?’

‘I’m sure it will. Thanks, awfully.’

‘No, thank you for seeing me to my tram. Here it is! Isn’t it lucky, not having had to wait for one? Good-night, John.’

Chapter VI

1

Thomas and Mrs. Arnison made friends, even if on one side lingered a nervous fear of what these secularists might bring of harm to those their attractiveness influenced. ‘I think your mother’s a dear,’ Thomas told John afterwards. ‘And I think she’s very wise, too.’

She descended into almost guile perhaps—or was it merely kindness and a willingness to disarm an older woman’s uncertainty—when she said, ‘I’d like to listen to your people some time, John, and give our own meeting a miss.’

The older woman’s face brightened through its tiredness. The Christian speakers were dull, she knew that. But their message was not dull. It was quick with life; once heard by receptive ears, it could not fail to do its work. There was enough in the world’s arrangement, Madge Arnison knew this also, to darken and lead astray spirits that should be serving God—that would be serving Him, if this fierce sorrow did not lead them to seek comfort where no true comfort can be found! There would be something said in the service which no speaker could maul or weaken. It might be that John would be the means of bringing his friends to the truth.

On the way to her father’s Hugh joined them, and Thomas warned John, ‘There’s another guest, Mr. Hezekiah Roberts, who owns The Bottelstowe Gazette. He lives and dreams, as my father does, to bring in William Morris Socialism.’

‘The point is,’ said Hugh, ‘Thomas will never forgive you if you laugh at him.’

‘Why should I laugh at him?’

‘Ah! Well, I give you notice in advance that he looks like one of Elisha’s bears who has joined the prophet and turned prophet himself. He’s a first-rate chap. But he cramps discussion. I must seize you in the street some time again, and drag you into my office for a good fuggy yarn! We shan’t get it to-night.’

2

Mr. Roberts explained that up to the last moment he had wondered if he would be able to come. ‘I suffer from an affectation of the throat, young man,’ he told John. ‘The fog catches it, and makes it worse. Do you smoke?’ he asked severely.

‘No,’ said John.

‘I’m glad to hear that. If you ever get an affectation of the throat, cigarettes—or any sort of tobacco—will make it worse.’

He spoke with a gravity John had never heard or seen equalled; stooping slightly forward, as though he thrust truth at you or under your eyes, where you were bound to notice it. ‘Latimer here,’ he added, ‘smokes too much. I tell him so.’

‘You do, Mr. Roberts, you do,’ said Hugh cheerfully.

Mr. Roberts consented to be mollified. ‘But there! I won’t dilute upon the subject now,’ he said. ‘Is Mr. Arnison a Socialist? ‘

‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘He’s a Christian.’

This was said exactly so, because Mr. Roberts also was a Christian, as zealous in religion as in politics. As he hoped and intended, Hugh drew his employer—whose manner towards him was as towards a forward child of considerable promise.

‘There you go again!’ Mr. Roberts said rebukingly. ‘Always tilting at dead horses! And if the early disciples weren’t Socialists, then what were they? Answer me that, Latimer! Answer me that, if you can! It says they had all things in common. And wasn’t that exactly why Ananias and Sapphira were killed by Peter, because they tried to keep back some of their wealth, and their conduct was seen to be equivocable?’

‘Of course it was,’ agreed Thomas. ‘You are quite right, Mr. Roberts. The early Christians were Socialists. And Hugh knows it.’

‘Well,’ said Hugh, ‘if they were—and I’m not denying it—it only shows how wrong present-day Christians are. You know, Arnison, we ought never to have separate meetings. Your crowd ought to be always with ours. But your fellows have let everything that matters go! While they cry aloud, like the priests of Baal, for their God to come and set things right! No, they’re not as good as the priests of Baal! For they wanted Baal to come at once, whereas we tell our God it’ll be all right if He comes’ (and his tones remembered cadences heard in childhood) ‘in Thine own good time, O Lord! Well, it won’t be all right! For His good time has taken millenniums too long in coming!’

‘Well,’ said John gravely, ‘religion and social reform are separate things. Of course I agree that they should go together!’

He brought down on himself the rebuke of Mr. Roberts. ‘They are not separate things, Mr. Arnison. For Our Lord Himself says He came to preach the Gospel to the poor.’

‘John Wesley did that, at any rate,’ Thomas remarked.

Hugh admitted it. ‘Yes, he did. Whenever he visited Oxford, he didn’t look up his old pals at high table! No! he went to the poor devils in Oxford jail, and told them that if they repented they would find that God wasn’t as bad as man, who was sending them to be dangled before a drunken cheering mob for pinching a piece of linen perhaps!’ Hugh strode to and fro, as was his manner when excited. ‘And for things like that I can forgive him and his Methodists more sins than they ever committed! Only why didn’t he go further, that John Wesley of yours? Why did he lay on all his followers that ghastly heavy dead hand of his, right down to our own day? Forbidding them ever to meddle in what he called the affairs of this world! You see, John, I know my Wesley! If I hadn’t cared about the love of God I would never have left what you people call the love of God! If there is a God, He must hate religion worse than He hates anything else!’

Mr. Heaton interposed. ‘You’re not altogether just, Hugh. If Wesley had gone about stirring up social discontent, it would only have meant misery on a huge scale for the people he stirred up. The Government would have put them down——’

‘Yes,’ said Thomas. ‘Our eighteenth-century rulers weren’t a lot of fools such as they had in France! You wouldn’t have caught them giving any Robespierre or any Napoleon a chance to push his head up! Go into those foul throats that open into the earth in parts of London—by Adelphi, say—and remember that men and women once lived there, in cold and dampness and dirt, creeping out only to cut purses or to beg! What else could Wesley and his Methodists have done but tell them that this world wasn’t the end or the whole, but that there was another if they would trust God?’

‘Thomas is right,’ said Mr. Heaton. ‘How could you do anything that would not have deepened their misery—except what Wesley did do?’

This seemed to give Hugh pause. ‘I hadn’t quite thought of it that way,’ he admitted at last.

‘There you make your mistake,’ Mr. Roberts pointed out rebukingly. ‘Always rushing ahead, with the cart before the horse! You should look all round a subject before you dive headlong into it!’

But Hugh recovered race and pace. ‘All the same, there’s nothing you can say in defence of the Methodists of to-day! who slavishly accept the position which their Founder ordered them to accept over a century ago! You get hold of people who have fire and passion, and you damp it down with that parrot-chant of We have nothing to do but to save souls, We have nothing to do but to save souls! God! how angry I get with God, when I think that He has raised up men and women merely to tell them to go about preaching that!’

‘I don’t believe God ever did do that,’ said Mr. Heaton quietly. ‘Although, since I’m an agnostic, the problem doesn’t arise for me,’ he added, with a half-smile at his own inconsistency.

‘You have to admit it, John old boy!’ said Hugh passionately. ‘The Churches, who ought to be helping us, have been a pest all along. Where did they get this notion of theirs that they have to be neutral? Christ wasn’t neutral!’

John wondered, and asked, ‘What about Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s?’

‘If that isn’t the most mischievous remark in the whole New Testament! the one remark—that, and St. Paul’s remark about everyone being subject to the powers that be—that has been twisted and misapplied and used as a whip for the poor all these centuries! Yes, I know your “Christian statesmen” are always lugging it out, whenever some Christian feels things can’t be let go on any longer! Why don’t they preach on the Parable of Dives and Lazarus? I repeat, Jesus Christ was not neutral! Nor, for that matter, was John Wesley! Only, he ordered his followers to be neutral, to the end of time! And the slaves have obeyed him!’

‘I wonder if he did,’ said Thomas.

‘Certainly he did! I know my Methodism. I’ve been a Methodist. I had a father who was the worst Methodist of all, always saying how discontented and wicked the poor were, and saying with an air of immense authority that he knew, for he’d been one of them! All through last century the Methodists sacked and expelled any who showed the least tendency to Radicalism. And they cold-shoulder them now—as John is going to find to his cost!’

John’s unhappiness had not been lost on his host or on Thomas. In a pause of his denunciations Hugh met John’s eyes and became remorseful. He held out his hand. ‘Forgive me, John! it was a shame to bring you here and then to start ranting like this! Only, you see, we’ve reckoned you as one of us ever since we met you! I feel I’m doing what Barnabas was told to do to Saul of Tarsus, I’m showing you what things you must suffer for Socialism’s sake! We’ve got to set the age right, and quickly! and we can’t do it without the Methodists, because it’s the Methodists who have the fire that we need! The truth is, having been a Methodist myself I know, and I grudge the Methodists to Methodism, for we need them for something better and bigger!’

Thomas stopped him. ‘You repent, Hugh, and then, a minute later, you’re back in your sins again! Don’t encourage him, John! It won’t take two pins to set him off abusing Christians as hotly as ever! John has had his Sunday services; and Hugh has now got in his! I place a veto on religious discussion for the rest of the evening.’

So the evening passed into calmer waters, of gossiping friendliness. Mr. Heaton, under encouragement (and where affection was so deeply concerned it did not need much encouragement), told stories of William Morris. Hugh and his employer discussed plans for The Bottelstowe Gazette. Thomas and John talked about books. And everyone talked about all of these themes.

3

Yet when John made his way home under a starlit heaven, remote and silent, he felt frightened at vision of the wilderness that was opening before him. Inside the Church you were at home: close to the hearth-fires of God, the central fire that warms the universe and all existence: close to a company of men and women whose hearts have been set aflame. Outside?

In the vast horizonless deserts of secularism, you were doomed to walk onward and onward until you fell into nothingness. You were an animal whose eyes were slowly glazing—whose limbs were slowly stiffening for eternal sleep.

In this new fear and loneliness that was closing in, why did he not accept with both hands the friendliness offered him? He did not, because he was a fool. Of course. That must always be conceded as part-reason for whatever we do. I fling it to you freely and contemptuously, and you can have it.

Yet look at something else.

To us the Choice of Hercules is a pretty-pretty fable. But that decisive division was once reality! Life was a dichotomy, and the severance involved eternal fate. It was the gulf between heaven and hell. This conviction gave life a solemn and majestic power—gave religion, too, its tremendous cohesion and drive, even though its philosophy of earthly life put them too often on to trivial affairs that could make no manner of difference to anything that mattered—as if Thor were to bring down his hammer on some maggot-scooped nut.

John’s heart was rebellious against the way life had been arranged. But it had been so arranged, and you could not evade the fact. The way is the way, and there is an end. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. It is better to go through life one-eyed—or altogether blind—than to run the risk of being cast into the eternal burning.

Always before him hung the fear, ‘lest, having Him, I must have nought besides’; lest poetry and the life of imagination, which brought him the warmth and glow which he could not get from religion, were the ‘sacrifice’ which God was demanding of him. He must give up what fed his mind and being, before God would consent to acknowledge him and to save him.

John therefore for a while avoided places where Hugh and Thomas might meet him. He must fight this out alone. They understood, and were too considerate to seek him out. Hugh might have done so, perhaps, but Thomas laid a restraining hand on him. And even Hugh understood, remembering that there had been a time when he himself, far more naturally a rebel than John, had hesitated to join this new-fangled Socialism. There had even been a time when he had tried to obey his father, whom he disliked and despised; and John could not for a moment forget his mother, who was so patient and quiet, often so understanding and tolerant, yet so fenced about with dread of the world outside her denominational pale.

4

A special reason also reinforced his avoidance of what so strongly attracted him. His own former friends at Grammand were, some of them, remembering John Arnison again.

They were beginning to take on that immense and frightening seriousness which Nonconformity imposes as a duty. While he had been feeding his spirit wastefully, wildly, casually, foolishly—without advice or oversight—they had been passing from strength to strength. They were now mature and settled folk; this one and that, (far too many) were headed definitely for the ministry, some taking a degree by the way. All intensely, desperately, in earnest, as youth can afford to be.

Thornhill began to write to John again, regularly and not at wide intervals. He had tried repeatedly, and failed, to win a scholarship at one of the two older universities. His failure was not so much from want of ability as from unhealthy excess of honesty. Once a daft question on an historical problem—phrased so inexpertly as to betray the examiner’s narrow and bitter little mind—had roused him to an ecstasy of wrath, and he had wasted forty minutes explaining that the question should never have been set! At other times he marred the display of knowledge that was considerable by intrusions which revealed that he would never become a scholar, he was too much interested in too many things. Worst of all, he was apt to bring in his thoughts on deep subjects, which were necessarily the thoughts of a boy still in his teens and not the thoughts that had been matured by decades of tossing about other younger people’s thoughts, and by dialectic in class and common room. He failed, therefore, to commend himself to those whose commendation he sought, and at the end of the summer term of 1908 he left school burdened with a lowness of spirits, a breaking of faith in himself, that made him wretched. He had time again for John, whom in two busy years of ruling the junior Grammandians and witching his little world with noble batsmanship and footballship he had almost forgotten.

They were both at the time of life when letter-writing has its natural abundance, and between them a perfect spate of correspondence burst out. With immense and intricate detail they laid bare thoughts and sorrows. Thornhill was a good influence for John, for with his loyalty to Grammand and Methodism went an individuality equally sturdy, which never wavered from its decision not to be dragooned into the ministry, for which he knew he was unfitted. Nor was he going to be straitlaced into that small selection out of life’s pleasures and possibilities which Methodism recommended,

Chapter VII

1

It was a good thing that the family to whom John came home, evening by evening, were so robustly normal and soundly philistine. No doubt the immortal soul and the expanding mind are important. But so is a tin of newts or a clutch of young voles.

Then there was the Coming of Nimrod.

In March, 1908, the Rev. Matthew Brocklebank, D.D., the authority on foreign missions, went on a tour of the world. His wife accompanied him. They had no children. But they had what filled the place of children not inadequately, a vast amorphous neuter cat, whom his mistress, with a conviction that he was possessed of great prowess, had named Nimrod. John’s father and Matthew Brocklebank had been college friends, and colleagues in South India. Would Mrs. Arnison take charge of Nimrod during the year of absence? Nimrod was an exceptionally good cat, kind and friendly. Nimrod was accepted.

As a matter of fact, Nimrod was a menace and impostor. Not an impostor through and through, of course; very few impostors are that. He himself believed profoundly in the prowess that had won him his name. He never seemed to realise that his bulk was a handicap; he believed that he could hide behind a blade of grass, and that the twitchings of his tail, disparting the herbage right and left with swift fierce strokes, were equally invisible.

As for his bulk, that had come to him partly by nature, partly by man’s thoughtful unkindness, but chiefly by slow accretion and long assiduous earnest action. Mrs. Brocklebank put it neatly enough: ‘Nimmy always likes to help in the kitchen.’ A strenuous life, but a rewarding one!

It had been Nimrod’s. He had always helped in the kitchen. He believed, too, that God helps those who help themselves; and he had never missed a chance of helping himself.

His new home was not ‘country,’ to be sure. But it was on the edges of ever-widening suburbia, whose inhabitants clung to the notion that country pursuits were still possible. Several of the Arnisons’ neighbours—at least, people who lived within what Wordsworth has styled ‘an easy walk,’ easy even for a cat as bulky as Nimrod—kept chickens. Now Nimrod, though he could catch nothing else, found he could catch chickens.

This might have been the end of him, if he had not belonged to so devout a master and mistress. But what are you to do with a cat that catches chickens and also belongs to a Missionary Secretary who is making a tour of world stations, and whose mind must be left at rest by the certainty that on his return he will find a well-beloved cat awaiting him, sound (well, not quite sound: Nimrod had never been that: but as sound as he formerly was) in wind and limb? You must find out the chickens’ owners and pay for those chickens. ‘Nimrod is becoming a very dear cat,’ said Trixie.

Not all his depredations could be paid for. When he came through the kitchen window exhibiting a string of uncooked sausages that he had caught, John refused to find out their owner. ‘I can’t imagine where he learnt such tricks,’ Mrs. Arnison sighed. ‘After having lived with such good people, too!’

Fortunately, Nimrod settled down, and worked mainly, and then almost exclusively, the poultry run of a couple with one child, a little girl who was consumptive.

Mrs. Arnison discovered who they were, and went round to see them, carrying the half-crown that was the standard price of Nimrod’s meals when provided by his own activity (if that is the right word for stalking a chicken successfully). She was not looking forward to the interview; she had had some stormy ones.

This one was an unexpected sailing into calm weather, even into Sabaean airs and slow soft refreshing ones. The owners of the chicken knew all about it, apparently. ‘Is it the large cat——’ the woman began.

‘Yes, yes.’

It was certainly that. Nimrod had the Twelve Pound Look all right; as a matter of fact (Harold and Peter often weighed him, with pride on their part and protests on his) he was sixteen pounds.

‘The large cat,’ she continued, ‘with the pretty white markings on his front?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid it’s our cat. That is, a cat which we are keeping for some friends.’

‘Then’ (she smiled radiantly) ‘my husband and I would not dream of taking anything. Indeed, it is our own fault that he takes our chickens. Our little girl’ (the light in her face went out, and was succeeded by a haunting fearfulness) ‘gets so much happiness from having him. He comes into the house sometimes, and she feeds him—he has his own saucer here—and strokes him and plays with him. It’s our fault, for encouraging him. And my husband says he is not to be hurt because he gives our child so much pleasure.’

‘But——’ Mrs. Arnison began.

The woman smiled, and at this moment her husband joined her and confirmed her story. ‘If you knew,’ he said kindly, ‘how much difference your cat has made to a sick child who often cannot go out, cannot even get up, you would know that a few chickens are nothing!’

So Nimrod was established as a paid toiler, a cat who visited the sick. When the little girl died, a few months later, for her sake (and this is a strange thing, but it happens to be true) he was continued in his post, and became a sort of pensioner, rewarded in kind. ‘We can never forget how good he was to Mary, all through her last illness. No, we shall try to look after our chickens, of course, but if he gets one occasionally, why, he’s welcome to it.’

I have called him an impostor. But has anyone the right to call a cat of such high moral calibre an impostor?

He was a great joy to the Arnison children, who early discovered that he was ‘reversible’—‘completely reversible!’ He was. You could toss him upside-down, or any way you liked. He would swear sometimes—he was a voluble and tremendous swearer, another mystery against the background of his pious training—but he was far too fat and lazy to try to do anything about it. Peter and Harold, who both adored cats and found in them an endless source of amusement and pleasure, got into the habit of testing all cats they met henceforward, to see if they were reversible. Not all cats were.

Nimrod was a sacred trust, Mrs. Arnison was sure of that. So was Nimrod himself.

He had occasional differences with Harold—notably when he somehow managed to yank open the door of the cage in which Harold kept field mice, and Harold had to get a fresh pair and to begin their training over again. But he was too much of a delight to be dismissed! He nourished one’s sense of absurdity as only a cat can, and especially a huge cat, of the good British tabby kind; his forays and depredations kept the household astir with laughter and wry amusement. His whiskered face, his bulk, his habits were all too grotesque to be true. And his name was Nimrod; and he stole chickens.

2

Another touch of change and variety entered life when, in September, 1908, Peter went to Grammand School.

Immediately the interest which his elder brothers and sister felt in him particularly was intensified. Peter had been a baby when their father died, and it was not until long afterwards that the others realised how much his helplessness, and the frailty which their huddled harried existence almost forced on this youngest one of all, had made their love cling to him, as to a centre. He was so small and tiny, he was ill so often and so heart-breakingly patient when he was ill, that any one of them resented it fiercely when he suffered. John acquiesced in his going to Grammand, for he had persuaded himself that it was a fine school, and of course Peter would have an infinitely easier time than he himself had had. Boys who had known John were now prefects and for his sake they would be kind to his younger brother. He would enter into the heritage of what John had sown before him.

But life takes a sadistic glee in driving home, not once but repeatedly, how utterly insignificant we and our affairs are, outside ourselves. Inside ourselves we are a whole world, with sun and galaxies. To others’ eyes we are only a moving shape, an exterior no doubt hiding feelings, thoughts, some manner of human spirit, but in itself rarely arresting, rarely noble or beautiful. That doctor who looks at you with the profound pity of his tribe (whose badge is compassion), telling you that now his science can do nothing to save you—he knows that your world has suddenly gone blank, but he cannot pause on the knowledge. He has other patients waiting, whose own worlds are also to them all-important. We are moths in a shadow-life, and matter to nobody but ourselves.

In the years since he had left, John’s old companions had entered into a vigour of being so far above the submerged existence they had shared with him, that the latter was shaken deep into oblivion’s abyss. If remembered at all, it was remembered with the patronising pity of triumphant adolescence, recalling with a smile how young and naive and unsophisticated it was once—long ago! His old friends had some of them brothers of their own, in whom they were far more interested than in anyone else’s brothers. Two or three of them heard rumours, or noticed in the school list, that there was a new boy called Arnison, and one or two hunted Peter out, and asked him if he were John’s brother, and how John was doing. Peter said timidly that John was doing very well. They expressed their pleasure, and asked to be remembered to him. Greatness sauntered off superbly, leaving one small boy awed and abased.

It was humiliating for John to learn that the Arnisonian tradition, as set by him, was not considered a high one. Raeburn and Walmsley, who had known him best, were in regions above those where Peter studied. Peter reported that when he had been caught looking up from his book to the clock he had been dropped on with double ferocity because of his name. ‘You are as idle as your brother, sir! And he was the idlest boy that ever came to Grammand! He was always wasting his time idling over anything but what he was told to do, and he’ll never come to the least good!’ ‘Your brother was no use,’ another master (somewhat unnecessarily, John thought) assured him. The Reverend Henley Haslam took an early opportunity of thrashing Peter—so far as John could ascertain (and he was not an unjust person), for no special reason except that their paths happened to coincide when the Head was at a loose end and in a thundering rage. Also, Peter’s name reminded him of his resentment when John left.

There are few things harder to endure than to have to let those we love pass where we cannot protect them. John suffered more over injustice to Peter than over injustice to himself. But there was nothing he could do, except from his own savings to see that the allowance which was all that his mother could spare was made enough to save the child from superfluous humiliation. He knew well what that could be, and that a few shillings can make the difference between peace and hell.

Chapter VIII

1

Outside was the break-up of that Edwardian epoch which, historians already agree, saw the old comfortable splendour at its last and almost highest brightness. The rolling carriages, the pomp of public functions, the battle of names that passed for politics, were to become a dream, faster than any phase of existence has become one before them. Those of us who were adult then and are alive now have been two different personalities. The Recording Angel at the end will have to resort to sharp practice to make our latter incarnation dovetail in with the earlier one. We are not the same animal as the species to which Socrates and Milton and Gladstone belonged. Thinking has been made afresh, by a revolution compared with which the Renaissance and Reformation were trivial turnovers.

In John was adolescence, and a poet’s imaginative mind—perplexed and perplexing, a room with gigantic elvish shadows flung from some inner fire of torment that was curtained with darkness. Stirring with a manifold restlessness, the Age drew his mind towards a crisis.

The feeling of time and the chance it gave going by for ever, of the summer ended without his salvation, of eternity rushing on to men’s view—all this, induced by the decided stand for righteousness which his old friends had taken, aroused a yeasty ferment in his spirit. At all costs, and by whatever means, he must come to a settlement with God.

The ferment within him was but his individual share of the ferment of his world. The most popular and influential preacher of the age had launched his New Theology. Instantly sprang up a war of dialectic and passion such as British Christendom had not known for half a century and more. The Pope of British Nonconformity denounced Mr. R. J. Campbell, and took the somewhat surprising line of attack that the latter was not a qualified religious adviser, because he had never undergone a theological training. Dr. Robertson Nicoll committed a further error (his intelligence department for once having been caught slumbering) in challenging the imposing list of trained theologians printed as in sympathy with the pastor of the City Temple. In especial, he was sure that Dr. Warschauer had been wrongly included. He made a personal appeal to him to denounce the heresiarch, and to repudiate the monstrous charge that he was supporting him.

Dr. Warschauer unkindly selected a popular halfpenny daily for his reply, which was a masterpiece of tartness. If a theological training was so important, why had Dr. Nicoll formerly, and until very recently, and over a long while, employed the man he was now attacking, in the pages of his all-but-canonical paper, The British Weekly, as special adviser to those experiencing theological difficulties? He went on to question this doctrine, that a theological college training was essential before a man might speak for God. There was at that very time ‘a highly popular and ultra-orthodox’ London preacher, ‘who has never darkened the doors of any sort of college, and every day gives ample demonstration of the fact.’ A shrewd thrust, for this preacher’s notorious foible was pretence to a scholarship which was not really among his disabilities. He loved to talk of the ‘skandalon’ of the Cross. Jordan was apt to become ‘Hayarden,’ and Canaan ‘Kenaghran.’ For a whole discourse, preached in the previous week, Zeus had been the dissyllabic ‘Zee-us.’

The wars of Christians are the wars of men, and, like all wars, have to be simplified to draw in the commonalty. This one became largely concentrated on one belief, that in the Virgin Birth. If you scoffed at it, you had science on your side. Darwin, Huxley, all the great biologists were with you; they watched from their graves. At one bound you had put yourself abreast of the latest thought, while remaining (you loudly claimed) essentially Christian.

John Wilkes in later years justified himself to his outraged sovereign as ‘myself having never been a Wilkesite, Your Majesty.’ Dr. R. J. Campbell, Canon of Chichester Cathedral, looking back on the storm of which he was the spectacular and spectral central figure, probably feels that he himself was never a Campbellite. It must all seem strangely hazy and far away, the confusions and battle-cries of that vanished time—to the Canon of Chichester!

In that dim fane he is not sure
Who lost or won at Azincour.

2

John had never realised how whole-texturedly orthodox he had remained. He realised it now, in the horror and wrath which the reported blasphemies of the New Theology aroused in him.

They cast a stain over the poetry of religion also. All this shouted scorn of the Virgin Birth seemed to touch something delicately and peculiarly lovely in the Christian story. In the last week of 1908, listening to carols, he felt angry and wretched at the sense of loss coming on the world. If (as the scorners alleged) the Christmas story was an assortment of pagan legend, then it was pagan legend that had become baptized, and as if in repentance was striving desperately to intertwine itself with the new loveliness that was conquering the world. The holly and the ivy, the running of the deer, the ships gliding in under a sky of conscious watching mystery, the innocence of far-spreading snowfields, the nymphs with flower-inwoven tresses, the Wise Men offering their gold and myrrh and frankincense—has the expectation of the nations and of the veritable Earth herself, of the whole Creation groaning for the coming of the Sons of God, ever so sweetly and justifiably thrust itself into man’s holiest places? The cadences with which the nights were blessed had so gathered to themselves our Northern associations of frost, that you could not even imagine them as sung beneath a June sky, amid fragrances of night stock and white warm jessamine. ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful!’ ‘Christians, Awake!’ ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing!’—if they passed out of life, or became merely an interesting folklore survival, man’s vision of the universe (he felt) would suffer a woeful blotting-out of stars.

What would that matter? cried the iconoclasts. There would still be the Sermon on the Mount.

Yes. There would still be the Sermon on the Mount.

But how unconvincing that Sermon is! Very very beautiful, and in its gentle inexperienced way so interesting, drawing out approval from minds that never think on this agonising world of ours, and from minds that come to Christianity from the outside and never get within glimpsing-distance of its centre. To Tolstoy, to Mahatma Gandhi, to good-hearted pagans everywhere, very wonderful and so true—almost as good as the Gita! But to souls desperate almost to loss of reason, because of sin and helplessness, how sometimes almost a mockery! ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this sinful body of death?’ Certainly not the ripple of Galilaean waters and the rustle of Galilaean oleanders.

3

In the tumult of his mind, John did a desperate thing. He wrote to a renowned theologian, and begged for an interview. He picked out this guide because he himself had once been in grievous trouble with the fathers of Methodism. John had yet to realise how low a standard of heresy the fathers of Methodism once had.

The interview was granted, and took place on a Sunday afternoon in February, 1909.

The celebrated theologian was, as his letter had prepared John to find, very gentle and friendly. But not here was any healing of the young man’s mental pain; hardly even perception that such pain could be. It was all a matter of proof texts, the Scriptures’ infallibility being taken for granted as a ground common to all thinking men.

The theologian asked searchingly, in a tiny jerky voice, that was like a squirrel jumping over broken ground, if John had carefully studied his own works.

John had not.

This shocked and surprised the questioner. ‘Read read my works! All my works. But especially—my great Theology. There are also—other theologies. Some of them are—good. Are—quite good. Yes on the whole, good. There is Newton Clarke’s, for instance. Newton Clarke is good—is very good indeed. I am not belittling Newton Clarke! His Theology is the next best to mine. But it is not so—Scriptural. Not so—Scriptural. Mine has been translated into Japanese. It is selling by thousands in America. It is selling by leaps and bounds. Newton Clarke you may read—with discrimination. My works you need not read with discrimination.’

John tried to get down to what things were tormenting him. Could a God Who had made the world we know be good—as we understand goodness? Could we say——

The theologian interrupted him. ‘Now, brother, we’re sailing over an unploughed field,’ he reminded him. ‘But in the third chapter of my great Theology you will find that I have dived very deep into it, and I have painted a perfectly simple picture of it.’

John’s one desire now was to get away to himself. Unfortunately, he had started the other on a favourite topic, the teleological argument.

‘Everywhere in Nature we can clearly discern,’ he was told, ‘the footprints of a Divine Hand.’

The ghost of a smile showed on the boy’s unhappy face. Something puckish within him visualised the method of Divine progression throughout creation—as if it were the gambits of a super-kangaroo. He thought of a Methodist legend, of a converted rat-catcher who used to shout at revival meetings, ‘Fetch un out, Lord! fetch un out!’ Primitive man’s deification of his totem—the ferret that was the badge of his daily toil!

The smile was misunderstood. ‘It is a great mistake, my young brother—a very great mistake indeed—to assume that the argument from design is out of date to-day. It is—to every thinking mind a very powerful argument. It is because of our insincerity that we now reject these grand old testimonies. It is an insincere age to which we belong.’ (He was off on another favourite theme, and John must endure a few minutes of it at least.) ‘At our public meetings the clapping of hands—no longer comes from our hearts. Our preachers neglect the great traditional Christian themes, and launch out into deep waters on hobby-horses of their own. The arguments which sufficed St. Paul—you must read my great Commentary on his Epistle to the Philippians—which sufficed St. Augustine—and Luther—and John Knox:—and John Wesley which I myself have found all-sufficing—these arguments are now contemned and treated with scorn.’

John thanked him very much, and apologised for taking so much of his time. It was only this New Theology agitation——

The theologian had a word for that also. He interrupted John with a ghostly chuckle. ‘I have a friend—in whose judgment—I place—great—reliance. He went to hear Mr. R. J. Campbell. Would you like to hear—what he said afterwards?’

John would very much like to hear this.

‘Well, this friend of mine said—that Campbell—seemed to be ignorant—of the very elements—of elocution.’

So that was that. Campbell had not had a sound theological training, preferably Scots; and he seemed to be ignorant of the very elements of elocution.

‘Remember,’ said the theologian at parting, ‘ the next step must be taken by your own hands. In fact, the next step is entirely in your own hands. Read my great Theology—and my Commentaries. God will guide you, my friend. Be sure of that. His word is a lamp; and with that lamp He will feed you, if you accept it humbly and faithfully.’

Always this stress on abnegation of the best you had, on suppression of the mind and independent judgment! What sort of a God is this Christian one, Who demands that men cease to think in order to serve Him?

Chapter IX

1

In the spring of 1909 John met the Revivalists.

The Welsh Revival had come to cheer the ranks of orthodox Christianity, dismayed by the newest theology, which yet seemed to revive so many ancient heresies. God had raised up in grim black valleys an unpretentious young man before whose preaching the colliers’ hearts melted. Drink and gambling were going. So was football. Why the giving up of football was a good thing no one seemed to be able to explain. But it clearly was a good thing. God demands sacrifice; this is His eternal custom. Sacrifice is good for us. Is exceedingly good for us. The Welsh colliers got pleasure from football, so football had become a definitely bad thing. God does not like us to become keen on anything. Therefore football must be given up by the colliers.

Hearing of what great things were being done in the Welsh valleys, the fearful saints took heart, and predicted that this blessing would presently sweep into and over godless England, and where would the New Theology be then? In May, 1909, a small band of Evan Roberts’s followers invaded London. John heard of them, and in his famine for God and peace sought out their meetings.

They helped him; but not enough. They were unselfish and humble young men and women, exceedingly poor. Out of their poverty they had learnt a deep pity, without bitterness; and a supreme belief in Divine mercy, Divine justice, Divine loving-kindness. They brought what John’s own class lacked, the comradeship of undisguised and frankly acknowledged lowliness. The girls, especially, were selfless enthusiasts; and wore like a flawless garment gentleness and natural grace.

John followed the Revivalists from place to place, and desperately sought salvation. It never came, though often it nearly came. Once he spoke a few words publicly. ‘You said just the right thing, my dear boy,’ one of the girls, the most winningly spontaneous of them all, told him afterwards. Her charm of manner and tone and physical perfection (all sprung from the Rhondda, that grey and lovely and dreadful region) thrilled him almost as if she had touched him. But he knew that he was not saved. He was the guest who lacked the wedding robes; he ought not to have testified.

These Welsh folk in London were soon a saddened group, longing to get back to where hearts were warm and throbbing.

A handful of other Welsh folk came to their meetings; and another handful of foreigners like John. These congregations they told of what God was doing in Wales, and assured them that Evan Roberts was ‘just a man like yourselves, friends, only far more jolly!’; and assured them also that God would do here the deeds He was doing in Wales. The cries of the Welsh Revival were raised here also; men and women prayed wildly and simultaneously, lost to everything but the agony of seeking God—collapsed and lay moaning, while Bryn Calfaria was sung, and shouts of ‘Diolch Iddo!’ rang out. The Christian simplicities revealed their power, when the worshippers exhorted each other,

‘O Pilgrim bound for the heavenly land,
Never lose sight of Jesus!’

It was healing and uplifting to be alone amid so much passionate thrusting towards God, and to be ignored, and left to find salvation himself, the alone with the alone. But John did not find salvation. And London fairly beat the poor evangelists, who were glad to get back to their native mountains.

2

The enemy was not indifferent to this movement of Christian forces, in so many ways and from so many directions. The New Theology he scorned and openly scoffed at. But to the Welsh Revival he paid the compliment of anger.

When American evangelism took a hand in the assault on England’s sinfulness, the enemy was angered still more, and nearly scored a victory. A leading secularist sent an invading preacher a list of renowned ‘infidels’; writing in the guise of a seeker after truth, he asked the great religious thinker to resolve this doubt for him, as to why men without God had yet lived such good lives. The preacher, supposing (as he afterwards explained) that he was dealing with a genuine seeker, in his reply handled the facts broadly, and pointed out that these renowned infidels had been secretly guilty of many sins and vices, of which they had all been conscious in the last terrible hour before they went to their doom. Thereupon the secularist ran up his pirate-flag, and denounced the preacher for a manifest and outstanding liar.

It would now have been very awkward for the preacher, if in his own defence, when plaintively accusing the secularist of sharp practice, he had not remarked that he had not recognised who his questioner was, having never heard his name. This saved him. In a passion of wrath his adversary wrote a pamphlet, page after page belabouring his antagonist for the crime of not having heard of his greatest contemporary. The evangelist was spitted for daring to have any opinions at all, when self-confessedly an ignoramus of such massive calibre.

The pamphlet was broadcast through the carriages of the underground railway, where John found it and studied it. The Christians escaped their foe for this time, and went on singing The Glory Song.

Meanwhile, in his long-drawn-out misery John found words that comforted him. A Methodist preacher preached on the text, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ It was not a particularly good sermon. That did not matter. It was a message that cut right across the teaching which was driving him steadily towards some kind or other of madhouse. Instead of pitilessly forcing him down to denial of his mind, to an unconditional acceptance of what intellect told him was nonsense or very dubious sense, sandbagging reason with a clamour of ‘Only believe!’, Christ spoke from the gracious sunlit world of the humanists, in accents which Plato and Erasmus and Raeburn would have acknowledged unhesitatingly as Divine. ‘Ye shall know the truth.’ What promise can equal that—except the promise of freedom that fulfils it?

And from Campbell, the troubler of Israel, this preacher, though a Methodist, quoted a saying which to John was comfort ineffable: ‘No man goes to hell backward.’ That put destiny where you could control it! Whatever happened, however charged with punishments the scroll, you had it in your power to be sure that your face was set in the right direction, as you staggered up again!

Chapter X

1

At the heart of England were peace and security. That is the ideal arrangement. Peace in our time, O Lord. Quietness and security within ourselves; and a passionate unpausing effort to do good to every country outside our borders. The two great English-speaking democracies are united by holding the same ideals.

Political meetings were held in abundance. Socialist units overspread the industrial areas. The Clarion Scouts, Sunday by Sunday, cycled afield on their missionary quest. But, as Hugh said disgustedly, ‘There’s no country where Revolution is a remoter peril than it is here. Nothing but a foreign invasion could ever bring about even its beginnings! What does Demos care about even decent Radicalism, for that matter? About Education Bills, Home Rule, Old Age Pensions, Industrial Insurance?’

What did Demos care about these things? Or about the growing menace in heavily armed and still-arming Europe? What does he care now? Exactly what he cared thirty years ago.

But thirty years ago Demos suddenly cared about limericks. He is like a huge unwieldy elephant, whom his keepers cajole and coax and bully. His keepers were cajoling him now, with a bunch of bananas or chunk of lettuces, now in this place, now in that. These bananas and lettuces kept him busy, and he did not fuss about politics. His keepers in the daily press offered him—limericks; and wealth on a ribbon of luck dangling from them.

You sent up sixpence (this was essential) and a coupon to show that you had bought the paper in which you competed. And you finished a limerick whose first four lines were given. The best limerick brought to its composer a sum that took your breath.

Everything could be, and was, belimericked. A touring team of Dominion cricketers, for example. A poet who predicted that

The bounders hit boundaries all day

pulled in £800-odd thereby. He proved a wretched prophet, for the bounders spent most of their time vainly chasing the boundaries of their opponents. But he achieved a larger payment for a single line of verse than Tennyson did by The Revenge.

The tide of limericking swept madly through a million offices, and through John Arnison’s also. Fantom! where was Fantom? He was sitting, harnessed and ready for work, on his own stair, turning his dog-loving brain into verse. Fantom’s attempts at limericks marred innumerable sheets of blotting-paper. You reached for one, and discovered scrawled across it, ‘But she dident half find herself in clover’ or ‘She went in and had a pint of bitter and she found she was half seas over’ or ‘She said why it seems to me as if all my things has been and got undone’ (this would be ‘the young lady of London’—just one, in that enormous London!). You collected Fantom, and gave him the charges; and as he went out he drew your attention to a piece of paper which he slipped into a drawer. ‘If you find you ’ave ’arf a moment and you think of something reely good you might write it down on that paper for me, Mr. Arnison. I very near got ’arf a quid consolation money last time I tried.’

Fantom felt he had a grievance against John. Young Mr. Arnison, who was so educated and so literary, could so easily help a poor working man to something that would enable him to set up a really adequate set of kennels, if he would only give his mind to it!

But John, who was made a prig by his principles, knew that this would be wrong. Apart from the fact that it would be helping Fantom to an unfair advantage, these limericks were ‘gambling,’ and gambling is wicked.

Fantom was not the only limericker. FitzAndrew’s finances, never other than rocky, were now precarious in the extreme; he had been caught riding without a ticket three days after his ticket had expired, and apart from the nuisance of the fine there had been the nuisance of his employers, who had officially drawn his attention to the fact that they disapproved of the publicity which a generous press had spared for an obscure offender (‘Edmund FitzAndrew, who described himself as a bank clerk’). So FitzAndrew spent every waking minute on limericks. ‘Mr. FitzAndrew,’ the Manager’s voice boomed, ‘your mind is not on your work. You are thinkin’ of somethin’ else.’ ‘Mr. FitzAndrew’ (holding before him a wad of blotting-paper), ‘what’s all this rubbish! about some young lady of Chester? This aboose must stop! We shall soon not have a piece of blotting-paper left in the office.’

But FitzAndrew continued to send up his lines and his sixpences; and, more fortunate than the barely literate Fantom, every now and then, just when he was about to flag in despair and might even—for a week or two—have saved his peace of mind and his money, he would win a Consolation Prize which would almost cover his postage and postal orders for the previous three months. This, like the smell of a half-glimpsed carrot to a nearly exhausted donkey, would cheer him onward again.

Meanwhile, the Bank was watching him closely.

In his desperation he cared nothing for this. He argued, they could not sack him, so long as he was not dishonest. And one of these days he was bound to pull in a colossal sum, which would pay off his many petty debts, such as that for lunch in the pub opposite (where they were beginning to get nasty about payment), and he and Brother Ignatius could have a real slap-up blow-out with their friends. He could even—and easily; some of these limericks pulled in enormous sums—pay for publication of a volume of Ignatius’s prose, and then they would both be in the deepest of lush deep clover. That prose, the greatest in the language next to Macaulay’s, needed only to be read to be acclaimed. Publication; that was all it wanted.

John looked on his friend’s occupations pityingly, and with the beginnings of sense. ‘It’s no use,’ he told him. ‘Those competitions aren’t straight. They’re just robbing as many people as possible, and giving an occasional chap back a bit of the money they’ve collected.’

This was denied. ‘They’re straight, right enough. It’s simply that my damned luck is out. Always has been, blast it!’

‘Then, if they’re straight, why is it that this week the winner lived in Bodmin, and last week lived in Edinburgh? Can’t you see that they just distribute the awards over as big a tract of country as possible?’

‘Anyway, I got back a quid as Consolation Prize, three weeks ago. That means I pretty nearly won outright. If the show isn’t straight, how could that have happened?’

So FitzAndrew carried on.

2

Anyone living in that age ought to have sensed its growing desperation—not over high political affairs, for those seemed far out of ordinary human reach, but over the poverty closing down on the common man. Was there ever so startling an example of desperation as the Treasure Hunts were?

An evening paper hit on the idea. Week by week, every Saturday it told its readers that a cylinder containing twenty-five metal disks was hidden in a region named; ‘clues’ were given. The finder of the cylinder would return it and its contents to the journal, and receive at a local music-hall twenty-five golden sovereigns.

John Arnison gave little attention to the Treasure Hunts. The amusements of the working classes were no business of his. It was deplorable that they wasted their scanty leisure and scantier funds on such pastimes. But things like this happened ‘in the world.’ Pretoria Street Methodists had come out of the world. When you have left Sodom, what the Sodom folk do is of merely historical interest.

He was to learn better. One Sunday morning, very early, in his dreams he was conscious of a murmur, as of some restless untidy sea, whose waves broke irregularly and with varying noise. The murmur steadily increased; and on the sea’s surface mermen or tritons seemed to be at matins. They sang with raucous cacophonous voices.

He heard his mother call from her room. ‘John!’

John got up, and went to his door. ‘Yes, Mother?’

‘What’s that? That noise everywhere!’

As they listened, there was a violent ringing of the front-door bell and a bang-bang-banging on the door’s timbers.

‘Mercy on us! Something dreadful has happened!’

John, startled, drew on trousers and coat (‘All right, Mother, I’ll go!’) and went to the door.

A respectable-looking family, father, mother, son and three daughters, all correct and complete with spades and pickaxes, confronted him. ‘Please, sir, may we dig up your garden?’

Dig up the Arnison garden? It was about ten feet square in front, and at the back perhaps four times as large. It contained a lilac and laburnum, and in their seasons a few flowers. But the Arnison budget never ran to employing labour in it; what work was done was done by John or his mother. ‘Dig up our garden?’

‘Yes, sir. Our Liz ’ere says she’s sure the Treasure’s in ’ere somewhere.’

‘It says, Go past the railings what have been newly painted,’ corroborated Our Liz’s mother. ‘And that must be them railings over there! And then you ’ave to turn ’arf right—that’s down ’ere—and the Treasure is ’id under a lilac bush. ’Ave you got a lilac bush, sir—at the back, like?’

‘Ye-es,’ John incautiously admitted.

That settled it; the father of the prospecting party without further ceremony assumed permission, and pushed through to the back. There he found a party already in possession; they had swarmed over the wooden wall without embarrassing the Arnisons by waking them at so unearthly an hour (a wild March morning, too).

John told his mother. She rose; and they drew the blinds, and looked out. On all sides, as far as the eye could see, the landscape looked as I suppose (never having been there) Klondyke must have looked in the first mad fever of the gold-rush. Every scrap of ground was occupied by squatters, delving deep into the earth and tossing it up. John learnt later that the trains all night had been full to suffocation, and the streets jammed with carts and walkers. The lure of that twenty-five pounds had drawn a hundred and fifty thousand people to a tiny corner of Bottelstowe. They could hardly move.

‘Oh, John, you didn’t give them permission to dig up our garden!’

‘I couldn’t help it, Mother, I couldn’t really. They didn’t wait for permission. And those people in the back garden must have gone there without our knowing.’

‘I thought I heard a kind of dreadful noise,’ Mrs. Arnison admitted. ‘Then I thought it must be imagination, or that I was dreaming. But oh, John! to let them dig up our garden on Sunday!’

Bad enough at any time, was John’s comment later in the day, when he viewed the havoc wrought. The lilac and laburnum had been uprooted, smashed, and chucked aside; evidently their presence had annoyed the seekers. The wooden fence was broken at a number of places, and every inch of ground churned up and over.

Certainly it was a deplorable way of spending Sunday. Of spending all of it, moreover; he found out that many of these families, which included babies and very young children, had spent the whole night on the ground. The fact was obvious for some days, during which the sanitary authorities were kept busy.

The day was not a quiet one. As it passed, tempers got out of control. Once there was a rumour that some boys had discovered the cylinder; John saw an ugly rush by ugly-looking men to get it from them. The boys took to their heels. When they were caught, a searching examination revealed that it was all a joke. A joke in poor taste, thought their captors; righteously indignant that they had been taken away from their toils, and precious minutes wasted, they gave the boys a hiding and sent them off howling.

Snatches of song came up, defiling the Sabbath morning. Outside Mrs. Arnison’s window a party chanted, as they took off a space for refreshment, the Window-Cleaner’s Lament:

‘III’vvve—done my best—to please Selina!
(Andante) But what’s the use—of a pair of kilts—if you’re a window-cleaner?’

This was the last good-tempered interlude. As the afternoon came, and then the evening, people to whom the timid householders, making a virtue of necessity, had given unwilling permission—

‘You’ll leave everything as you found it, won’t you? ‘ ‘Oh yes, mum, we’ll be sure to do that!’—wearied of their task, and went back to their homes, leaving behind tins, packets, newspapers, bits of cloth, and debris of every kind. A vast wave of humanity had overswept Bottelstowe. It had retired, leaving scum and spume.

Treasure-hunting presently came to an end, by police action. Municipalities complained; it was too heavy a burden on the rates, this tearing up of boards, railings, roadways.

It was a great age for tearing up. The Suffragettes now! What a time they had with park railings and people’s houses!

Chapter XI

1

A schoolmaster was shot in Barcelona for his political opinions. Barcelona in 1939 is not a place where shootings are unknown, and the reader, reminded of Ferrer’s execution, will respond, ‘Of course! of course! Barcelona? That’s a place (one of the places) where they do shoot people!’

Yes. But this shooting was in 1909.

John met Hugh again, not in Bottelstowe, but on a platform of the Underground, where they were both waiting for an Inner Circle train. Hugh was almost silent, he was so shaken. ‘Fancy putting a man to death for his opinions! in 1909! It takes you all the way back to the dark ages!’

He had never known Hugh so shocked. But then, all the world had been shocked. Germany and Italy were shocked. Well, perhaps not Italy so much, for Ferrer was known to be obnoxious to those who thought religiously. But certainly Germany.

Then, late in this summer, John Davidson, who for months had been writing more and more wildly and obscurely, baffling the few who troubled to read him, titillating a few others with scorn, disappeared and for some weeks was a newspaper sensation. For a matter of weeks, a poet interested England.

The week after his body had been found at the bottom of a disused pit at Mousehole, in Cornwall, John felt strong hands close round him from behind, and turned to be confronted by Hugh, with Thomas beside him. They were again outside the offices of The Bottelstowe Gazette, and John was returning home from the station. This time he was not unwilling to enter Hugh’s office, and Thomas made his mind at peace by assuming that old friendship had been persisting all along. Not that there was any assumption in it; it happened to be true. Hugh and Thomas had been outrageously busy, too busy to notice anything else.

They sat down, and tea was brought in from the back premises, by a girl who appeared to be typist and secretary and general help to Hugh and anyone else who was running the Gazette.

Hugh was quieter than John remembered him. He looked at John, then said, ‘I can’t get another John out of my head. John Davidson! I’ve just done a leader on his death. Fat lot the readers of The Bottelstowe Gazette will care!’

‘Still,’ said Thomas, ‘you don’t do it because people care, but because you care yourself. What do you think about this Davidson affair, John?’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ admitted John. ‘But, like Hugh, I can’t get it out of my head. It seems like something that happened long ago—a poet taking his life because—well, because——’

‘Because the whole age, and everyone who runs it, are absolutely bloody!’ said Hugh. ‘Because there’s no more place for poetry than there is for pity and ordinary decency! Have you seen what William Watson has written to The Times? I’m quoting that bit about Davidson’s “having gone down to a grave as unknown as his who heard the thunders of Sinai”—though it’s no longer true since they found his body at the foot of that disused mineshaft in Cornwall.’

‘I’ve told Dad it’s the only protest he can make,’ said Thomas, ‘but that he ought to stop advertising in the Academy. It’s ages since it called him by his name! It was always “the towsy tyke.” It seems to me something I simply can’t believe, that we should have had a supposed reputable literary paper in our time, that consistently and regularly used the manners of the gutter towards a distinguished poet, simply because it didn’t like his opinions!’

Hugh reached furiously for his pile of discarded papers, and began rummaging in them. ‘Have you seen what one of our literary bosses has the cold-blooded rottenness to say, now that he knows the poor fellow’s dead? You know,’ he said to John, ‘Davidson said, among other things, that his pension wasn’t enough and that he couldn’t make a living?’

John nodded.

‘Well, he argues—-yes, look for yourself, John, or you’ll surely think I’m making it up! He actually argues that he was mistaken. He estimates that the Westminster Gazette, which was printing two or three times a week those long raving blank-verse poems of his, must have—yes, must have—paid him at least so many quid a week; and then he reckons the total up and adds it to his pension, and concludes that it was amply sufficient for a poet who came from his social class. That’s why I swore just now. Sorry, Thomas,’ he added in belated penitence, ‘for letting out that “bloody” before you. But it was, and is, bloody. And the paper that argues like that over a dead poet is beyond the pale!’

‘Anyway,’ said Thomas, ‘he has been called “Mr. Davidson” at last, and not “the towsy tyke.”’

But Hugh had not finished his fury. ‘And he concludes by saying that not having enough money to live on isn’t a reason for a man’s dying, if he’s a decent man.’

He was looking at John. Thomas also fixed her eyes on him, saying nothing. John spoke, and said very slowly, ‘I know, of course, that to take your own life is always wrong——’

‘Why?’ asked Hugh, with a quietness unusual for him. Then, more intensely, ‘Why? Why? Why is it wrong?’

‘Because we were sent here to get something done. At least, I believe that.’

‘Yes. That’s what we used to be told. “There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John.” John Arnison, if you like! Or, “There came a man, sent from God, whose name was Hugh Latimer.” But that’s all gone and done with! There isn’t any mind in the universe anywhere that cares about any one of us, whether we are Hugh Latimer or John Arnison or Signy Heaton. I care—we three all care. But nothing outside us, in all this dead blind swinging lump we call the earth or in the stars and sun and heavens beyond it cares!’

John flushed; and remembered something through all these days hidden and lost. The sense of destiny had faded, with the generous dreams of boyhood. Those heroic thoughts that had had their birth in freedom, long before they came down the ages to him—in the wilderness beside Jordan and on the thyme-scented dry-breathing Galilaean uplands—that had stirred again when he and his fellows sat by Raeburn’s flower-hung windows—had withered completely. He was now only an insignificant hand driving a pen over passbooks and ledgers.

Yet something had entered that smoke-fugged room, and seemed to stand beside him, challengingly. He looked past Hugh, startled—as a man must be when his own dead self stares out of the darkness of memory, like a ghost suddenly confronting you in the loneliness of your own room at midnight.

Not yet was he willing to admit, even to himself, his utter unimportance. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I do still believe that each one of us was meant to do something which no one else could do.’

‘He’s right, Hugh,’ said Thomas. ‘And you know yourself that you couldn’t carry on if you didn’t in your heart of hearts believe that every single one of these poor chaps who now has to depend on others’ goodwill for a bare living really matters—in the sight of something or other, though we don’t know what. And every now and then you come across a man or woman who looks conscious of having a destiny.’

‘As Keats did,’ broke in John eagerly. ‘And as you can see Davidson did. I don’t pretend to have liked, or have clearly understood all those long poems he was printing all the time in the Westminster—they seemed to me, to be quite frank, often blasphemous. But they were written by a man who wasn’t writing for money, but believed he had to write poetry, and to write those particular poems.’

‘Yet he took his own life because he couldn’t make enough money by them!’ said Hugh. ‘And they say that wasn’t a reason that any sane man would have regarded as a reason.’

‘I think they know nothing about it,’ cried John eagerly. ‘I know, of course, as I said before, that suicide is wrong. But if a man if to commit suicide, I can’t imagine any better reason than that he couldn’t make a living. If it was absolutely certain that he couldn’t!’

‘It’s just what I thought,’ cried Thomas, ‘when I read that shabby argument.’

Hugh also acquiesced. ‘ I believe you’re right,’ he said quietly, and gathered up his papers and put them away for the day.

Then he said, ‘Look here, John, I don’t pretend to understand poetry as you and Thomas do. I’m pretty solid—squalid—prose. Yet even I can see that Davidson is—well, not on the real smooth lawny slopes of Parnassus.’

‘He wrote from brain to mouth, as it were,’ Thomas agreed.

‘Precisely. He had to write, and he had to keep on writing. And so anything he saw—that struck him—had to jump, or be jumped by him, straight into verse, without much chance to collect a bit of glamour by being steeped in the mind. But that’s just what seems to me to give him value. I mean value for us, not value for the lucky young men and maidens who will be sitting at their ease in a perfected world, a century after us and when the grass is growing through our brains. They’ll turn idly over gorgeously bound and printed anthologies, and will sniff at poor Davidson, as they will sniff at all of us and all our age! For them it’ll be like looking down from a terrace on to sheer mud and slime! But he has got contemporary value. He shows us what life was like, and is like, for a man with imagination and sensitiveness, who’s got to live not the kind of loafing life that poets in the past always seem somehow or other to have managed to get! but a life stuck down, jammed down, right in ugliness!’

‘You can see that,’ John cried in agreement, ‘whenever he writes about the country! About Epping Forest. Or about Cornwall. He seems astonished to find that you actually get wild roses in the hedge, and honeysuckle. It makes his country verse unlike any other poet’s, and gives it freshness. Yet it seems to me a sort of surface freshness, a kind of inventory sometimes—like a chap going round a house that’s all strange to him!’

‘Doesn’t it! ‘ said Thomas. ‘Like an intelligent savage walking round and round inside an English house.’

‘Yes,’ said Hugh. ‘But that isn’t his chief value—for me. It’s this, that Davidson is the first poet who has seen from the inside what life is like for the poor devils who are not exactly and actually what we call the working classes, and who would be terribly pained if you called them the working classes, yet are so near to those classes, in poverty and uncertainty and eternal continuous sheer fright of unemployment and starvation, that for my part I, Hugh Latimer, can’t see the difference. Well, Davidson sees things from the inside, and he gets them expressed, even when they’re things that current taste thinks you have no right even to think in your own mind, let alone express! I’ll show you what I mean!’

And, with a shaking of his voice that John had never heard, Hugh read:

‘“And so,” he said, “though I am faint and old,
High in my garret cold—
While on the pane Death’s knuckles rattle stark,
And hungry pangs keep sleep off—in the dark,
I think how brides and bridegrooms, many a pair,
With human sanction, or all unavouched,
Together softly couched,
Wonder and throb in rapture; how the care
Of ways and means, the thought of whitening hair,

Of trenchant wrinkles fade when night has set,
And many a long-wed man and woman find
The deepest peace of mind,
Sweet and mysterious to each other yet,
I think that I am still in Nature’s debt.

Scorned, disappointed, starving, bankrupt, old”—

‘Oh yes, I know you can say it’s journalism. You could be very scathing and funny about it,’ Hugh said, looking up. ‘But the point is, here is an English poet at last getting down to brass tacks! and all that your comfortable literary critics can do is to call him “a towsy tyke” and hound him to suicide! God, how I sometimes hate and loathe your fine literary set! What utter swabs they are, and keep on making themselves! But I’m going to give you a bit more, John. And I don’t care what anyone says, the man who chucked himself down that pit in Cornwall did know that the old self-deludings had broken down and that men at last were taking honest stock of this grim deadly world in which they were living. He remembers all about the appalling cruelty of the past, in every land, and the darkness and harshness and sheer terror of this Christian England—something which no hymn-singing can touch!—and he comes down to the fellows who at last—at last, John!

“begin to test
The purpose of their state, to strike for rest

And time to feel alive in: all the blight
Of pain, age, madness, ravished innocence,
Despair and impotence,
The lofty anguish that affronts the light
And seems to fill the past with utter night,

Is but Love’s needful shadow: though the poles,
The spangled zodiac, and the stars that beat
In heaven’s high Watling Street
Their myriad rounds; though every orb that rolls,
Lighting or lit, were filled with tortured souls,

If one man and one woman, heart and brain
Entranced above all fear, above all doubt,
Might wring their essence out,
The groaning of a universe in pain
Were as an undersong in Love’s refrain. . . .

I sometimes almost feel that God may be.”’

If the verses had been read in any circle which John frequented, he knew how the atmosphere would have gone blackly arctic. John Halifax Gentleman would have tactfully (but swiftly and decisively) indicated that no gentleman ever admitted that at the core of this cheery romantic world lies hidden a poetry picked out of misery and failure, as the poetry of Davidson’s clerk was; and picked out, moreover, from the elemental bed-rock of life and its biological necessities.

Yet the shock did not go as deep as it went a little later, when John realised that this poetry was every bit as pagan as it seemed, as implacably against the show of things which organised Christianity has built up and has had the effrontery to call life. His artistic sense stumbled momentarily at a heavy word here and there, and the cliché stiffness that is so constantly embedded in the matrix of this poet’s verse. Then he found himself caring nothing for this; and found himself also suddenly looking into the bleak unlovely misery of his age. Pan and the Nymphs and Graces became shoddy and wanly irritating, even the Midsummer-Night’s Dream entered the category of things that must fade out from man’s world of imagination and beauty. Their time had gone, and only the incorrigibly immature or shamelessly self-indulgent could care about them again—until mankind had found a way of justice at last, after the sorrow of the ages.

Hugh took up The Testament of John Davidson, and read:

‘My feet are heavy now, but on I go,
My head erect beneath the tragic years.
The way is steep, but I would have it so;
And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears,
Though none can see me weep: alone I climb
The rugged path that leads me out of time. . . .

Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair
That went before me still and made the pace.
The earth is full of graves, and mine was there
Before my life began, my resting-place;
And I shall find it out and with the dead
Lie down for ever, all my sayings said. . . .

‘This man, with all his artistic faults, will be one of those poets who seem big to mankind, because they were voices through whom their time spoke.’ It was Hugh summing up.

2

And so Davidson, in misery and excitement and savage loneliness, passed from the sight of his fellows. Thirty years have since rolled away, and we have no need to think of him, there can be no excuse for mentioning him again after this. Yet he has an historical place; and I am trying to remember how a generation lived, which is further from us, and more incomprehensible, than the generations of Queen Victoria’s reign are.

By every test, the world of 1909 was a poor one. It was lamentably short of dictators, of any kind whatsoever. Its cricketers were merely such men as Lockwood, Brockwell, Palairet, Fry, Knox, Braund, Perrin, Ranjitsinhji, Rhodes, Hirst, Mason, Jackson, and another few score of that sort. Literature was represented by such bunglers as Conrad, by the heretic Shaw, by men whose work was all done or nearly done, veterans like Swinburne and Meredith, and tired broken John Davidson—

Withered, angry, mad—
Who would list to me,
Since my singing sad
Troubled earth and sea?

Yet every age is vivid and exciting to those who live in it. When Tono Bungay or Kim appeared, people were as avid of them as we are of any much-heralded novel or political study. Literature, not yet simplified, had not yet been shorn of its excrescences of poetry and drama. Synge’s plays were read eagerly, though they had been performed only in Irish theatres. London audiences treated a new Pinero or Ibsen show gravely. John Arnison, living intensely, was not conscious that he was living in an age which was merely slipped in between two greater ages, to be forgotten as soon as it was over. The problems seemed real problems; the battles, even the political battles, genuine enough.

As he made his way home, he looked up, at ‘heaven’s high Watling Street’—an ordered Roman road, thrusting its ruthless efficient spear from one strong point to another: ‘the army of unalterable law,’ as another poet of that age saw it.

There are phrases which light up the inner thought of a whole period, and these are among them. Not yet accustomed to the depths and gulfs of immeasurable space, men were frightened and chilled by the vastness and aloofness of a world which had once been ‘the work of Thy fingers,’ a not too stupendous roof over a central hearth-fire of Eternal Love. It was now a desolate unending highway over heath and mountain. The stars were beacons for the legions’ imperturbable impersonal marching and marching towards the frontiers of an Empire which had at last reached the land where it had no frontiers.

The picture was wild and savage. Yet exhilarating also, to the Arnison blood. He was still the Viking in his Cumbrian fells, though a serf in a London slum.

But he saw suddenly that the poet had taken only the phrase and some sense of trimness from the world of Rome. ‘Heaven’s high Watling Street’ was only a London street after all. John remembered Thomas’s criticism that Davidson’s hedgerow air was a policeman coming stealthily along, hoping to catch you at it, whatever ‘it’ was. The stars, too, it seemed, were so many policemen ‘that beat . . . their myriad rounds.’

Your environment, like your sin, will find you out. Davidson the poet was the Glasgow dominie and Fleet Street hack; and it was a London street that he set in the heavens’ immeasurable height, though he gave it a name from ancient Roman Britain. And this is one reason why it is worth while, even now, striving to give men and women environments that are not Glasgow slums and London crowds. For some of them are men and women of genius.

Chapter XII

In these years, at last, something that had been, not exactly asleep, but damped down, as a fire is damped down by loads of wet rushes, sprang into flame. There was a stirring born out of intimate deadly knowledge of weakness and suffering and obscurity; and it was a stirring for ethical ends, an exultant sureness that God cares nothing for a salvation which leaves most men and women in misery and fear. For the only time in the last hundred years, men, as well as women, attended church in their thousands; and as they went abroad about their ordinary work were full of resolution, so that the city was changed in their vision of it.

For a time—even for a space of several years—religion genuinely mattered. It mattered so much that even the religious papers mattered. They contained articles that were not a mere occupancy of space, but said something; said it in words that were exultant and nervously clear. The Church of God really was what it so often asserts itself to be, a mighty army; and not a sprawling gaggle of churchgoers and theologians. Behind the thought and politics of the age burnt a fire and conviction such as England had known only once before.

If we ask, Was this reality?—remember the years that followed. Could anything except some deep centre of moral decision and earnestness have carried England through such peril and suffering as she had never dreamed could threaten her island peace? We shall know soon if she has still a strength within, that can bear her through another testing.

This was the last time that Nonconformity was to count. As we know, it does not count to-day.

It had been born in obscurity and exile, nursed in persecution, driven out of the high places of national life, condemned to fifth-rate schools or no schools at all, and no university until London University (the poor man’s university, doomed to bear always the stigma that attaches to all that the poor man uses and possesses) was founded. Now at last Nonconformity was counting—really and strongly counting. For the first time since Oliver Cromwell died, it was alive in national affairs.

It was alive in them because it was alive in men’s spirits, which were reborn into a conviction of the immediacy of God and of His passionate will concerning them.

John had come to one of those periods when the soul must form a decision, or the rest will be wretchedness and deepening failure and acceptance of failure. Decision came, not in a moment, but by accumulation of fiercely lived and felt emotions.

By accident he discovered midday mid-week services in a Bishopsgate Nonconformist chapel. The place was crammed with men, and men only. The services were rigidly pent within forty minutes, for the hearers came from factory and office, to which they must return.

This was the great age of the Nonconformist pulpit. There are no preachers to-day who speak with that strength and courage and abounding hopefulness. John heard Dr. Clifford. The text was naught. Yet even so, as that old man gave it out, it was something to dwell on, for its spirit and race and fire; it gave such a tang of frosty joy and assurance. ‘Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound! they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of Thy countenance.’

The sermon had nothing to do with the text. It was all about the way God lifts men out of the sheerest destitution. An enemy might have called it political; Nonconformity was for a short while sure that politics mattered, and were something a Christian had a duty to care about. The illustrations were for the most part irrelevant. But who cared? You were listening to this mighty old man, son of a home as poor as you can find, in this civilisation whose roots are in starvation. He had smashed the lines of Established Church and landed privilege. Exultation of conquest strode abroad in his words. You went out feeling that victory was God’s intention for you.

John picked up an intimate little pleasure of his own also, when Clifford with one of his sweeping gusts of irrelevance dragged in from nowhere within sight an allusion which he never bothered to expound. ‘Society made a big fuss about the author of Don Juan! He was not a butcher’s son! A butcher’s son could not write Don Juan! Perhaps NOT! But he wrote Clifton Grove!’

A deep murmur of appreciation and assent thrilled the audience, sitting eager-eyed and breathless. God had raised up a butcher’s son to write Clifton Grove. Not a peer of the realm! No, a butcher’s son! You could see the congregation nodding their heads unconsciously as faces met. We had found at last a God Who cared about butchers’ sons. He helped them to write Clifton Groves.

John thought, ‘I am the only man here who knows who wrote Clifton Grove.’ Not having any exalted opinion of Clifton Grove, he wondered a little why Dr. Clifford had flung that name out at them so defiantly; and presently discovered that Dr. Clifford came from Nottingham.

Every Nonconformist preacher that mattered was in the stir of these years, and John heard them all.

He heard the celebrated Dr. Watkinson, whose sermons were such an education, they were so crammed with literary beauty and with scientific illustrations; wonderful how he knew so much science, and wonderful how he used it to prove the Gospel!

John did not get much good from the celebrated Dr. Watkinson; he seemed too well aware of his fame, and of his eccentricities, and it is not good for a man to get to know that he is ‘a regular card’ and that people are watching to see him perform. All the expected tricks were there: the drawing up of the lanky length until it towered like an overgrown sunflower, the elaborate sniff before a sarcasm the laboured simile. Of course people liked them; we like anything that the right people (in the circles where we move) tell us we ought to like. Which of us is going to be the first to own that he or she has a brain missing on some of its aesthetic cylinders? to cry out, as the King goes by, ‘Why, the man has no clothes on!’?

Yet even a celebrated preacher can drop into simplicity. When the old man suddenly spoke of growing understanding that had come to him with the years, and added, as if to himself (and this was not a pulpit trick), ‘And yet the light hasn’t come along intellectual lines. No, it has come along moral lines, through action’—John got something that would stay by him.

Men hunger to find a God who cares with all the intensity of Eternal Being for what they do, not for what they spill out rhetorically. Is there such a God?

Hesitatingly, for he was a Methodist, John heard also Campbell, the troubler of Israel. He heard him first at one of the celebrated Thursday midday sermons, when Campbell was in belligerent mood.

The orthodox religious journals had given New Theologians the martyr’s halo—of the very best kind, that which costs the martyr precious little—when martyrdom is not a scorching flame, but merely a blatter about the lugs; partly abuse, but mixed in it the mad enthusiasm of those who applaud.

Here they crowded, these people who thought that religion, so long as it demanded nothing except power to shout and make demands on other people, was a good thing. Religion was practical and should be simple, or else it wasn’t religion. It made you efficient in business, and kind to the poor. It was what had made England great and would make her great again. It was England’s secret, and the New Theology was recovering it. There was nothing of pietist or quietist rubbish about it, nothing about sinking self into a self so beyond all thought that we die to this world. Religion was a fine virile thing; and what was needed was what these New Theologians were doing. That was, to clear away the ‘accretions,’ the Virgin Birth, Miracles, Resurrection, the Divinity of Christ, the Last Judgment, Eternal Death, and especially that nonsense about Original Sin. We knew now that man was sure of progress; he had been a brute once, but that was so long ago, it was almost unkind to remember it. He was now essentially decent. All he needed was plenty of education, and votes for all.

It was long overdue, this reconciliation of religion with science, this showing how exactly Christianity fitted into a scheme of Evolution. The press had nobly rallied to Campbell’s work, and between them they had made God front-page news again.

The hearers sat there excited. And from their excitement, it may be, a flame passed to the pale ghostly figure before them.

What was it that Matthew Arnold called Newman (who had once tried to start a New Theology in the Anglican Church)? A sick angel? That was what this preacher was: a sick angel: an angel in high fever. John heard him arraign a God accused of many sins, and most of all of terrifying His creatures with threats of a hell and retribution that were sheerly bogus. This wicked God was shaken over the presentation of His guilt, as a terrier shakes a rat over the sewer at whose mouth it has caught it emerging. The audience hummed satisfaction.

Strangest of all, behind John a Salvationist, intoxicated by the general excitement, shouted from time to time, and most exultantly when the Deity was ragged most pitilessly, ‘Hallelujah! Glory!’

John went out angry and sick at heart.

Of course it was merely the God of the Old Theology—the God in Whose name men have burnt and broken on the wheel, and consigned to Hell furnace ‘infants a span long,’ predestinate to eternal wretchedness. A God of such character the lover of God must hate, and does well to show his hatred. It was a sifting of the things that were shaken, that the things which were not shaken might remain. And only by such rigour as the New Theologians used could this outworn simulacrum be expelled from Christendom’s mind at last. But it was not the message for John Arnison in his misery.

Yet he heard this troubled and troubling spirit again; and this time on a Sunday evening, after standing on line for two hours. The City Temple was packed to its heights, with a very different crowd, for the most part young men and girls with hunger-filled faces. In the service which followed, a psychic experience which shook them to their hearts, it was easy to understand this man’s power. What preacher ever had a more direct and intimate way straight to what the ordinary man and woman were thinking? That immediacy of appeal and understanding made you feel that in this Universe also was a Mind that understood and cared.

How came he to have this power? His life had been above the battle from the first: he had lived with the influential and admired, himself admired and loved: it had been a surprising thing when he stooped to become a Nonconformist minister. Even so, from the ending of adolescence he had been recognised as a king among those whom he served. ‘Campbell of Brighton’ had been as celebrated as once ‘Robertson of Brighton’ had been. And when Dr. Parker had ‘ascended’ (as a placard outside his church had neatly put it), no rival name was mentioned with Campbell’s to succeed him in Nonconformity’s greatest church. How could this sheltered brain and heart discover a sympathy and power of understanding and revelation, such as Clifford or Charles Brown of Ferme Park, men whose lives had begun on labour’s hardest grimmest level, could never find?

Nor were these who listened to him the half-witted amiables who form so much of the religious world. They were young men and women in desperate search of hope—passionately knit in purpose to find salvation and a way to save the whole world, beginning with drab Britain at their doors. Such intensity of listening, such a silence of resolution—has our world known them again? The pale tense countenance worked with the community of their desire and passion, as he said, ‘Yesterday you were saying to yourself——’. And it was—exactly—what you had been saying to yourself; and saying yesterday.

You heard, and were awed and shaken—yet only to be strengthened as you had never been strengthened before. You forgot Campbell; and saw the eyes that had watched you since before the foundation of the world, the eyes of Eternal Pity and Compassion.

And in all this maze of sun and planets and dead stars there was no other God! There was only Eternal Pity, Eternal Love, which were crucified for you. Christ had come from the very heart of that Love and Pity; He came now; He would come for ever. He stood beside you, and had stood beside you yesterday, as you walked, sick in mind and body, through Babylon, that great and terrible city which the English have built beside the Thames; and walking beside you He heard the misery and weakness and despairing appeal of your own mind. You were not helpless, you were not insignificant!

Chapter XIII

1

John knew now that he must answer this God Who was calling him to His service. In this Universe was a Will that had singled him out, and was demanding all that he could give, of life and brain and emotion. He worked in a slum, and lived in a rookery; between slum and rookery his daily journeyings passed. But Eternity was all about him, as a sea is about a raft in mid-ocean. He could not forget that sea. Its strength and swelling were beneath him, its salt wind in his throat and face.

Yet how hard it was to find a way of service that was not a mockery of what youth was longing to pour out!

Man’s heart, black and bad as it is, is sounder than his head. His feelings are on the whole good enough for this world in which destiny has seen fit to place him. His thinking is not so good.

When John turned to thought of what he could do, to fill the sails of existence with this breath of God that was blowing so fervently, this inadequacy of men’s thinking revealed itself. He could think only of those things which others in his circle assured him were the things that God wanted men, and young men most of all, to do. These things were, to conduct a Sunday School class, and to preach. Mr. Arnison therefore did both of these things.

Mr. Hawkins, the Sunday School Superintendent, had an address which he gave occasionally, and one day, in a chat which they had, he kindly explained to John the methods by which one became a preacher. ‘The thing is, to get a text which splits easily into three main threads on which you can hang a lesson. For example, “This man David prospered.” You have, first, man; explain what man is, a little lower than the angels yet full of sin and going to destruction. You can say a lot about that, if there’s time; if it’s only a short address that you’re giving, of course you have to pick and choose and be sure that you say only the best you can think of. Then you have this: This man David. A special man: not just man in the mass, if you get my meaning, Mr. Arnison, but one special man whom God has picked out to do a special work, as He picks out each one of us. You can say a lot about this too, and drive it home with illustrations from modern life, such as Cromwell or Gladstone or one of the great missionaries, or perhaps Abraham Lincoln. Finally, you have the word prospered: that’s what is bound to happen if you give your life to God and let Him use you! Like David did!’

This was Mr. Hawkins’s favourite address, and indeed it was almost too favourite. When he gave it the third time in six months, a section of his audience made of the session a composite act of edification, repeating his findings simultaneously or even a trifle before him. This was disconcerting. So Mr. Hawkins turned his mind to other texts, and after long gestation produced a fellow in the story of one of David’s followers, who ‘slew a lion in a pit on a snowy day.’

He slew a lion: always a fearsome wild fowl, hard to confront, harder to slay! slew it with his bare hands, throttling it! The lion stands for your darling sins, those that you refuse to give up. They will slay you, unless you slay them. Further, the lion was in a pit. None of your mannerly well-fed lions, this one was trapped and desperate. It had been there for days and days and days, it was starving, it was wild with terror and hunger. That is like your sins when you have been giving in to them for a great while: they grow desperate and savage.

And the day was a snowy one: the pit was slippery, it was hard to keep footing as you slithered down to the waiting lion. That is what happens with us and sin. We have to conquer sin just when circumstances are all with it, and conquest is going to take out of us all we have. It can be done, though; and it must be done.

John thought this a good effort. As a matter of fact, it was. Children have gone blasé about lions to-day, but in pre-War years lions were still interesting. And there was something to admire, it was no use denying it, in a man who slid down an icy bank with his hands all frozen and took on a lion in a beast of a temper. The story brought you into a heroic world where it was quite credible that there was a God who was seeking heroes to serve Him. It may not have gone deep. But it kept a mob of children quiet, on an afternoon when parents in need of rest had handed them over to other authorities, and those authorities had to cope with original sin and high spirits, without any of the aids that are in the day-school teacher’s hands.

2

John proceeded further. Given ‘a note to preach,’ on a week-day evening he preached accordingly, to seven people assembled in the basement of a chapel in an outlying part of Bottelstowe’s immense sprawling warren. His sermon was dull and halting; he had memorised it, and while he was speaking it somehow it did not seem worth memorisation, still less worth passing on. However, it sufficed, and a kindly report was made of it. He came ‘on plan’ as a ‘preacher on trial.’ A wide field lay open to his gifts.

Bottelstowe is a human swamp that extends from the borders of Epping Forest to the enormous sewage farms on Lea marshes. Pretoria Street Methodists lived in this region’s aristocratic quarters, and in a missionary spirit they tried to help the dwellers in the darker spaces. A room was rented in a network of wretched houses, and religious services were held in it. Mrs. Arnison took charge of the social side, of women’s sewing meetings and teas. Young Mr. Arnison helped on Sundays.

The inhabitants looked on with considerable good-humour and detachment. It might have been taken as insult, that this handful of decently clad and adequately fed middle-class folk held themselves entitled to preach religion to others whose meals were precarious and their clothes noisome. But the heart was seen to be well-meaning, and the hymn-singing did no harm to anyone.

The younger members of the community being evangelised even recognised that the effort had in it features of very fair comedy value. When one of John’s co-preachers, an utter ass, came specially dressed, with frock coat and topper, as he took his stand on the soap box and removed his tall hat, with a suggestion that they should all pray, a voice remarked in tones of conviction, ‘Now I knows where ar pigeons went!’ John afterwards advised the speaker to leave his topper at home next time.

And, without analysing his thought or frankly admitting it, John at the back of his mind felt that there was something to Hugh’s belief that it was downright immoral to preach God’s love to men and women sodden with helplessness. If he had had a decently dressed, decently fed, decently literate audience, he could have felt a glow within, as he talked of the Love that is in all things, and in and through all things is calling us to Itself. It was a mockery to breathe a hint that you thought this Love existed, in these appalling slums. He hated the effort more than he could say. God had no right to make him be dishonest!

He could not help feeling that the dim unmoved creature whom they paid a shilling or two weekly, to look after the room and arrange tables, showed a grip of the mot juste, in an incident which shocked his mother.

‘Do I milk the cups, or do you, Mum?’

Mrs. Arnison looked at her questioningly. ‘Oh, you mean, Put milk in the women’s tea! I’ll see to that, Mrs. Gardner.’

Then Mrs. Gardner asked, ‘How many devils are coming?’

‘Oh, I hope, NONE!’ cried Mrs. Arnison.

‘I only meant,’ the woman explained shamefacedly, ‘How many blokes are you expecting?’

Chapter XIV

1

Not everyone who was religious was made happy by the Age’s religious excitement. In the chilly Eastertide of 1910, Uncle Hamlet sent his sister a note of warning:

Dear Sister,

You do not write now and it seems to me as if as Muriel was saying to me yesterday since you went away from us you had given over to care about us. I do hope that it is not so and that sisterly love will continue. The times are full of meaning to those that believe, what with all this infidelism that abounds and with so called ministers of the Gospel teaching that God’s word is full of fables and devices of science falsely so called. For as Muriel was saying only yesterday how can true science teach anything that is contrary to God’s word? And though here we may be despised we shall be exalted in the end. That hymn is a good one which tells us

I ride in the sky freely justified I
Nor envy Elijah his seat.
My soul mounted higher in a chariot of fire
And the moon was under my feet.

But do we sing those good old hymns now? I fear that we do not. There is no doubt in my mind that we are living under the Fifth Dispensation and at any moment the sound of a trumpet will be heard and the elements will melt with fervent heat. O that all of us may be ready, and you also dear sister! for the sin of worldliness doth eat like a canker, and it may seize us before we are aware. I am no criterion of these matters, but I know well that the love of money has brought many to Hell and is the sin that should be guarded against or at the Last Day there will be misery of parents parted from their children and brothers from sisters, as the hymn puts it

While they enjoy their monarch’s love,
Shall I in torments dwell,
And howl while they sing hymns above
And blow the flames of Hell?

But as Muriel was saying it is time you wrote to Madge and find out how they all are. How are you all dear sister you and all your family. And is John a local preacher and the rest are they all shaping well and to do His will? We have had a hard winter and much sickness with the children ailing and myself and Muriel in much anxiety. Times are hard there is no doubt of that for we are living under the Fifth Dispensation and it will not be long now and we should all be ready and watch lest the sin of worldliness and covetousness etc. take hold on us. And now that things are nicely settled for you and you have no worries what with John earning good money and the rest of the children getting ready for earning we were wondering if you could send us some help. It has been very worrying what with the children being unwell and . . .

But Uncle Hamlet seemed more than ever an irrelevance. The young Arnisons were not disposed to be troubled by his troubles, let them be ever so great. John happened to see the letter lying on the table. He impounded it unhesitatingly, and with his hand on it said, ‘Mother, you are not going to send that old cadger a penny of our money?’ Our money!

Mrs. Arnison looked unhappy. ‘He says they have had a hard winter, what with his children being ill.’

She paused; and saw that the arnisonian heart was hardened against all appeal. And her own somehow seemed to harden also.

Trixie said, ‘When I was staying with Uncle Hamlet he used to take to church always a shilling and a penny.’ She smiled—-Trixie’s queer crooked smile.

‘A shilling and a penny! But what a funny amount to contribute to the collection! ‘ exclaimed her mother. ‘A shilling seems an awful lot!’ she added.

‘Ah!’ said Trixie. ‘The shilling was only in case he was asked to take the plate round!’

And it was Trixie who settled the question. ‘We are not going to have Peter taken away from school like John was, for the sake of helping Uncle Hamlet and Aunt Muriel! Besides,’ she added explosively, seeing Nimrod and pouncing down to seize him, ‘if we help Uncle Hamlet, how can we pay for Nimrod’s chickens?’

For Nimrod was still with them. The Brocklebanks, it was true, had returned; Mrs. Brocklebank had come, full of eagerness, to make arrangements to reclaim her pet. But Nimrod, who was out when she arrived, had walked in while she was having tea, had taken one good look at her, and stalked out again. ‘Why, Nimmy!’ she wailed, heartbroken. ‘Don’t you recognise your mistress?’

Cursing and scratching, he had been put in a hamper, and taken from the sorrowing Arnisons, to Wanstead, where the Brocklebanks lived. On the third night (and this is yet another mystery in the story of this remarkable cat), something less than his statutory sixteen pounds (for Nimrod had been travelling) hurled itself through the darkness of pre-dawn on to John’s feet. Purrs that might have been worked by some internal hydraulic system shook the bed. Nimrod was back. He had stayed.

‘He’s a furry fellow!’ said Trixie, rubbing her face against his. ‘See, mother! He looks more like a lion with mumps than ever!’

It was no longer a case of Madge Arnison against the Hendred four. A popular front had been formed in Arnisonia.

2

It was some time since John had seen Hugh, when he got this note from Thomas:

Dear John,

Hugh has been adopted as Labour candidate for south-east Hoxton, where Mr. Roberts has made him Principal of a show he has started for working men and women, to give them a chance of getting to know what poetry and art were meant to be for all people. We are married, and are going at once to live there. It is work which William Morris would have loved madly, and we’re both crazy about it. I’m running a series on English poets this coming winter, and John Arnison is going to give one of the lectures; I’m not going to take any refusal! But of course you are going to look us up often and often, and long before that lecture. There’ll always be a room for you.

Mr. Roberts, met in a Bottelstowe street, confirmed the news. ‘I’ve always had a great inkling to do something for the masses,’ he said. ‘They haven’t had your and my chance, Mr. Arnison, and those of us who have had advantages must pass them on.’

Mr. Arnison agreed. ‘You’re doing a great thing, Mr. Roberts.’

Mr. Roberts thought so too. ‘Of course there are these colleges already, one or two,’ he said with some complacency. ‘But I mean this one to be very unique. In fact, more unique and really classical, if you get my meaning, than any other. Thomas plans to run classes for dancing and fencing, and I’m putting in a billiard table.’ The old man’s eyes softened. ‘Thomas will do it something grand, I know that. I’ve always loved that girl, ever since she was so high. Of course,’ he added hastily, ‘my affection’s been purely plutonic, as you might say. And I wanted them two young people to settle down and work together. They were meant to work together, don’t you think, Mr. Arnison?’

‘I do indeed, Mr. Roberts.’

‘Yes,’ he said broodingly. ‘I’ve known Miss Heaton since the days when William Morris used to call round to see them, and he used to say (I can hear him saying it), “Signy! Signy Heaton! what utter tommyrot is this, Heaton! damning a poor child with a name like that!” He was very fond of Miss Heaton, was Mr. Morris.’

‘I don’t see how anyone could help being fond of her,’ said John.

‘You’re right, Mr. Arnison! And I always say,’ he concluded, ‘that she and Hugh are just another case of Romiet and Julio. So they ought to settle down together, just like Romiet and Julio did.’

3

John now took the office in his stride. The hours were as long as ever, the leisure as scanty. But he was not the junior, and his work was admitted to be good. Mr. Arnison had become definitely ‘fast.’ He was on the ledgers now, and sometimes was initiated into the cashier’s job.

Mr. Hunston still lurked to capture door-closers. Fantom still dreamed of dogs, and he and FitzAndrew, the latter wilder and more tousled than ever, as he rushed in morning by morning just after the stroke of nine, still covered blotting-paper with limericks. The junior toiled in his undistinguished rut; the two senior clerks went their way, Joad scornfully and aloofly, Garlock methodically. They rarely came out of their appointed hutches, and usually for some unexpected reason.

Garlock one day thus emerged, and surprised Arnison by asking him if he thought Shakespeare a good writer. John thought Shakespeare a very good writer, and said so. Garlock thought a minute, then said, ‘I’m glad to hear you say that, for I know that you have had a good education. I think he is good, too, but he’s sometimes a bit indecent, isn’t he?’

‘Oh no! not really!’ said John. ‘At least, not by the standards of his age.’

‘No, I suppose you have to remember that always,’ said Garlock, relieved. He told John he and his wife had agreed to take in Shakespeare in fortnightly parts. He had recently married, and his wife, though he did not think it necessary to put it this way, was anxious to educate him up to her level.

Joad’s incursions into the world of his colleagues were less reasonable, and even less predictable, than this one of Garlock’s. For example, one day he appeared suddenly in the middle aisle of the office, where there happened to be standing simultaneously everyone else except the Manager and FitzAndrew. They were waiting for the doors to open for the day. Mr. Joad related, swiftly and without pausing, the following incident.

‘Tell you a good story I heard yesterday. There was a chap at a children’s party—frightfully annoyed with the children, and the row they were making, and all that—and he gathered them together, and he said, “I’ll teach you a game you don’t know. It’s called The Beehive. I stand in the centre, and you all run round me and you all say, ‘We’re all little bees! We’re all little bees!’” So they did as he told them; they all ran round him, saying, “We’re all little bees! We’re all little bees!” And he said, “I know you are!” and walked off.’

And Mr. Joad walked off also, leaving the others staring.

Absurd, and silly, and trifling. Of course it was. But you see, to every one of us come moments when, in some amiable fashion or some fashion not so amiable, we are just pleased to go out of our mind. The new generation, silly little blighters chasing hoops and flicking marbles, going to school or parties, were all little b——s, and it was pleasant to think someone had told them so. The moke between the shafts had kicked up a heel, to signify that he still lived; his other kick had been when he had ‘glared’ at Jerry Oldham and asked him, ‘Are you aware that I haven’t had a rise for five years?’ And Jerry had predicted (quite accurately) the riseless course of the next five years.

‘Mr. FitzAndrew, your mind isn’t on your work! You’re thinkin’ of somethin’ else!’

(There was a young lady of Ipswich,
Who put some hot rouge on her lips which
Were as ripe and as neat
And as pretty and sweet—)

Blast that young lady of Ipswich! What was it she did with her last line? What do young ladies of Ipswich do with their last lines?

Chapter XV

As it became understood that John would take up his father’s work, old comrades of his father remembered the latter’s early promise and striking achievement, seen always against a rosy sunset of romance and strangeness: Matthew Arnison the great evangelist eternally preaching, on a background of mighty rivers, palmy plains, parrots and other exotic gorgeous creatures, while a vast heathen world silently listened, listened. When one of these veterans ran across Matthew Arnison’s son, kindly interest and pleasure would be expressed, along with the hope (accompanied by a smile of arch dismay, a smile that was as near a despairing shrug as a smile can be; and that is very near indeed) that ‘you will have your father’s eloquence, his great gifts of speech and persuasion, and above all, his heroic and devoted Christian character.’

John accordingly, though as yet undedicated formally, was invited to a lengthy séance for discussion of missionary problems. This was the John R. Mott Era, the Age of Missionary Statesmanship. The Student Volunteer Movement flourished; the hopefulness that was alive at last in Nonconformity looked abroad over the whole world, and in vision saw mankind coming home to one faith and one loving companionship. It was a vision that had in it nobility; it was at its heart fiercely ethical, and not a hugging of excitement for excitement’s sake. If in August, 1914, the accursed thing had not happened, it might—conceivably—have set man far on his way to some ordered decency which it would not be a mockery to style civilisation.

Every good thing brings its own parody. A wise man does not fuss over this. He sees, yet looks past it. But it is there, and those who are not so wise are troubled.

John was not exactly troubled. He was, however, not enthralled and not enlightened. For the session was taken charge of—unofficially but effectively—by the Rev. McLeod McDonald, among the eloquent preachers of that age the most eloquent of all. Unfalteringly poured on the majestic voice, with resonance of latinism clanging after latinism. It opened now with prayer, a rich compendious exhortation and instruction to the Power that rules the world—twenty minutes! Then came an address (not on the agenda—Dr. McDonald’s own spontaneous inspiration) on ‘The Missionary Imperative.’ For ten minutes he stressed the truth that you must have ‘an iconoclastic policy’; and he then hammered this down by pointing out that you must have also ‘a destructive policy.’ Then he discoursed about the need to occupy ‘strategic points,’ such as fords across rivers (in India, whose rivers are for the most part merely drains for a few weeks of each year, and for the rest of the time sandy desert!) and places where marts were held at regular intervals. He then—thought of other things. ‘It has just occurred to me, brethren.’

And he continued to think of other things. Let there be a pause, how brief soever, and the Rev. McLeod McDonald was on his feet, with bland smile observing, ‘Perhaps it would help the discussion if I were to suggest a few thoughts’: or, ‘Let us, while we are waiting for God to direct our minds, again engage in the exercise of intercession.’ ‘Let me guide our enquiry by putting before you a train of thought that has struck me!’

Thought!

But that was just what must be warded off, as germs from sickly children, who have enough of their own, anyway. John, gazing at the magnificent old warrior, envied Scotland these sons of hers: so superb in their straight-striding way across lesser peoples, so grandly encased in the unfeeling armour of their own consciousness of power and the call to use it for the good of others. An example of zeugma slid into his mind. ‘He drove home his points and his audience.’

This audience, however, could not be driven home. They were not in the convenient recesses of a vast church, but in the intimacy of one large room, specially lent for this close friendly discussion. ‘We are not at a public meeting,’ as Dr. McDonald had beamingly reminded them. ‘We are a small company of men and women whose hearts have been touched. And this is a family gathering, where all may speak freely, as God moves them.’

When finally the end really came, to his astonishment John saw that Dr. McDonald was beckoning to him. ‘Would you mind waiting a few minutes, Mr. Arnison? I have something to say to you.’

When they were alone together, Dr. McDonald said, ‘When are you going to decide to take up your father’s work, John? ‘

‘I hadn’t thought about it, Dr. McDonald.’

The fearless eyes looked at him searchingly. ‘Then isn’t it time you began to think about it, my boy? How old are you? ‘

‘Twenty-one.’

‘When I was twenty-one I was in my last year at College, and about to go out to the foreign field.’

‘Ye-es.’

‘When your father was seventeen, he was known as “the boy preacher,” from Penrith right down to the beginnings of Manchester.’

After silence, Dr. McDonald said, ‘The minister at Lichlea, in the Severn valley, is ill. I’m afraid he won’t recover, poor fellow. They are wanting a layman to take up his work for a few months. What about it, John? You will be a minister in all but name and authority to administer the sacraments.’

John said nothing.

‘It’s a Call, my boy. Dare you reject a Call? ‘

No, one cannot reject a Call and remain saved. Yet deep within him something bristled in angry resentment. It had to be quieted, however; and he did quiet it.

When Dr. McDonald spoke again, he spoke with the voice of reason and fairness. ‘You could take this post, and it would give you a chance of finding out by practice if the ministry really were your vocation and the work God meant you to do. You would not have committed yourself.’

Put that way, it remained a Call, yet bore within it a way of escape if the spirit flagged or found itself unworthy.

‘What are you doing now, my boy? ‘

‘I’m in a bank. The Grand Bank.’

‘Who is its Managing Director? ‘

‘Sir Jeremy Oldham.’

Dr. McDonald’s eyes brightened, and his whole face smiled with affection. ‘Jeremy! Jerry Oldham! A devout man,’ he said softly, ‘and one who fears God. He is a generous supporter of every good cause. If you have fears that there might be difficulty about leaving your employment at short notice, all I have to do is to have a word with Sir Jeremy Oldham, and everything will be made smooth for you. Well, good-bye, my boy. I’ll give you a week to think it over. Remember, God’s word will not tarry. He has His world to save, and while He waits for us He will not, and in justice to His own self cannot, wait too long.’

John’s wretchedness of uncertainty was not calmed by the joy that flashed into his mother’s face when she knew. It was wonderful beyond her dreams, that the Rev. McLeod McDonald himself should have had his eye on John and have been thinking about him. Her prayers were coming true.

Yes, but in the mind of John’s generation, a generation dumb where to-day their successors are voluble, was rising a feeling not yet clear to the point of expression. One’s parents have rights, no doubt. But have they all the rights that, from the grim ages of patria potestas and all that, they have assumed? Have they the right to thrust fingers, however lovingly, into the heart of one’s own life, and to arrange the course in which our days and nights are to flow away to the silence that will end them? One loves one’s father and mother. But does one love their assumption of the right to plan and dream on one’s behalf?

Chapter XVI

1

He wrote to Thornhill and asked his advice. Thornhill’s answer was troubled. ‘Of course, John, if you feel you have a Call I can say nothing. And of course I admit that the ministry is a noble calling, in fact the noblest of all. And if that is the way that God wants you to go, no one has the right to say a word against it. Yet I cannot bring myself to believe that you were meant to be a minister. I may be quite wrong, but that’s how I feel. I wish one could get Raeburn’s opinion. But good luck, John old fellow, whatever you decide! Whatever it is, I know it will be the right thing!’

He wondered about Hugh and Thomas, and for three days was sure he dared not face them with his problem. To them the secular was all in all, and this life must be given up to the one over-mastering aim and sacrifice, to save man’s body and mind and self-respect.

Yet he wrote to them, and asked if he might spend a night with them. He wanted advice, he said.

Both of them answered, with abounding delight and kindness. So he went, and told them his problem.

Hugh said, ‘Oh, my God!’ and his face went blank.

Thomas said, ‘Be quiet, Hugh! and let John tell us some more.’

John talked on therefore, and out of his mind came stumblingly thought after thought that he had not known was there, or, if he had known, had known also that he would die rather than have it torn out into any other person’s sight.

Hugh said passionately, ‘It’s wrong, John! I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I won’t believe it! I’m saying nothing against the parson’s life, although I believe it’s utterly damnably mistaken, and dead against what Christ wished and taught! Since coming here I’ve met some parsons, working in these appalling slums, who have changed my opinion in quite a lot of respects. I take off my hat to them every time I think of them! But we had hoped, Thomas and I, to bring you in to a bigger thing, into something that isn’t outworn, as the Churches are, but is the living movement that is going to do for men and women what Christ wanted to see done for them. You mustn’t do it, John my dear! It’s a good life, and a fine life, and one that can be, and often is, full of sacrifice. But it isn’t your life!’

John looked at Thomas, and she looked at him in silence, reading his face as if she would read all that was in his being. She spoke at last, with a question.

‘If you take this job, John, it isn’t final, is it? It doesn’t make you a parson for good?’

John explained. ‘No. But I preach. And I mix with the people——’

She started, and interrupted. ‘I see. Yes,’ she said to herself. Then, ‘Go on, John.’

‘Well, that’s all, Thomas. I shall find out whether it is the life for me, really.’

‘And, if it isn’t, what then?’ asked Hugh.

‘Why,’ he admitted, ‘then I clear out, of course.’

‘And are out of a job?’

‘Yes.’

Hugh whistled. ‘Have you thought that out?’

‘I’ve faced it. Of course. And I don’t pretend it won’t be darned awkward——’

‘Awkward! My hat, John, but you have a pretty gift for understatement!’

‘Still, I shall be only twenty-two. I can find something.’ His voice quavered on the brave assurance.

Thomas had remained silent, still looking at him. John’s eyes travelled to hers again, and she spoke. ‘John dear, I think perhaps you’d be right to take the job. I believe you’ll find it a Call, though not perhaps in the way your people use the word.’

Hugh started. ‘You think John should take the job! What rot is this? Thomas, have you realised what it means? It means that, a few months from now, John’ll have to choose between remaining a parson, when he isn’t meant to be one, or being out of work—at twenty-two!’

Thomas did not budge. ‘I’ve said my say. John will do right if he takes the job.’

So John wrote his consent to the Rev. McLeod McDonald, and received his letter of benediction back. And to himself he justified his action, not merely by Thomas’s decision, which he trusted more than, he felt, he could trust any decision of his own, but by one of those rough-and-ready tests which the earnest use. His whole training had been that life meant the taking up of cross after cross. Find out which of two courses of action is harder, and then—unhesitatingly—take it, as God’s way for you. There could be no doubt in this case.

His mother’s heart welled out in gratitude to the Rev. McLeod McDonald, and to Hugh and Thomas, who were not the evil influence she had believed. She had dreaded John’s visit to them. He had said no word about it on his return—none that was to the point, that is. But they had clearly not advised the way she had feared. She was a fountain of thankfulness.

John avoided her.

2

Into the office exploded a bombshell—a letter from Sir Jeremy Oldham himself! The Grand Bank, waiving its rule of a month’s notice on either side, was releasing Mr. Arnison at the end of the week. And, since Mr. Arnison had not been found out in any embezzlement of Bank funds, one-third of the guarantee money of which he had been mulcted was to be repaid to him.

The immense sensation, increased when it was discovered that Arnison had not been sacked, held up the tide of limericking and exposed John to close questioning. The general impression left was that he was concealing something. He had probably come into money, a suggestion hopefully advanced by both FitzAndrew and Fantom, who were finding literary pursuits costly. This queer yarn that he was going off to do religious work in the country, a parson yet not a parson, would not hold water! Probably he had been touched in the head, imperceptibly yet deeply. Also, he must have come into money. Yes, he had been touched in the head.

John had spasms when he thought so himself. He had joined what Dr. McDonald repeatedly styled ‘a company of men whose hearts have been touched.’ Perhaps their heads also.

3

John was alone, the last in the office.

One by one his companions in serfdom had bidden him good-bye, with a genuineness of kindliness that moved him, and laments that he should be going, to be replaced by some crude slow-scribing junior, just when he had become ‘fast,’ an esteemed limb of their hard-toiling commonalty.

He looked round the dingy room, its high stools and desks, the ledgers in their nooks, the trays which held the passbooks. He looked at the square dull windows, and the sky still holding the light of the late October day.

He wrote the time, and against it signed his name, and taking the ruler drew a straight line across. In this manner, day after day, their transactions were consigned to eternity. He stared hard at what he had written, and felt a welling of tears. He was looking back across the years spent in this dust and dimness of an East End slum, to his springtide on Cotswold heights. How long he sat there, staring and thinking, he did not notice.

At last he woke up, and added the comment of Deity gazing on its house of exile and servitude:

Next morning the Manager, with head bent very close (for he was short-sighted), peered and puzzled long. Finally he closed the clocking-in book and passed into his own room, muttering, ‘What’s the meaning of all that rubbish Arnison wrote in the book last night? Some outlandish nonsense or language of his own!’

Part III — Lichlea

Chapter I

1

John interviewed a Board whose members were friendly; they had heard of his father and knew vaguely of his mother. Then he journeyed to Lichlea, and settled into a room in a house on its one street (the side streets were merely tentative strayings off to some field or other that abruptly closed down their wanderings). Five years’ service of the Grand Bank had brought him to a salary of eighty pounds. Now he received seventy, and for board and lodging paid nineteen shillings a week.

He lodged with the Blakes, who consisted of father, mother, and one son. By profession (in more senses than one) Mr. Blake was a poultry farmer. His poultry were few in number and mangy in character; he did not waste much time on them. He was not idle, however; he read Penny Stories. He was a good-humoured good-looking waster in the early thirties, much spoiled by a wife quite disillusioned but still very much in love. Percy, their only son, had adenoids and other concomitant afflictions, and John’s frame bounded with agony whenever he struck up Yip-I-addy, the reigning ditty. This tuneless tune was on the air all day long, except when Master Blake was at school. Yip! like the leap of a hornet-stung mustang it ramped up into the peaceful day!

Mrs. Blake asked Mr. Arnison if he was ‘fond of children.’ His predecessor had been, and had been particularly interested in Percy. Mr. Arnison (a bad liar) replied tonelessly that he was very fond of children, and dutifully tried to prove it by taking an interest in Percy. The obvious first move in a dreary gambit was to ask Percy what he planned to be when he grew up.

Percy ‘reckoned to go in for butcherin’.’

This was a stumper.

However, John recovered; and reminded himself how everyone is good at heart, so that under this desire there lurked beyond doubt some perverted kindness. The boy was probably desperately fond of animals, and had not visualised what butchering meant, except that it meant that he would see animals every day and all day long. Your big-game hunter is always a nature fanatic; it is the peace and solitude that draw him to the wilderness. He explains this clearly in his Reminiscences (Sport under Many Skies). John tried this line of approach therefore.

‘But ’twas but throwing words away’ (as with Wordsworth’s stubborn little maid). ‘No,’ persisted Percy, with clear-eyed grim-throated ferocity. ‘I think I should like the killun’.’ Aged ten, he came of a stock that matured early, and looked out on the world with unsentimentalising gaze. John perforce postponed their hoped-for intimacy.

Mrs. Blake petted her good-looking husband, and in return was affectionately rallied by him. When she occasionally suggested that he might do a bout of work: not heavy or prolonged work: perhaps fetch in a log for the fire: he would reproach her with breach of premarital pledges. ‘When you asked me to marry you, you promised that you would bring me up a cup o’ tea in bed every morning.’ ‘Get along with you and fetch that wood! When I asked you to marry me! As if you don’t know that you pestered the life out of me until I, fool that I was, let myself in for being made a slave! Now rouse yourself and get me that wood, or you won’t get no supper! What do you think Mr. Arnison thinks, seeing you lyin’ about all day, good-for-nothing! and your wife doin’ all the work, indoors and out!’

2

Mrs. Blake spread the news that Mr. Arnison was fond of children. He was introduced to the work of the Band of Hope.

In a smallish room, a raging tearing mob of young demons of both sexes, released from fear of the teacher’s rod, romped and romped, and at last reluctantly, after many requests, took their seats on long benches over which they had been leaping, threw back their heads, and with immense enjoyment sang one of Arthur Hoyle’s Two Hundred and Twenty-Five Gems of Song:

Right men— are wanted—high stations to fill!
Men of good manners, of wisdom and skill!
Drunkards can never attain to the prize!
We will be teetotal, for—
We all want to rise!
Break the Pledge? Never! No! no! NO!
Not while the streams through the valleys shall flow!
Dear are the treasures that Temperance can tell!
Health and Pleasure follow
When we drink from the well!

They did not conspicuously follow for Lichlea, which had just had two deaths from diphtheria. As John presently made his way about his parish, he was astonished at the amount of disease and early decrepitude to be found in this delightful old-world village.

Another favourite was sung to the tune of ‘Rosalie the Prairie Flower’:

Take away the winecup! take away the beer!
Water! give me water! fresh and clear!
Take away the winecup! take away the beer!
Water is the drink for me!

Then, prime favourite of all, the saga of an eccentric blacksmith and his hobbies:

Old John Cross was merrily singing,
While his friendly hammer was swinging,
And his anvil loudly was ringing;
Merrily sang he all the day!
Would—you—like—to know the measure
Which this good smith deemed a treasure
And sang out with glee and pleasure?
You shall hear it—if you stay!
‘Sign, Boys, sign the pledge of Merry Temp’rance!
Come and join, Boys, join—our noble happy Temp’rance Band!’

Over these rustic revels the village wheelwright, Harold Corduroy, a harassed but imperturbably good-natured giant, presided. The bouts of community singing gave him a rest; otherwise he was usually rushing through the swirling shrieking mob, or was stalled in it, like a whale surf-stranded and madly plunging and splashing. He now appealed for a semi-silence (the best one could hope for) for ‘Mr. Arnison, our new minister. He’s not reelly a minister yet, but he’s almost a minister, so to say. He’s——’

‘What do you mean, Cousin ’Arold—almost a minister?’ demanded the noisiest maenad of all, a gay little minx who was his mother’s youngest sister’s child and spent most of her time catching at his coat and screaming ‘Cousin ’Arold! Cousin ’Ar-OLD!’

‘Why, what I means is, he’d like to be one, but he isn’t one yet, in a manner of speakin’!’

‘What d’you mean, Cousin ’Arold—he’d like to be one? Can’t he be one if he likes?’

Followed an argument, in which the minx had the better. Satisfied that this was so, she closed it abruptly by standing up and looking round to announce, ‘Now shut up, all on you! We’re goin’ to hear Mr. ’Arrison, what’s come to tell us stories! And after that’ (she shouted) ‘we’ll sing some more ’ymns!’

John had no stories ready, and his address, which was brief, was not his idea of what an address by John Arnison should be. He was heard with some impatience, and when he sat down found his forehead was sopping wet. His chairman had meant now to say a few words. But Cousin Janet was on her feet, with a yell of ‘Cousin ’Ar-old! We’re a-goin’ to sing again about Old John Cross. Aren’t we, you chaps?’ ‘Yeeess!’ chorused the chaps.

And John presently slipped away—as a captive paleface, creeping silently out into the night, might slip away from Mohawks who were discussing last-minute arrangements for his execution at the stake next morning. At the door he took one shuddering look back at the stamping ramping horde, and at Cousin Harold helpless in their midst. They were all little bees, and he knew it.

Yet his mind admitted, when its tumult had quieted somewhat, that in the dulness of village life they were entitled to their fun, and that he as a newcomer was rightly called on to contribute to it. Much the same attitude, he remembered, was taken towards a new master at his old school. Until he had won his spurs he was regarded as on probation, and anyway it was essential that his life should be made a Hell on earth. Perhaps that was why the masters turned so sourly towards their pupils afterwards. They had not realised that those awful first few weeks were all in fun.

Chapter II

1

The village had a loveliness which caught the breath at all times: in the lazy death of a summer day and when the elms stood in starkness against a dim November sky.

The houses were thatched and of Cotswold stone. The church on the hillside above was seven hundred years old. It recalled the one which Wordsworth says:

Sat like a thronèd lady, sending out
A gracious look all over her domain.

The drinking supply came from wells and ponds, into which the cemetery drained. John’s landlady’s came from a swamp, in which her ducks swam and dabbled. That was why John, who had powers of smell as well as eyes, quite early told her he did not like tea (‘He’s a queer lad, our young Mr. Arnison! Says he doesn’t like tea! and he won’t take it!’ ‘Fancy that! Not likin’ tea!’); and he got a reputation for extravagance and childishness because he kept stores of ginger-beer and lemonade, whose lure brought Percy into his room daily. (‘He won’t drink water, either! Drinks nothin’ but ginger-beer and lemonade! a young man what’s goin’ to be a minister, wastin’ his money on trash like that, as if he was a kid! ‘ ‘He must be queer, like!’ ‘Yes I think he is—in some ways. Though, mind you, some of his ways are real nice!’)

Near at hand was the Severn, loveliest and most mystic of British rivers: the one whose roots are deepest in the wildest mountains, the one whose traffic with the ocean is closest and strongest. For it goes out farthest into the great waters, and they in their turn come racing farthest inland.

Even in its low wide reaches, where its waters’ daily commerce is with those of the sea, it is still a river, bordered with red bluffs where the sand-martins build, and high banks crowned with forest. It is never like ‘our poor Thames,’ whose waters become a clotted surge of foulness—a ditch whose name the rustic gods have long forgotten; its sides a thicket of wharves and warehouses. Sturgeon and salmon and lamprey know their way along it. Men ply their small boats still across its surface, studying its shifting moods as they did in the morning of time.

Whenever he was free from holding services or taking tea with some parishioner, John used to climb a hill daily at sunset to catch a glimpse of the wizard stream. Once he saw it fade with such magic swiftness into deep black mystery, as a cloud blotted out the redness, that he wrote a sonnet about

the river, winding dark
With sense of overshadowing deity.

But the sonnet was not a good one—how could he write a good one, in this new preposterous life he was leading? He put it in the fire. (Not in the wastepaper basket; he had seen his landlady going thoughtfully through its contents one by one.)

Finally, Lichlea was in the centre of a famous Hunt, under the shadow of a famous feudalism. Thrice every winter the Hunt met in its street, a pageant of power and well-being; of loveliness of hounds and horses fed and trained until they were like mighty muscular engines bursting with strength; of men and women, some of them taut and lovely as the horses that bore them, and all of them out of a world far above that of the village street whose children and women stared at them from windows and doors and whose men looked up from the fields as they rode by.

Lord Lichlea, from whom the Hunt got its name, had a conscience, as became a feudal magnate, and kept a close eye on the village. January, 1910, had seen one election, with a far from satisfactory result; another election was in preparation. One had to keep an eye on one’s villages. The disgrace of 1906, when even Mr. Henry Chaplin was ejected from the House of Commons, must not be allowed to recur.

2

How close was this watch which Lord Lichlea kept when necessary John discovered. On November 16 Mr. Asquith saw the King, and obtained from him ‘a hypothetical understanding’ that if the Liberals won another election, their third, and the second in this one year of 1910, the King would create enough peers to overbear the House of Lords’ objection to cutting its own political claws. Dissolution and an electoral battle followed swiftly.

Passion ran high, and by mutual consent the law of libel was given something of a holiday. Not only passion ran high; courage did also, and even agricultural England began to wonder if it dare claim its own soul. One day, Mrs. Blake, considerably flustered (for she had been caught in the curlers in which she spent her mornings), told John that Lady Lichlea was waiting to see him in the parlour.

The visitor opened with a few words about hunting prospects. One rarely had frost in the Severn Valley. Only two days had been lost last season, and she did not anticipate that it would be any more this season. All this Mr. Arnison heard respectfully, and did not question.

The conversation took a still more gratifying turn. Lady Lichlea proceeded to ask about the Wez-ley-ans and ‘ your work, Mr. Arnison. Lord Lichlea and I have heard most excellent reports of what you are doing. In fact, Lord Lichlea said, “ I think we should see something of the new Wez-ley-an parson. The Wez-ley-ans are good people, not like—other Dissenters.” Lord Lichlea and I think it so important that there should be educated men like the vicar—and of course you—to guide the people in the villages. Uneducated people are so easily misled, don’t you think, Mr. Arnison?’

Yes, indeed, Mr. Arnison did think so.

This perfectly disgraceful election now—it was bringing strife and party politics where there had been none before, where everyone had stood together for the good of the whole. ‘A little attorney—from Wales,’ who said the most disgraceful things, as Mr. Arnison must remember, at a place called Limehouse, was working to bring about the ruin of everything that ‘has made this dear country which you and I both love, Mr. Arnison.’ ‘This shameful attack on our freedom—and our glorious Constitution! on the House of Lords, which is such a comfort against men who care about nothing but themselves, and nothing about our glorious country! and when we have a young King who is new and inexperienced, and who should be spared all this anxiety and trouble!’

However, a champion had consented to oppose the attorney from Wales; Lord Lichlea’s nephew—‘who is’ (a quick appraisement) ‘ three or four years older than you, I should say—you must be very young, Mr. Arnison, to be a minister, but then of course you are exceptionally able and—and gifted—really clever! Well, this boy—I always call him a boy, though of course he is twenty-five, so he isn’t exactly a boy but a mature man—you will like him, Mr. Arnison! He’s a keen sportsman, as I am sure you are, and——’

Anyway, he was the Conservative candidate, which ought to be good enough, and there was to be a Rally, with tea in the schoolroom. Lady Lichlea invited Mr. Arnison to share in the tea, ‘and afterwards we shall all be on the platform with my nephew, and we should like you, Mr. Arnison—Lord Lichlea specially asked me to invite you, and to say how pleased we should be—to join us, and to say a few words, after the vicar has spoken also—just a few simple words of welcome to the candidate, explaining the country’s danger and that we must all of us stand together to save it, because it is the country that we love.’

John’s heart had somehow hardened, though at first he had been mildly pleased and flattered. He drew himself together, and looked at his visitor. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’

‘You mean that you don’t feel it is quite your work as a clergyman? But if the vicar has consented, Mr. Arnison——’

‘It isn’t that. I am—not a Conservative.’

‘You are—surely!—not a Radical, Mr. Arnison!’

‘Yes. I am a Radical.’

So that was the end of John Arnison the Liberal Conservative.

His visitor rose, but paused at the door. ‘Mr. Arnison, do you think that the clergy have any right to interfere in party politics? ‘

‘I am not—sure. I haven’t thought the question out yet. But it does not arise for me, because in the first place I am not proposing to interfere in them, but have merely refused to interfere in them. And in the second place, I am not a clergyman.’

‘If you are not a clergyman, then what are you doing in Lichlea?’

John thought ruefully, ‘Striving to save my own soul and my comrades’ homeward way—like Odysseus.’ But all he said was, ‘I am not a minister, but I am doing the work of a minister. I dare say I may become a minister.’

There was no sense in attempting fuller explanation. The lives of England’s two nations are so distinct from each other that nothing can make the thoughts and ways of the one intelligible to the other.

So they parted.

In some way that he did not understand, news spread that young Mr. Arnison had told Lady Lichlea that he was a Radical, and had withstood her commands. He found a new respect as he went abroad, and from the men most of all. He was accepted as not altogether an alien in this queer watchful life of the countryside, whose inhabitants, though saying from age to age nothing at all, yet must be accumulating, by inheritance and slow accretion, some sort of decision and attitude. Mere dumbness does not mean that animals have no thoughts. Their thoughts, the villagers felt, Mr. Arnison could to some extent interpret; they felt that he shared them.

3

And let Lady Lichlea have the credit for the fact that in the election which followed he took a part.

He was on the platform when the Liberal candidate came; and would have spoken, had not a spasm of sense warned him that if he did he would be accused of the crime of being a ‘non-voter.’ Let anyone ask a question of an obnoxious kind, and he would be assailed with this shout, ‘Non-voter!’ ‘I am a voter!’ one of the interrupted answered angrily. John could not have so answered.

The election was sharp and angry. But its singing was good-humoured:

Oh, have you heard the news?
It would anyone amuse
To see the Tories how they tremble, O!

and

Arthur Balfour one day
To the People did say,
‘You are taxing the land and we grudge it!
You are putting a tax on
The suffering Saxon!’
Cried the People, ‘Why, that’s our own Budget!’
Then hurrah for this Glorious Budget!
A right little, tight little Budget!
We don’t care a pin!
For the People must win!
And the Lords shall not veto the Budget!

There was also (to the tune of The Bay of Biscay) that fine lyric whose chorus was

All this bom—
Bast was from
The House of Lords to the Commons, O!

and of course the once-famous Land Song:

The Land! the Land! the ground on which we stand!
The Land! the Land! ’twas God Who made the Land!
Why should we be beggars, with the Ballot in our hand?
God made the Land—for the Peeb’ple!

Verse that was unsung played its part also, and spoke to the nation on posters everywhere:

There’s a question that touches us all,
And touches us twice a day:
Whenever you drink a pennorth of tea,
Do you know what you have to pay?
A tax as much as the tea is worth!
And it don’t seem right to me,
To have to pay a pennorth of tax
For drinking a pennorth of tea!

There were other stanzas, but this one will serve. I maintain that it has a fine marching swing. For weeks John’s brain made him step out to its rhythms, even if he were merely walking over to get a book from a shelf.

4

Because of his sympathies and stand, John got to know the schoolmaster, Charlie Venables. A similar experience presently linked them. Lord Lichlea himself called on Charlie, and with some brusqueness told him he wanted the big schoolroom for a meeting.

‘That’s all right,’ said the schoolmaster cheerfully.

Was there any charge? If so, how much?

Venables told him what the school authorities charged.

Eyeing him with suspicion, Lord Lichlea said ‘I’ll send round some of my men to see to the lamps and benches.’

‘Oh, you needn’t do that! If you let me know the time when you want the room, I’ll see to everything.’

‘You’ll see to everything?’

‘Yes. If you hire the room you hire the lamps and benches. It’s my job to see that they are all right, and you can leave it in my hands.’

Lord Lichlea looked hard at him; and decided to chance it. Then, ‘There will be several cars. Do you know where they can be left? There isn’t room’ (as a matter of fact, he said ‘woom’; some people do, and not merely in comic writings) ‘in the street outside.’

Venables thought a minute. ‘Why not leave them in that field outside the Methodist chapel—the one in which they are going to build a Sunday School some time?’

‘But that belongs to the Methodist chapel.’

‘That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to leave cars in! If you like, I’ll ask Mr. Arnison for you. But you may take it that it will be all right.’

So, the morning after the meeting, a groom rode round to the schoolmaster’s and left a couple of rabbits, and then rode round to Mr. Arnison’s and left another couple. The recipients laughed together over the gifts. ‘Decent enough chap, the schoolmaster! Awful Wadical, of course!’ Venables laughed. ‘But not so bad! Take him and that Methodist parson fellow a bwace of wabbits each!’

5

They made a noble use of one of the rabbits; Mrs. Venables put it into a pie which the recipients took off on a picnic. ‘I’ll show you our cathedral city, Arnison, and the workings of democracy,’ said Charlie. They cycled off on a Saturday afternoon.

All cathedral cities are corrupt, and in the West of England for some reason they were then most corrupt of all. Worcester, for example, carried a light-hearted attitude towards the anti-bribery laws so far that she was presently disfranchised. But Worcester was unlucky. She happened to be in the Tower of Siloam’s shadow when that building was tottering.

‘There are half a dozen towns in this West country,’ Charlie explained, ‘where Tories and Liberals are so close together, that whichever wins gets in always by about four votes. Now, at Muncaster, where we’re going, there are just about twenty chaps who, it is known, think it wrong to vote without payment. These chaps turn the election. It’ll be fun to watch them.’

Muncaster was packed with folk, shouting some of them, most wearing favours. Vehicles were rushing about. There was a display of placards. After they had explored the cathedral, Venables took John to a place opposite a pub, where they joined a watching gleeful crowd. Cheers went up as a dapper little fellow crossed the road, and, sidling along as if he were going to pass the pub door, slid suddenly unostentatiously through it.

‘That’s Hargreaves, the Conservative agent,’ explained Venables. ‘He’ll be out again in a few minutes’ time. Then you’ll see Jan Harcourt, the Liberal agent, slip in. Each of those two fellows has to be pretty slick, I can tell you! He has to find out what the other side have offered, and to make a better bid—and, mind you, he has to do it in such a way as to give no one any evidence! Now you watch!’

John watched accordingly, and was much impressed by the modestly evasive activity of the two gentlemen who were in charge.

Finally, the arguments of one side were seen to be the better grounded, and at five minutes before the poll closed the last twenty of the free and independent electors of Muncaster shambled out, amid derisive cheers and hand-clapping, and—some of them under their own power, others with friendly support—filed across the road and into the polling booth. Supporters made a path for them, and greeted each hero by name or nickname.

While they were serving their country, Charles left John for a few minutes. On returning he said, ‘They’ve got five quid apiece, plus the promise of another couple if their man gets in. Don’t ask me how I know, for I am not at liberty to tell you.’

The Liberal candidate was elected by three votes.

John saw in the papers that Hugh was defeated. Labour’s day was only at dawning, and because the candidate was young he had been given a tough constituency to try his teeth on.

Chapter III

1

It was breaking exhausting work, this job of being supposed to know about God the invisible immortal King: of being officially in commerce with the unseen at all times. John was pastor to a humble people, and had charge of half a dozen widely scattered village causes. He was in cyclings oft, in preachings constantly; and in addition was expected to ‘visit.’

The latter he found hardest of all his duties. It brought him daily close to poverty of a mind-racking horror, and to physical weakness and suffering. It brought him close also to that unreason which afflicts the lowly as well as the high and mighty. There was old rheumaticky Mrs. Hendy. John learnt to know her ways early, yet even so she kept a capacity to surprise him. He had been out till midnight three evenings running, preaching to tiny congregations at many miles’ distance; he had looked her up the day before he went, and looked her up again the first evening he was free. She greeted him with a malignant scowl. ‘Let me tell you, young man, you’re a very poor visitor.’ The young man flushed, and said nothing. He managed to recover, and to speak about her health at some length, always an interesting theme to one of two parties who are conversing together. He hoped she was getting rested, and by the rest was feeling better of her rheumatism. ‘I should ’a’ been in bed long ago’ (again that malignant scowl) ‘if you hadn’t a-coomed in.’ (It was about seven in the evening.) John apologised, and made to go. But was detained. ‘Since you’re ’ere you might as well’ (a sniff, part piety, part disapproval) ‘put up a bit prayer before you goes.’

John did as requested; and this was the hardest job of all, and he began more and more to wonder why folk look on the parson’s job as easy. Easy? Whatever the burden on your own spirit, whether of bereavement or anxiety or physical pain or sheer unmitigated tiredness and flagging into unbelief, to have to produce consolation on tap all the time, to be ready to speak to the Father of Spirits, as the mouthpiece of other spirits! There is in all this world no such drain as this!

It was not made easier by the boy’s perception that in some cases (not in all) it was sheer habit, and a feeling that this man was fed and paid to do your praying for you; you might as well have your money’s worth! Not that the money amounted to anything to make a song (or a prayer) about. But there it is; your parson, even your Nonconformist parson, has to be a priest, however he may inveigh against the priestly function: he has to speak on behalf of the people, and to express their thoughts for them, even when they have no thoughts and ‘would ’a’ been in bed long ago if you hadn’t a-coomed in.’

He was a shallow vessel, but the vessel, being articulate and being alive, was striving to thrust itself down into depths where living and eternal waters covered it, and through it became available for others. He was discovering that the Bible which we read with so slick a casualness is an organic existence, breathing and acting from age to age. Not only St. Paul’s words had hands and feet (as Luther observed); the Psalms and historic passages were not all of them dead stuff of bygone civilisations. If you touched them they bled.

2

He came at once in touch with quarrels. Because to squire and retired stockbroker the hamlet pulls its cap it is a mistake to imagine it is all meekness and humility. Bad and inadequate water supply, want of sanitation, the irritation of rubbing shoulders and other parts against the person next to you and always on top of you at those hours of the day when you are most tired, the whiff of disease in the air and the drip-drip-drip and seasonal tempestuous rush of water down eaveless walls of picturesquely thatched cottages, do not make for uninterrupted placidity.

A century hence, civilisation may decide for health and comfort. But for this generation, and up to this generation, it has preferred jails and lunatic asylums, and the signs are that it is going to continue to prefer them, and increasingly.

In Eastbury, inland and away from Severn, lived Douglas Ransom, by trade a greengrocer, but interested in many things. He knew, for example, what birds used this deep-hearted estuary that trenches a road through the Anglo-Welsh marches. (That pair of hoopoes which were shot on Wrekin last year had flitted up-river, all the way from the narrow seas—as you may see them flitting beside your ship through the Red Sea trough in winter, with swift gleeful claps of the wings and sudden liftings of the body, to shoot it forward, as on some invisible slide of air within the air.) Ransom had skill in music also, and played a harmonium in the Methodist church.

When old Mrs. Gurney died, her son-in-law Mr. Cotmore, with whom she had lived, sent a note to Mr. Ransom, of the time of the funeral and the deceased’s favourite hymns. This note was unacknowledged; and when the mourners arrived, there was no organist and the harmonium was locked. Ransom had found he had work all day in another village, and had taken the key with him. Mrs. Gurney was therefore buried without musical honours.

This was in the week before John came; and he arrived to find in full blast the nastiest of rows. Mrs. Cotmore’s uncle, James Beardmore, a gnarled fierce spirit abounding in wrath, had reinforced Cotmore s protest with a letter of his own, setting out his view of the episode. Beardmore had a reputation for plain speaking and spiky unpleasantness, and it was the considered judgment of the village that he had now achieved his masterpiece. Ransom, whose rôle was dignity that refused to ‘demean itself,’ as he put it, ‘by entering into, controvversy with a ruffian,’ replied that he had ‘not seen fit to attend a mythical funeral.’

This note was put before John as Exhibit No. 1, and Mr. Cotmore was in an ecstasy of rage as he flourished it. John thought that Mr. Ransom by ‘mythical’ had probably meant ‘hypothetical.’ However that may be, Mr. and Mrs. Cotmore had taken the cross-country bus to Devizes, and there in the Public Library had borrowed a dictionary, and looked up the word ‘mythical.’ ‘Mythical: fictitious, purely and solely imaginary.’ Other shades of meaning are sanctioned, but the dictionary starts off with this, and starts off clearly and firmly. The Cotmores therefore took it that it was alleged that their mother had not died, and that the funeral was a bogus affair. Mrs. Cotmore, with her husband gazing fiercely beside her, broke down and wept; and both of them with tears told of all that the dead had been to them, and of how they missed her.

John, to whom death was an unfamiliar thing, was shocked to the depth of his being. He was aghast that Christian men and women should square, and bandy savage letters and speeches, over what was so sacred.

He called on Ransom, who snorted when John stressed the Cotmore affection for Mrs. Gurney.

‘No one but themselves knew it! They gave the old girl a hell of a time, and were always saying what a nuisance she was, and how she took up their best room and what an expense she was! Yes, and her own daughter was the worst of the two!’

John, pained by such callousness, was sure Mr. Ransom was mistaken.

Ransom looked at him in silence, and then remarked, not unkindly, ‘Ah, I see that you don’t know so much as yet! You don’t know how hard it is on the poor when they gets old and knows they’re a burden on their own flesh and blood!’ Another shocking comment; and yet to John, by degrees learning to look outside that all-absorbing world inside his mind, and learning also to look even on himself detachedly, it seemed afterwards that it was from the time of this comment that Ransom began to soften and make concessions.

Ransom explained, with involution and repetition, that he played that harmonium without remuneration. People who wanted funeral playing ought to recognise this, ought to write humbly ‘and not give orders as if I was their servant’: ought to offer to make some payment. He might not have accepted the payment. He indicated that on this point he kept an open mind. But it ought, to have been proposed. In his degree and in his sphere, Ransom was an artist and had the artist’s respect for his function. ‘If those Cotmores—and Jimmy Beardmore!—think they’re going to trample on Doug Ransom, they can think again!’

Over this trivial squabble John fussed himself silly, the whole village and neighbouring villages silently watching. Distressed that men and women could quarrel over a new-made grave, he haunted Eastbury, interviewing both parties. Hopefully he got all the belligerents into the one room, having ascertained that before this scrap they were close friends. Surely old kindness would reawaken irresistibly if once they were face to face! But all of them, and worst of all Jim Beardmore, outdid themselves in fury; and, ignoring John, ripped to bits each other’s characters and careers, and with exultation tossed the pieces widespread. They spoke out all that each had spoken separately to John, and said also a deal that he had not heard and was terrified to hear now. Each said unforgivable unforgettable things, nor was Mrs. Gurney’s character spared out of delicacy on account of her so recent death. Ransom’s father and mother, too, came into the discussion. It was hard to say how or why; but they came and were accepted as an essential part of the argument, in which they were very prominent.

Having done all he could, in despair John washed his hands of the matter, and with heavy heart went off to his work elsewhere. Three days later, Venables came into his study laughing. ‘Remember those folk in Eastbury, who were fighting about old Mrs. Gurney’s funeral?’

Yes, indeed. John did remember. He sighed, and looked up sadly from Principal Fairbairn’s Philosophy of the Christian Religion.

‘Well, I was in Eastbury yesterday, and I saw Cotmore and Ransom, along with Beardmore, going arm-in-arm into the Blue Dragon. They’re all as thick as thieves again.’

‘But——’ John began. He told Venables of that appalling meeting when everything short of physical battery had taken place. It was not possible (he shuddered) that either side should forget the dreadful words and charges! If one-tenth of the latter were true, all of them should be in prison, serving life-sentences!

‘Shucks!’ said Charlie. ‘The trouble began before old Mrs. G.’s death, and both sides got off their chests a whole heap of stuff that had been sitting there like a pork chop and poisoning them for months and months. Then they made friends, see? Because there was nothing left that they were bursting to get said! And so everyone felt happy!’

‘But it wasn’t only Ransom and the Cotmores. There was James Beardmore!’ And John shuddered again.

‘Ah, I suppose he was—pretty rich and fruity? Said a lot of things, and said them well?’

John nodded.

‘He would do! Snarly Jimmy, everyone calls him. Well, if it’s any comfort to you, Snarly Jimmy, who’s never had a good word for any parson before, is going about swearing by Mr. Arnison!’

‘But I did nothing! Except mismanage everything by getting them all together when they were in the most unchristian mood you can imagine!’

And Venables looked at John as Ransom had looked at him. With a kind of wonder that anyone should be so simple and so unqualifiedly naive: telling other older folk how they should order their lives! and yet somehow so decent under his simpleness and inadequacy.

‘I’m not so sure about your doing nothing! Nor is the village, which laid off all work for a month to watch those donkeys braying and kicking! Anyway, I tell you they all had tea together in the Blue Dragon yesterday, including Mrs. Cotmore! For she came along by herself, a bit afterwards, and joined them! She likes a bit of rum to her tea.’

Chapter IV

Very early one morning, as Easter was on them, Charlie Venables awakened John. ‘I’ve borrowed a horse and trap, and Jimmy Jackman is driving us. Come and see the Bore.’

This was the day when (weather favouring) they should see the biggest tide of the year. It should have been big enough last Sunday, when it turned out to be but a white snout pushing up the Dean Forest side. But the belief of years is not easily dispelled, and they looked (despite that failure) for a towered and crested wave rearing its twelve feet of marching water. Jimmy vouched for bores ‘twice as high as a man’s head!’

The day was fresh and young—

the wind blows cold
Whiles the morning does unfold.

But the wind, though sharp, was slight. The Bore, Jimmy admitted, in so nearly dead an air would not be a monster.

At The Hock they hitched up the trap, and raced across a field. As they reached a stile Jimmy halted them. ‘Listen!’ They were too late. That roar told them that their fastest pace would be too slow to see anything but afterwash. ‘Listen!’

Listen, Sabrina fair, where thou aft sitting
Under the glassy cool translucent wave!

The Embassy of Ocean, thy lover, is clamouring and effecting entrance!

Severn here made a loop of several miles, ‘the Horseshoe.’ ‘Elvers!’ observed Charlie, as they hurried (back in the trap) across its bowstring. In the lanes, wriggling though many wheels and hooves had gone over them, were tiny eels. Sabrina was a great purveyor of elvers, esteemed a delicacy; and pails that carried them had slopped over.

The road was a marsh, the brown ash of yesterday’s spume showing where Severn daily transgressed the bounds men had given her for a habitation. Traps, cycles, men and women on horseback—the sharpness of the hour and the human keenness nettling their strong lovely beasts—were hurrying along. That minatory roar was chasing them.

As they reached the Anchor, at Epney, the party in the trap saw they were just in time. The Bore came flashing and falling like a trampling cascade. Before it raced exultant gulls, heralds to an invasion. Invasion it was, for twice a day Ocean stormed admittance, and this was his announcer. It was Ærgir sweeping inland: queerly deliberate and purposeful and personal.

Boats were loosed swiftly, by boys daring to front the shock of the Sea’s outriders. Overhead flew a shouting covey of plovers, behind came a dozen teal. Horses moved restlessly under their riders. The Bore whipped over a narrow spit of sand, gathered itself together—and advanced in three snow-capt squadrons, pawing up its channel. It swung past. And at its side, unseen till almost at the watcher’s feet—racing as if with insecure foothold, along the shelving beach and a good yard ahead of the whiteness—rushed a swish of inky water, digging up the shores as it went. In an earlier generation one might have been allowed to compare it to a demon dragging a captured soul onward, or a black slave leading at a run a steed at exercise!

And now thrust in the tide’s fulness, a moving plateau of which the Bore was but the jutting front and outlier. This fulness brought with it how much else! Ocean, a debtor grown repentant, was returning the River her own. He added interest: not a wave but carried its driftwood, its straw hat or thatch, strange offerings to the Maiden Goddess of Comus! Or was all this but what Sabrina in her mischief and marauding (for such moods she has, as Milton notes, though he ignores her real purpose, when she

oft at eve
Visits the herds along the twilight meadows)

looted and lifted away, afterwards flinging it aside? Could it be that Ocean was merely saying, ‘Take your own rubbish again’?

The river filled up steadily. Soon it would overwash its banks. As John and his companions went, a brakeload of sightseers arrived from Stroud, and with them a posse of cyclists; they had missed the Bore by five minutes. ‘Five minutes!’ Charlie informed them.

Their grief was a pity to see. But they had learnt a great lesson, that time and tide wait for no man.

John and Jim and Charlie continued for half an hour to meet other hopeful ones labouring up, some carrying cameras. To each and all, Charlie, with what they felt was an unseemly joyaunce, shouted the precise extent of their lateness. Meanwhile, Sabrina proceeded to gather in her arrears of tribute.

As they dismounted at Jackman’s farm, to breakfast there, a boy brought John a note. He opened it, and read, ‘Mr. Randle is seriously ill. Mrs. Randle said you was to know.’

Chapter V

1

Isaac Randle took thirteen weeks to die. Most of the spring and early summer, in fact. And his dying was John’s chief memory in after-days.

He was an old faithful opinionated quaint toiling humble chap, officious and self-important in a harmless fashion. A slow-thinking slow-speaking, portentous saint.

He had a right to be portentous, and knew this. He was John’s leading layman, and the leading citizen of the village. He had begun as a linen draper in a small way, and his shop had blossomed into the main emporium of Lichlea, selling groceries, stationery, books (Horner’s Penny Stories, the works of Claudius Clear, and Books for the Bairns). He had become a man of substance, and the Sunday School was his child and creation.

As soon as he became ill he decided that he was going to die, and gathered himself together in fine old patriarchal manner. The dying, as I have said, took thirteen weeks. He enjoyed every minute of it.

Every evening, by his request, the Sunday School gathered outside his open window, and sang the hymn he had chosen for his funeral. ‘Fading away like the stars of the morning.’ Fading away, like those stars in the light of the sun:

Only remembered by what we have done.

The old man, lying back on his pillows, sipped his own lingering passing like a rich sweet wine. ‘Fading away like the stars of the morning. Fading away,’ he whispered to himself and to his wife and to John. ‘Only remembered by what we have done’—his Sunday School, the children who had passed through it and were now working as farm hands, domestic servants, or wives. Some of them of course were backsliders. But not all.

Death was something John watched from outside. It was very very sad, and rather dreadful. He was not yet where he could share the thoughts of the spirit that knew it was moving from this life, and was content to go.

He did all he could, and was in the sick-room continually.

There was a night when Isaac Randle all but died. ‘I had a dream,’ he told John next morning. ‘I dreamt I was a-glidin’ down a green slope. Beautiful slope it was! It was evening. The shades of even were a-comin’ on, and the mists was risin’. They were a-risin’ from the river. And I reached the brink. But I didn’t go over. I was a-brought back. There were prayers a-bein’ hoffered for me. Many prayers. Of God’s people. They—brought me back.’

It was a green slope—beautiful slope it was; and it led down to a river. To what river but the noble stream that flows not merely through England’s glorious Western marches, but through the love of their sons and daughters? The river that carries on its breast deeper and more ancient memories than any other in these islands! In our dreams, when life and its preoccupations are at last over, we let the heart speak—or rather, it speaks of itself, and asks no leave.

2

There were other things that happened, of course, besides Isaac Randle’s dying, and the strangulation of John’s own spirit as he wrung out of texts, week after week, messages for men and women older than he was and living starker harder lives.

He was surprised one day by a visit from Douglas Ransom, who explained that it was early closing, and would Mr. Arnison like to have a look at a hill where there were whole carpets of pasque-flowers? They sallied forth together, and saw the flowers.

John remembered the tradition that they grow where Danish blood has been spilt. Of course. This village was Lichlea—Lykelea? The Field of Dead Bodies?

Shall one day from this sorrow’s depth arise
Beauty, to brighten day with purple dyes?

He did not like the repetition of ‘day’, and could get no further. He wanted something that would bring out the picture of the Dane lying dead beneath the pasque-flower meadow—as some time this present heavy experience through which his life was passing would lie at the root of the happiness he refused to think did not await him. The hillside with those hundreds of deep-stained blossoms lying along it, rejoiced him for a month of Sundays (and this is not a mere conventional expression, for the man who has to preach on those Sundays).

Ransom, finding how rich was his pleasure, took him also to Oaksea in fritillary time. They met hordes of cyclists with bunches of the lilies on their handle-bars. ‘Ah,’ said a local inhabitant, seeing them dismount, ‘you’ve come for some of they snakesheads! Well, they’re there, right enough! In Snakeshead Meadow.’

They were. Growing like grass beside a stripling tributary of Thames: mottled bells in profusion, and a starry spangle of white ones. John did not gather any, but stood there in happiness gazing.

In May Charlie Venables took him for a long walk in darkness, to hear one of the venturesome Gloucestershire nightingales. Then in June Ransom showed him a roadside cutting where spikes of butterfly orchis stood out of straggly briars and bent; and John had a bowl of them in his room, exhaling their glory of fragrance when night came.

Mistletoes, magpies—he was getting to know this lovely West country even deeper than he had known it at school, and to see its features—the trench of Severn cutting through the wooded hills, the flying watchful birds, the mistletoe massed on the aged apple-trees, on black poplars, even on hawthorn bushes. It was a good country, and a man might be content to abide here for ever. It is a country to which one returns for the last years of this incarnation, as one returns to Florence or Sicily or Edinburgh.

In May and June he had some cricket, and the village would have liked him to have had more. Mr. Arnison filled a gap in the team; he was that pearl beyond price, a longfield who judged the ball the moment it left the bat, who got to it if it were within human range, and who held it if he put a hand to it. As to his batting, it was a bit uncertain perhaps. ‘He seems to think he’s got to start scoring right away. But there I when he hits he hits hard, if you gets my meaning! There’s no stopping short of the boundary, for him! And a four’s a four, ain’t it? And a couple of fours is as good as what Jimmy Jackman makes when he’s been in for a whole half-hour, nicking them away by ones here and there!’ ‘He’s a good lad,’ said Jimmy’s father, who happened to hear this far from excessive tribute to his own son’s prowess. He was not referring to that son.

It was a pity that Mr. Arnison was unavailable for the ‘Coop’ match against Saul. Saturday is the favourite day for funerals; most people can get off from work, and you can treat the dead with proper respect. John had a funeral, and not a Methodist funeral, either—a fact which the Village resented. The Congregational minister of another village wished to visit his wife’s people, and asked John to officiate for him at a graveside. Only too often there were funerals on Saturday, when Mr. Arnison would have been so useful in the longfield.

After the funeral he looked in on Mr. Randle whose own end was plainly drawing near. In Mrs. Randle’s worn-out anxious eyes he read this fact. Randle lay in almost coma, but as he came up John noticed him twitch and stir wretchedly. He looked for the cause, and saw a fly on the old man’s baldness. ‘Shall I kill this fly?’ he asked. He was astonished by the tremulous passion of Mrs. Randle’s answer of appeal. ‘Oh, if you only could, Mr. Arnison!’ Mr. Arnison could, very easily. The fly, who for weeks had been dealing with a dying and helpless man and a feeble shaking old woman, did not realise how the position had changed. As John made a movement of the air, he rose lazily, intending to circle round as aforetime, and to settle to his crimes again. He was swished up into a fist instead, and dealt with.

The old woman came forward eagerly. ‘Have you got him, Mr. Arnison? Oh, have you caught him?’ Mr. Arnison showed that he had. What followed astonished him still more. She took hold of her husband, and quite literally shook him and dragged him back from death’s door. ‘Isaac! Isaac!’ ‘What is it?’ he asked at last. ‘Mr. Arnison’s a-killed that fly that was a-worryin’ you! And in the deepest tones of thankfulness that John had ever heard came the answer. ‘Thank God!’

That fly had driven two helpless old people to something very close to madness.

John, with Mrs. Randle bustling on his heels, looked round the room, which had been shut for weeks, and found two more flies, very somnolent, very satisfied with themselves and their security, doing an occasional drowsy buzz up and down a window. They joined their fellow.

The village soon heard all about Mr. Arnison, Flycatcher. Grimm’s ‘Seven at a Blow’ tailor was not so fabulous, after all!’ Well, of course he caught them! Haven’t you seen him in the longfield? Why, when he went out to field substitute for Tewkesbury, ’cause they were one short, our captain hit a ball up and started to walk away. “’Ere, what are you a-doin’?” asked their skipper. “That ball hasn’t been caught yet!” “No, but it’s goin’ to be!” our chap says. “I ain’t got any more interest in it.” And it was! So afterwards our fellows all says Mr. Arnison isn’t to be lent as substitute any more. Why should we lend ’em the very best scout we have ourselves, and a man better than any they have? “Oh, if we had only had him against Saul, when Jimmy Jackman dropped that sitter, from the chap as afterwards made 35!’

For the match in question, which had eliminated Lichlea from the ‘Coop’ competition, had proved to be a Dead March in Saul, as Charlie Venables put it. It had been a procession for the visitors, and when they were in the field three longfield catches had been dropped.

Chapter VI

1

A change had come over English Nonconformity, and over Methodism, even conservative Wesleyan Methodism. The apocalyptic fervours and terrors of John’s childhood were dying fast. Religion was being humanised, and was growing hopeful and full of quiet comfortable dreams, for mankind seen as marching good-temperedly towards the millennium. This was Liberalism’s great day, the only day it ever really had, and it would have been strange if the spirit of Liberalism, whose leaders were so largely in Nonconformist ranks, had not taken possession of the Free Churches. It did take possession of them. The New Theology controversy could hardly be as yet called officially dead. But already it was being tacitly accepted that you could reject the Virgin Birth, even scornfully reject it, and reject Eternal Punishment, and even hedge on the Divinity of Christ, and remain a sound evangelical scriptural Christian. All that mattered was belief in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, and acceptance of the fact that Christ was God, and that if you looked at him you saw all of God that you ever would or could see, or need ask to see.

That there had been ardour and passion once, and pain beyond all measure, John could not altogether forget. He cycled to Gloucester once with Charlie Venables, and they stood before the Memorial to Bishop Hooper, whom a former age had burnt. The faggots were green, and Hooper had taken long to die; in this place, in this England of the West which was so pleasant and lovely, a man of their own blood had prayed, ‘For the love of God, good people, give me more fire!’

But those times, when a man must pay a price for his belief, and must be prepared for that price to be all he could give, were gone for ever! The Law of Progress was the law of life. Once an advance had been made, there was no going back. The nations had left behind them the Dark Ages when for religious and political beliefs men slew each other and haled each other to judgment. The only martyrs in recent years were Passive Resisters, whose martyrdom was half-joyous excitement. Had not Punch expressed the general feeling (well, anyway, of the classes that matter)?’ “Have you any cheap marters to-day?” Woman at fruit-stall, looking round to see: “No, we’re just out of passive resisters.”’

2

John’s theology was loosening fast from its foundations of fundamentalism, and he was aware that what he believed and what these simple folk believed were two different matters. And that if they once guessed what was in his mind concerning ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints,’ they would not be able to see the distinction between him and an unbeliever. Yet he was sincere in his conviction that ‘in essentials’ their faith was one and the same and grounded on the same rock of truth and love. He was sure also that the Christian religion, which for so long had seemed shaken by the discoveries of science and the assaults of criticism, had survived those shocks, which indeed had helped it by freeing it of ‘accretions’ (that blessed word which the New Theologians had made so comforting!), so that now Christians could proceed to the Regeneration of the Age.

The word with which they were strengthening their souls was this, that God was Christ. No man had seen God at any time, and the revelation of Himself which God has left in the world, and worst of all in man and history, was not one to bring peace and happiness. Therefore close your eyes to all that, and look on Christ only! And remember, Christ is—God. Look hard and close and long and always, at Galilee, and most of all at Calvary; and there you see God!

How far away the world has strayed from the God whom you see there! That God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. This was the most amazing thing of all, that there had been historically this irruption of the Divine into the human, which was so pitiful and so full of heart-break!

It was the historical that stirred John with a wonder that never ceased or grew less. Men and women seemed so real, they walked the roads and spoke with one another, they engaged in surpassingly vigorous activity; and they faded out of your eyes and out of one another’s eyes, and the past, even the past of only yesterday, became a shadow and less than a shadow! You read in the books that Alexander stormed Tyre and crucified the defenders round its walls: that the Prince Consort wanted Tennyson to become Poet Laureate: that Ladysmith was relieved: that England beat Australia by one wicket. It was all merely words! Signifying—now that it was over—nothing!

Into this shadow-world Reality had come. The Word had been made flesh and had tabernacled among us. Over that Prologue to John’s Gospel John’s mind lingered, as the cadences sank in—the tones of an old man thinking aloud, and going over again the events which had laid their spell on his young manhood and made him theirs for ever.

Where did Christendom get its perversion of what it styles God’s will? From the vision of human life, very likely; and if so, very logically. But certainly not from the Life that was once lived in Galilee. The mountain slope rising from Gennesaret, a tangle of flowers—the laughing, all but conscious, all but speaking, rustle of the waves, and the all but childishly gay and mischievous response of the oleanders nodding above them, the stiffer grey-blue beauty of the agnuscastus—Jesus thought these were part of God, part of that ‘will of the Father’ which brought into his words such a happy tenderness. He had not where to lay his head, we know that. But it was not poverty such as you see English preacher, when ragged children are barefoot in a Northern slum in winter, or a woman (as I saw her recently) turns out the garbage tin waiting on the pavement edge, in the hope that somewhere in its dust and broken crockery is a strip of cloth worth salvage. It was not squalor and sordidness. It could be, of course, when times and seasons were unfriendly. But for the most part poverty, even dire poverty, so long as it keeps short of famine, is a different kind of thing in the warm South from what it is in Bethnal Green or Edinburgh or Oakenshaw. Otherwise, how could the Captain of our Salvation have walked so closely with God? You cannot do that if you are submerged in the close-textured misery of our civilisation. Or you can do it only in the terrific memory of Calvary, forgetting Galilee.

But you can do it, as naturally as drawing breath, in Palestine! God is there a God of the sunlight and the thymy hills and myrtle-crammed ravines.

The world which the writer of that Gospel lived in became real to John Arnison also. The oleanders and poplar thickets beside Jordan made it a world that strengthened and exhilarated; he could forget that we have driven it into Gothic church and red-brick chapel. He read of the Baptizer’s mission; he could see him in the wilderness, its dry clean airs about him. The pity and triumph of this man’s life had softened even the traitor Jew who afterwards told the story of his people’s ruin!

John Arnison could see again that meeting on Jordan’s bank, when the prophet who had been asking the rich and religious why they of all people were now fleeing from the wrath to come (like vipers scuttling out of the scrub when it has been fired), flung down all his severity and assuredness, and said only, ‘I have need to come to Thee! and comest Thou to me?’ The Word Made Flesh—God Himself, Who had entered this world and this shadow life which is so spectral and transient—came to John, and accepted his baptism, making Himself one with that repentance! And so God came still, to each one of us who would receive Him! John Arnison could believe that, and could preach it.

In that wide breezy world of Cotswold and Severn he could make the Word’s coming seem reality, could show this God—the only God who mattered!—uttering Himself through the ages, and in life after life.

There was a week-night meeting, a special one to which all neighbouring Free Church causes sent their quota of speakers and hearers. John was the first speaker. The pity of Francis Thompson’s life and recent death, and of those verses, ‘O World Invisible,’ found on a scrap of paper, were fresh in literary people’s minds. It is not easy to stir those people’s minds, but it has happened, and had happened now. A journal which had rejected Thompson’s Essay on Shelley, twenty years before, had now printed it. George Wyndham had testified that it was ‘the most important contribution made to English literature for twenty years’; ‘and for the first time in a long life of seventy-two years’ the journal which had despised it, because of it and it alone passed into a second edition. People were thinking of the poet whose life had been passed in such poverty and often starvation that only a woman of the streets had befriended him when he was lowest.

John, in that over-varnished dimness of a village chapel which was neither Gothic nor Grecian but pure English Puritan, crowded with farm labourers and wool-mill workers and their wives, told them of the poet and of his nights on Thames Embankment. After him spoke a Methodist lay preacher, a Severn boatman and fisherman, a thunderous, grimly orthodox hammer of Popery and modernism. A great preacher, though!

A great preacher who was not quite sound in his sources, perhaps. He spoke much of Dan’el, and ‘those Three dear Children in the Fire. I forgets their names—they’re queerish names, and hard, like—but one on ’em was Dan’el. I knows that, anyway! Dan’el was sure to be where trouble was, if the dear Lord was in that trouble! So one on ’em was Dan’el.’ He seemed happy to have touched certainty in a swaying dubious world.

Then his tones grew very gentle as he spoke of ‘that dear brother in London, of whom we have just heard, who saw our dear Lord walking on the water of the Thames, like as some of us have seen Him walking on Severn.’ So John had managed to say something that was understood.

In after years he remembered the tolerance of the poor. They had an unrivalled knack of not seeing his ignorance and irrelevance. What they saw was that the boy in their midst meant well. He had not much to give them, but, such as it was, in the line of the Methodist ministry’s tradition he gave it with all his strength, keeping back nothing.

Chapter VII

1

The village half-wit, as the chief duty attaching to his post, was a mighty cadger. On John’s arrival in Lichlea he had called, and dancing up and down announced, ‘It’s my birthday, Brother! my birthday!’ John had produced a shilling.

But had refused to disburse for the same reason further shillings three days later and at other birthdays.

The half-wit was the only person who styled him ‘Brother.’ The better-brained were too respectful to Mr. Arnison. ‘Say good-evening! Quick!’ John heard a horrified elder sister adjure a younger child as he cycled past in the dusk. If there had been a Lichlea Who’s Who, he would have had large space in it.

In mid-July came Feast Week. Two slate clubs converged on Lichlea, and on alternate days marched fanfaring through its street. On a scrap of public green sprang up booths: the air burst into a mist of roundabouts: whistles blew and tinny music blared. All roads in Gloucestershire led to Lichlea.

At the head of both processions marched the village half-wit, preternaturally solemn. Wildly excited, he called on John, and asked, ‘Are you going to treat me, Brother?’

‘Yes. To-night,’ John assured him.

On the morning of Sunday that ended Feast Week, John found outside the church the Python Man. Also, the Python Man’s wife and daughter.

The Python Man was tall and grave. His skull showed plainly through tightly drawn skin. He spoke with an American accent (which I shall not attempt to reproduce) of the heavy kind which is not by birthright but is acquired. The Senior Pythoness was vast and without shape, and her clothes festooned a waistless body loosely. She said no word, but at important places in the talk which followed she nodded significantly. The Junior Pythoness? If you happened to note two points of sunken brightness that were its eyes you could see that the mass was alive. She proved it, by two contributions to the conversation.

The Python Man merely wanted to tell a story. He was like the Ancient Mariner; he had to go through the world telling his story. And John Arnison, as he was beginning to discover, was one of those people to whom other people do tell stories. Some men and women are like that.

Mr. Stephen Marett, local preacher and a good fellow, saw Mr. Arnison in talk with three earnest-looking strangers, and came along and joined the party. He acted as Chorus; he said ‘Of course! of course!’

‘When I were a mere slip of a boy,’ observed the Python Man, ‘I hated my home and my parents.’

‘Of course! of course!’ said Mr. Marett encouragingly.

‘So I gave my father a piece of my mind.’

‘Of course! of course!’

‘And then I ran away! To America.’

‘Of course! of course!’

‘And thurr I went—utterly to the bad.’

‘Of course! of course!’ (One does in America. Utterly to the bad.)

‘I went in’ (this very briskly and with gusto) ‘for horse-racing.’

‘Of course! of course!’

‘And drinking, father!’ The Junior Pythoness’s first remark.

The Python Man’s story swept majestically on, out of the mist and hum of daughterly comment and local preacher’s agreement. On a visit to England he had been converted, and after conversion had not dared to return to a land crammed with wickedness and temptation. ‘So the Lord told me to buy a python.’

‘Of course! of course!’

‘A what?’ asked John bewildered.

‘A python. A large snake.’ The Python Man illustrated. ‘Feeds on rabbits and big rats, which it squashes and then swallers. I kills them first,’ he added.

‘Of course! of course!’

‘Ah, yes. And what did you do with your python?’

‘I shows it. It’s my living! I go in with one of these shows as is touring England, and I pay what they make me pay—for to be with them; you understand? And me and my python has a place at the back when they pitch their camp.’

‘I know,’ said Mr. Marett, who had seen them in their professional capacity. ‘Between the World’s Fattest Woman and the Living Skeleton?’

The Python Man nodded; into his eyes came a rapt expression. His saga took on exalted solemnity.

‘And before I shows my python—always!—I pray to the Lord Jehovah. “O Lord, send along lots o’ folk—to see my python!” Always I ask Him that. Always! For I wouldn’t show my python without asking the Lord first!’

The Junior Pythoness made her second comment. Her body swaying excitedly, like that of a precocious child being self-consciously original, she said, ‘For we can’t none of us do nothing without His help, can we, sir?’ She ended, and was breathless.

As when a wave, sweeping in over oceanic immensities, rises to its towering summit, came the climax. ‘And the Lord always—sends along—lots o’ folk—to see my python! And though they always puts me in a poor place where they think no one will go until he’s tired of everything else, the people comes—to see my python! Yes, sir! For you can’t get round the Lord, that’s certain! I makes my prayer. And the people come! Lots and lots of them. To see my python! So that’ (look and voice attained their triumph, and amid his listeners’ hush the Python Man moved to his solemn conclusion) ‘we not only get enough to eat!’ He paused.

‘Yes?’ said John.

‘Yes?’ said the local preacher.

‘We get plenny to eat! We get—plenny to eat!’

Senior and Junior Pythoness swayed corroboration. Indeed, it seemed likely.

John’s anthropomorphic mind saw a shrouded shadowy figure moving among the gaping rustics, and tapping one after one on the shoulder. ‘I want you now to go to the back and watch a python eat a rabbit.’ But this was no time for amusement. The Python Man was dead in earnest; and he conveyed somehow, through all simplicity, an awed feeling that this absurd group—man and shapeless women-folk, python and accessories—were going their way through this mysterious world not without nobility.

The Python Man, slowly and with pain, as he recalled times of stress and mental fighting—yet with joy and courage, as he remembered how he had come through them—told of men who assailed his faith. Men in the shows with which he travelled—men who came to see his ptokophagous colleague and who discovered (for he left alone no chance of preaching it) his religion. They had cunning scoffs and questions. ‘They ask me where Cain got his wife. And if I really think the whale could swaller Jonah, like my python swallers his rabbits. And I never had no education, so it’s hard for me sometimes to know what to say. But I pray—always I pray! “O Jehovah Jireh, as Thou didst help Thy prophets of old time, so help me and give me Thy words!” And the words come—always! So that even men what have had education—yes, real book-infidels——’

‘What?’ asked John.

‘Book-infidels. Men what have read books and lost their love of God. Yet God has told me what to say even to them! Even to book-infidels! O Lord!’ prayed the Python Man, ‘may we do nothing without Thy connivance!’

The episode of course was preposterous, and shows up the absurdity of the Christian religion. No God, if there can be a God, could possibly bother about three people simple to the point of bordering on imbecility. He might conceivably, as an experiment in creation, let them come into existence, but once that had happened He would regard them as sub-significant, like the beasts of the field whom He has created merely for man to do what he likes with.

In any case, a Christian Python Man is a self-contradiction. You can have a Christian Soldier, a Christian Master of Foxhounds, a Christian Collector of Trophies of Gun and Chase. But not a Christian Python Man; for when a python eats a rabbit, this is cruel. I hope I have made what I think quite clear.

So they drifted out of John’s life, and he saw them no more. The Python Man had told his story of God’s love and pity. And like the Ancient Mariner—like the Scholar Gipsy—for all I know, he may be wandering over England still, answering book-infidels, showing his python at sixpence a rabbit (threepence for children if accompanied by parents or school teachers).

2

That night Isaac Randle died. John was with him during the late evening. It was a moving experience, shot through with occasional touches of what was not so moving. The dying man brought out for the last time his lifelong heresy, his one heresy. It related to the Miracle of the Gadarene Swine. ‘He hadn’t ought to have done that, Our Lord hadn’t! Pigs is property, and them pigs weren’t his’n! And pigs is what the small man lives by, mostly—and it’s these Tariff Reformers, that would put up the price of sharps and offals, that would make pig-breeding dearer! I always say, sir, Our Lord had no right to send all them devils into all them swine! ’Twasn’t right, and you won’t get me to say as ’twas!’

To Isaac Randle, the village martinet, the Sunday School’s Founder and Superintendent, glaring grimly at those rambunctious musters until they quietened respectfully, ‘And Mister Isaac softened to a smile’—to Isaac Randle, the village millionaire (he was believed to be making, clear, four pound a week), property was sacred.

But this was a last assertion of original sin. Once he had got it out of his brain, the old man drew towards the solitude where his spirit had no friend except the unseen which he served and trusted. ‘His servants shall serve Him,’ he whispered. ‘And they shall see His face. And His name shall be—in their foreheads.’

It came to that at the end. What one had done so poorly and brokenly here—standing behind one’s counter in one’s apron and weighing out sugar and tea—or on the Sunday School dais, browbeating rowdy urchins and trying to make one’s voice heard above their tumult—it had been an inadequate wavering thing, this service, but how it entered on fulness. That was the only reward—continued service—which was worthy of God towards us; and it was to be given us. And Isaac Randle would see the face of deity—as Socrates about to drink the hemlock had imagined for himself (in his land where the gods themselves were visible, and not mere idols in temples). God’s name would be in Isaac Randle’s forehead.

Shortly after John said good-night to him, the little grocer passed into unconsciousness which continued until some three hours past midnight, when it finished in death. On the Thursday (early closing day) they buried him, and the Sunday School children sang ‘Fading away like the stars of the morning.’ It was easy, and almost inevitable, to see the dead man’s spirit looking on in eager delight. This village was his world, the only world he knew or cared about; and into this world he had poured his seventy years of life. And this last scene of all he had lived through so often and so often, foreseeing every moment of it! ‘Fading away like the stars of the morning. . . . Only remembered by what we have done.’ These children would remember it; and so his work would live on.

John was surprised, a year later, to get a letter, from a lady in West Africa of whom he had never heard, thanking him’ for all your great kindness to my dear grandfather Mr. Randle.’ The letter breathed deep sincerity and gratitude. It seemed a lot of fuss to make ‘over the killing of a couple of flies,’ he remarked to himself. But it made him happier.

Chapter VIII

1

The days went by bringing incident, and with it friendship. And like a river at dusk, drawing down its own cloud and the strangeness of far countries where its waters have been gathered, they carried with them some mystic quality. Nothing that you could have called wisdom or definite knowledge: yet something that slid into the mind’s inmost recesses, and built up there awareness and maturity.

John met in his own fields Tom Swales the prosperous farmer, and they talked together. ‘Yesterday morning, when you were preaching on that text, “They shall hunger and thirst no more,” those words, sir, went deep somehow. For the very day before you spoke, I was working in my high meadow and I got terrible hungry, and I said to one of my men, “Have you anything left in your handkerchief, Jack?” And he opened it, and found a dry crust which he hadn’t wanted at his midday dinner, and he gave it me and I ate it. And I remembered when I was a boy of seven, at my first job, scaring crows for two shillings a week, and how clemmed I used to get, for there was thirteen of us and it was as much as my mother could do to feed us. And I remembered, “They shall hunger and thirst no more,” and I found my eyes were full of tears Don’t you worry, sir! you go on preaching! Even if you say nothing, the people know you mean to say something.’

John had to hold weekly ‘class-meetings,’ and in his Lichlea one the village undertaker and village policeman met. ‘I should like to say, sir,’ said the undertaker, ‘that last week, when you weren’t able to be here, Mr. Smith here led in prayer for the first time, and very uplifting and helpful it were!’

‘That it were!’ said the wheelwright. And so said all.

John looked at Mr. Smith, the policeman: a vast silent man, who could hardly be supposed equal to his main job, which was that of leaping over hedges and ditches in pursuit of imps truant from school. Mr. Smith burst out of his silence.

‘You see, sir, it’s this way! A policeman’s work means he has to be for hours alone, standing under lamp-posts and that! And that’s how I got converted. For when a man’s alone, thoughts come into his head!’

This made a deep impression. The undertaker and wheelwright accompanied John home afterwards, and the undertaker said at parting, ‘You know, sir, what Mr. Smith said was right! When a man’s alone, thoughts does come into his head!’

It was the undertaker who introduced next day a deputation consisting of the churchwarden and two other Anglican functionaries. John looked at them in some surprise. Why should they come to him? All he knew of the Vicar was that he rode an antiquated tricycle, and before he climbed up on to it always looked exhaustively up and down the road and all round the landscape. No, this was not quite all that he knew, as he was to be reminded now.

The deputation humbly asked if Mr. Arnison would sign an appeal to the Editor of the Severn Valley Chronicle, to print the Vicar’s sermons every week.

‘But why?’ asked the astonished John.

The deputation interchanged looks before the undertaker explained. ‘You see, sir, the reverend gentleman’s sermons are so downright bad——’

‘Terrible bad!’ said the churchwarden; and those strong men shuddered.

‘That, we somehow don’t believe,’ said a sidesman, ‘that he knows how bad they are! For if he did he couldn’t preach them. Now could he, sir?’

‘So if you, being an educated man, was to sign this Petition, we believe we might get the sermons printed every week.’

‘But what would be the use of that?’

Again that interchange of looks that were all but uttered questions.

‘Why, it stands to reason,’ said the undertaker patiently, ‘or, at least, so these gentlemen think, that if the Vicar was to see with his own eyes the rot he’d been talking the Sunday afore he couldn’t go on talking it!’

‘Why, he said last Sunday that the Holy Ghost were undoubtedly a woman!’ said the sidesman.

So the Vicar was an advanced theologian, as well as a preacher whom flesh and blood could with pain endure! The Holy Ghost, in Whom some theologians have seen the feminine principle of deity, had been thus expounded to a rustic audience, who had misunderstood. John felt sympathy for his fellow thinker, and wondered when he too would be misunderstood similarly. Would there be a movement to get Mr. Arnison’s sermons printed?

After hesitation he signed the Petition, which the Editor of the Severn Valley Chronicle rejected. The Vicar, however, heard of it, and stopped John in the street, dismounting from his velocipede. After chit-chat talk of this and that, beaming all over he said, ‘I heard of your trying to get the Chronicle to print my sermons, Mr. Arnison, and I appreciate it very much. Very much indeed, Mr. Arnison. I had not realised, I confess—for Dissenters are generally enemies of the Church—that you were so well disposed towards us. It was very kind indeed, and if the Chronicle had printed my sermons I should have sent you a signed copy.’

‘Oh, it was nothing,’ said John. ‘Your own people got up the Petition, and asked me to support it.’

‘Well, it has been a great encouragement. A very, very great encouragement, Mr. Arnison! One feels that it is indeed worth while to go on preaching!’

2

As the incident shows, Mr. Arnison’s literary judgment was highly valued. Of this he had other proofs.

Literary historians sometimes lament that the old broadsheet has died out. They are quite mistaken. It has not died out; or, if it has, the death is recent. It had not died out before the War.

Birth and death are all that the peasant has left to him as really great occasions. And it is on death that he breaks into poetry.

David Miller, local preacher of the Bible Christians, was the principal broadsheet writer. Since good men and women were constantly dying he wrote many elegies, which he printed at his own cost. He got into the habit of consulting Mr. Arnison about nice points of metre and diction.

He read out, in John’s study:

‘On many of the summits
About the city of Devizes
He gave the sinner warning
Of the Judge and Last Assizes.

‘Don’t you think that’s very plain and clear, Mr. Arnison?’

‘Perfectly plain and clear,’ said John. The deceased had been a great field preacher, and the poet had brought this out.

‘Sabbath by Sabbath he did his work,
Yes, and on week-days too!’

‘That’s a good point,’ said John.

‘He never was a man to shirk!
He knew what we ought to do!’

‘No one could misunderstand that, either.’

Not all, however, was such straightforward sailing. As authors know, printers have a way of mucking up your text—wantonly—after you have passed final proofs. They think they know better than you do, and they skewer and peg your stuff together with commas, and subtle cadences and phrasing are deliberately changed into something crass and flat-footed.

David with some indignation read out to John:

‘He has to Abraham’s bosom gone,
Entucked within his home.
There where all is happiness
Never more to roam.

‘What right had the printer to change to that?’

‘What was it you wrote?’

‘Why, this:

‘He has to Abraham’s bosom gone,
Ensconced within his home.

Isn’t “ensconced” a good word? Better than “entucked”?’

‘“Ensconced” is certainly a better word than “entucked,”’ John agreed.

‘That’s what I thought. Yet they’ve been and gone and changed it!’

‘They had no call to do that,’ said John.

‘Jesus that loved little children
Knew that our brother, so kind
Had the heart of a boy, so loving
And gentle and ready to mind.

O God Who art made of pity,
Knowing how we are naught!
Speak now to Thy dear dead servant!
Show him Thy face which he sought!’

‘I am sure that God has done that,’ said John quietly.

It was an education. Far more so than the smattering of Greek and Latin he had received at Grammand. (Yet how much that had meant also! The myths of Hellas had slid into a boy’s brain, in all their lusty strength and loveliness.)

3

Yet something inside John was breaking and despairing. He was working against the inner law of his being, and against the warp and woof of all his thinking and nature’s purpose.

Every day and any day, and at any hour, to have to stand for his people, to have to receive the inmost confidences of men and women whose sorrows were in a world out of his ken, whose experiences were starker and maturer than any that had come to him; to have to advise them, and to pray for them, speaking for them to a God Who had promised to abide with them and to help them in the deepest places of their hearts and minds! to have to bring them, Sunday by Sunday, and on their week-day evenings, a message of truth which should sustain them through a child’s deadly sickness or a parent’s dying of cancer, through the foreman’s insolence or an employer’s word that was like a blow that must be borne in silence, to be a priest while his nature was a boy’s!

4

The absurdest thing about this life was its isolation.

Thornhill was discovering a whole new world part literary, part what we must style traditional, since grounded on the immemorial pleasures of mankind. He was going to plays and even an occasional music-hall, watching the joyous preposterousness of tumblers, deft climbers on each others’ shoulders, prodigies who played half a dozen instruments at once and perhaps played them standing upside down: amusements that had delighted the Elizabethans, and the Romans before them. There was once an Indian potentate who said he had spent millions of rupees vainly seeking for happiness, and had found it at last, when he engaged as Prime Minister an Englishman, who introduced him to the pastime of old women racing against each other in sacks. In their pleasures all mankind are one kin.

A man called Shaw had written plays that startled you, they were so daring. Yet, when you looked closer into them, they were on the side of morality, so were all right. One was about a woman called Candida. She was apparently the adoring wife of an excellent preacher fellow, probably Methodist. Yet before the action ended she had launched him into a whirlwind of ideas and emotions that spun him round and round, and was saying to a young poet who was in love with her (an unconvincing poet, to be sure, his allegedly poetic side upset by the smell of onions and showing itself mainly in talk about ‘ivory shallops’; but his poetic side was inessential) the most disturbing things, that she would let him or anyone else have her ‘purity’ and welcome, if it would do him any good. Yet it was all right really.

Another writer was showing the life of the men who serve and struggle in society’s sub-strata—not quite on the lowest levels, but near enough to make the final drop always a present fear. He showed you not their one life only, but both their lives—the two they lived side by side—the waking life, which was drudgery, and the dream-life in which Mr. Polly and Mr. Lewisham saw themselves as such terrible chaps.

Thornhill sent John books, and long excited eager letters. The spirit was lifting itself out of its agonies, like Farinata rising from his burning tomb. A new morality, fiercer and more exacting than the Methodist—one not tied to the necessity of emotion, and not finding in that emotion its chief duty, but considering men and women as brains and personalities—was shaping itself, in minds that still meant to hold by morality of some sort.

Thornhill sent John The Tragedy of Nan. Neither of them saw its tricks and flaws of style: the jerky Jingle-like dialogue, all exclamations: its melodrama. What they did see was its breath of wide unpolluted spaces, the widest that are still left in southern Britain. The Severn sweeping inland! and sorrow and anguish scattering, in the exultation of something elemental, everlasting, that had nothing to do with man or his trivial generations. ‘It be coming. Out of the wells of the sea. The eagles of the sea hear it. They sharp their beaks.’

Maturity is a thing that depends on things outside the self. At twenty-four Pitt is Prime Minister, while at the same age a youth from the classes that are ruled, and have never dreamed of ruling, still regards the daily newspaper as possessed of inside knowledge and uttering truths that must be accepted as canonical. John belonged to the classes which in all their thought are always ten years in the lag of what men and women who form opinion are thinking.

His letters home were lively and interesting enough, but never for even one sentence did they touch on the matters that were troubling him. He knew what his mother longed to hear: of deep spiritual urgencies, of men and women responding to the message he brought them. He would have died rather than have said one word of all that.

To Thornhill, however, he opened up all that Lichlea could never see or understand; and in return Thornhill opened up a life that was as strange and as vivid as that which the Elizabethan dramatists had once opened to John.

Chapter IX.

1

John had ministerial colleagues, who treated him as one who was going to join their ranks. He saw them rarely, however; like him, they had an immensity of country to cover. A Methodist parson is always preaching and praying, except when he is ‘visiting.’

Even then, he is praying and preaching!

They were all good fellows, and from differing walks of life. That is the strength of the Methodist Ministry; it draws from every social stratum except the highest and next-to-highest, and builds up from them the finest brotherhood of service in the world. It knows the people. Not the people who enter Parliament or govern the Empire or write the books that get read and praised. But the people. There are quite a lot of these.

He knew that his colleagues were better men than himself. Which was part reason why he was not at home with them, despite his admiration for them.

‘You have nothing to do but to save souls,’ was Wesley’s legacy to his Church. Nothing but that! The world and its shows were surpassingly evil, and they were fast dying. The Elements would one day burn with exceeding heat, when

shrivelling like a parchèd scroll,
The Flaming Heavens together roll!

Books, the drama, were wrong, though a certain kind of book escaped the general censure and was definitely helpful to faith, might even be a means of grace, opening up and reinforcing the Bible.

The Superintendent of the Severn Valley Mission had a ministerial jamboree late in July, to which John was invited. Afterwards he was drawn aside and sounded, kindly and hopefully, as to whether he wished to be a Candidate for the Ministry. All his ministerial colleagues wished this. They would keep him in the Severn Valley Mission, and next March Mr. Sidebotham would gladly bring his name before the Quarterly Meeting, where ministers and laymen together would consider him. There was no doubt, Mr. Sidebotham assured him, that his name would be accepted unanimously, and sent on.

John was not so sure. At one of his hamlets there was dear old Ebby (Ebenezer) Millbank, who detected heresy in every sermon. At the prayer-meeting which closed a Sunday night service, Ebby would rise and draw the Lord’s attention to unsatisfactory points in the exposition under which they had just suffered. The previous Sunday, John, getting very tired of this dear old saint, had been a coward and played not quite fair; he had called on brothers and sisters by name, to lead them in intercession. He had not called on Mr. Millbank. But just as he was about to pass to the Benediction he had seen Ebby slowly rising, and had caught his gaze. It was then that he realised the power of the human eye, especially if it has in it something inhuman in fierceness and bigotry. He had wavered, and had been lost. ‘O Lord,’ Ebby’s voice had risen, in sorrow and pain exceeding, ‘if there’s been anythink in this ’ere sermon what we’ve just ’eard, that’s been contrairy to Thy blessed will—and Thou knowest, Lord, there ’as been—then forgive it right now, and teach this young man the error of his ways!’

Yes, Mr. Millbank would probably vote against Mr. Arnison.

John was moved by his Chief’s kindliness. But he stood fast in time, and said he wanted more experience, and a chance to think things over.

2

In the last week of July the Rev. McLeod McDonald came to Lichlea, to preach its annual Sunday School sermons—five of them, counting the hour’s talk to the School on the Sunday afternoon and the Monday night public lecture.

Other names for this visitation had been suggested to John’s Sunday School Committee. At one they had wavered. But alas! he charged five guineas. ‘Why, we had Dr. McDonald two years ago, and he charged us only a guinea, and no one could have given us more than what he did!’ Faces opened into a glow, as of sunburst in a rain-packed sky at evening. Dr. McDonald was plumped for.

Expectation was more than justified. The visitor addressed the Sunday School in the afternoon, preached morning and evening on the Sabbath and on Monday afternoon, and lectured (‘Heroes and Apostles’) Monday night. And John, loving his valour and prowess (yet watching them with some detachment), writing to Thornhill, summed up. ‘He takes one of those texts in Saint Paul, about “height” and “depth,” etc., one of those that are so spacious that practically any darned thing that comes into your mind is strictly relevant to your theme, and then preaches for fifty-five minutes by the clock! and our clock’s a generous one, which everyone knows puts nearly seventy minutes into each hour! And, not content with this, he threw in every time no less than three of his heavy rich plum-duff prayers! Oh yes, no one could have given us more than what he did! We got our guinea’s worth all right!’

He had to admit, and admitted gladly, that everyone enjoyed the break. But it drove in on him (and this very fact of their intense enjoyment hammered it down) his knowledge that he was no good for what he was doing.

Dr. McDonald spoke to him privately, and expressed his pleasure to have heard such reports of him. He plainly took it for granted that John was going to take up his father’s work.

That settled it. What proved more than anything else that John, despite his upbringing, belonged to the new generation, was his revolt when anyone fiddled on his heart-strings or suggested that his spiritual and mental life must go on lines of consanguinity. ‘Your mother’s devotion,’ ‘your father’s work’—by God! no! and never! and he was not blaspheming. He was appealing, in strict literalness, to the truth within his own soul.

He gazed resentfully at his questioner. And resentment died.

For whatever else there was—an outworn mode of thought and seeing, trappings that had covered Hebrew half-savages millenniums ago or peasants in Asia Minor—there was also, overmastering all and making all else unimportant, a burning sincerity. And in his own eyes sincerity answered, and from that moment there came to each of them a new respect for the other.

‘I am sorry, Dr. McDonald,’ he said, ‘but I should never be happy. I should know in myself that I was dishonest.’

McDonald looked hard at him. Then he pressed his hand. ‘I loved your father,’ he said at last, ‘and he was the most rigidly honest man I ever met. And I see that you are his son.’ This time John did not resent the fiddling.

Chapter X

1

In September, a proper minister would come in his place. The people knew this, and in these last weeks among them John was made conscious of a real sorrow that he was going. He had managed to do something, with his wild-fangled talk of Francis Thompson watching Christ walking on the water, not of Gennesaret but Severn.

He was made most conscious of what they felt by Jim Beardmore, whose volcanic contributions had so wrecked for a time his efforts to settle that appalling funeral quarrel. Snarly Jimmy came and walked beside him, at the end of one Sunday.

‘I hear you’re going for good, Mr. Arnison?’

‘Yes, Mr. Beardmore.’

‘Well, I know only one person that won’t be sorry.’

Put that way, it suddenly hurt: that there should be one person who was glad he was going. He was wondering who it might be, when Snarly Jimmy gripped his arm. ‘I mean this genelman.’

Charlie Venables one day, looking keenly at him, said, ‘You’ve done none so badly, Arnison. Anyway, the next man’s going to find his job easier because you’ve been here. The village knows that no one else who’s been in a sense above its troubles has ever bothered about it—except the ladies of the manor, snooping round to see if our political caps are on quite straight!’

He had done none so badly. Perhaps. Yes, for others; but had he done so well by himself? Youth, that knows nothing of time’s passing and sees ahead only an endless vista of leisure and planning and dreaming, finds suddenly that it is twenty-two—twenty-five—thirty—and out of a job, and too old (so it appears) for this and that job which it had taken for granted was within its reach. Shades of the prison-house of unemployment begin to close down while life is still at morning. John now faced unemployment.

He ought to help his family also, if only by a few shillings a week. True, they had forgone this, and how gladly! while it was understood that he was on his way to the only service that mattered. And no one had taken seriously his leaving the Grand Bank. Mr. Arnison was meant for the ministry, and of course would go on to it.

After he knew that the dream—not his dream, but the one to which he had been dedicated before he was born—was over, terror overhung his days. Then he descended into hell.

Honesty must be served, whatever the cost, and honesty meant starvation, for he would not go back to the home that was so overburdened. He wrote to Thomas and Hugh—glancingly and with apparent carelessness, ashamed lest anything of what he felt should be betrayed. He told them—well more than he imagined. Then he did not send the letter. At the back of his mind he knew that it was a half-appeal—unuttered because of pride that forbade all approach to appeal—for any help to employment that was in their power.

2

Early in August, feeling as if madness were on its way to him, he took off a matter of several hours and cycled south-eastward, anywhere, so long as it got him away—from himself, if possible. It did not achieve that, but it took him through an untidy sprawling town in Wiltshire. Dismounting to buy some oranges, he noticed a written announcement outside a large stores. ‘Accountant and bookkeeper wanted. Must be well educated.’

‘Must be well educated.’ He had no illusions as to his claim to fill the bill. Yet he must be educated enough for that!

He bought his oranges, and cycled slowly out of the town, to a roadside field where he lay and ate the fruit, and thought. It was a chance, anyway, and if successful would save him from starvation and perhaps the necessity to fall back on his family. He cycled back, and, his face a deep red, went into the stores and asked to see the proprietor.

Mr. Stubbs, the proprietor, was a homely body wearing an apron. When he learnt John’s errand he said, ‘Come into my office.’ Here his manner, suspicious at the outset, became at once sharpened, and John was made to realise that the man who seeks employment is prima facie wastrel, if not potential crook. Society has to be protected, and still more, employers must be protected.

His story of himself seemed to deepen suspicion. He did not look the sort of man who would be wanting the meanest sort of drudgery at a pound a week. What had he done before? Been in the Grand Bank, had he? A very damning circumstance. What young fellow who had been so lucky as that would have cleared out? ‘Why, all you had to do was to sit tight, and you’d have gone steadily on to a couple of hundred a year! Very likely, more! Much more if you’d been made a manager or chief cashier!’ He must have plunged his hand deep in the till or wherever it is that these princely banking houses keep the public’s cash; or have cooked the ledgers! He had been sacked quietly out of pity for his youth! When an older man would have been sent to prison!

John explained. And explained what he was doing now.

And, as he explained, something of his grim honesty came across. He was in a hole, Mr. Stubbs could see that (and the business man within him told him that a fellow creature in a hole should be taken advantage of—within decent and Christian limits, of course). He was also a trained accountant—five years in the Grand Bank!—why on earth didn’t he try to get back to it? But there, naturally every educated young man who could pull any sort of strings was trying to get into billets like those of the Grand Bank, and this young fellow had definitely thrown away his chance. Had thrown it away for a fat-headed reason, but one that in a way was to his credit. And Mr. Stubbs, who was a Congregationalist and not a bad one, felt a respect for him.

He was silent for what seemed an age of ages, staring hard at the red face before him, and thinking hard. His last accountant had had a demonic way with figures; spilt ink and smudged the books. He used to flirt with the post-office girl. With another girl, it had gone far beyond flirtation.

Mr. Stubbs had interviewed a stream of applicants who merely depressed. Yet he had all but taken one on this very morning, in sheer despair of finding one who was any use.

At last he admitted, ‘I half believe you’d do. And because I’m sorry for you and can see you’re a decent sort of young fellow, I tell you what I’ll do. I was going to pay a guinea a week. But I’ll try you for a month and pay you twenty-five shillings.’

John accepted.

‘How soon can you come? I really wanted a man right away.’

John’s face fell. ‘I’m afraid I can’t come till the last week of August.’ That was when his job was finishing. The idea had been that he should take off seven days as holiday, and be sent to another similar lay preacher post on September the First. This was before his decision not to go on.

Mr. Stubbs thought hard once more. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘ It’s very inconvenient for me. But well! all right! Only, mind you turn up on the date you mention!’

It was the lifting of part of his nightmare. Now came the worst of John’s task. He had to write to his mother and explain what he had done. That night he hardly slept.

She cried a great deal, and asked God to forgive him and to guide him. Her prayers could not be unanswered, for she had dedicated this son to the Kingdom! And part of her immediate prayer was answered now—as prayer is, indirectly. For when she had finished praying she found herself unable to believe that there was so very much for God to forgive. ‘No man taketh this work upon him,’ she whispered to herself, ‘save he that is called of God, as was Aaron.’ John had been called, she was sure of that; it could only be that he was too honest to be certain of the Call—as yet. And before her eyes came up the patience she had watched (almost the most heart-breaking sorrow of these last dreadful years of hardship), patience in the heart and gaze of a boy who was not by nature patient and repressed. She had faith, therefore, and she wrote back a letter as brave as the one she had received. And some spasm of sense—or it may have been that mother and son had been learning from each other, slowly and by the inspiration of pity and silent endurance—made her say not too much about ‘God’ or ‘the will of God.’

Next evening, Charlie Venables called. One way and another, at last John’s affairs came out. Or rather, they came out in this manner. ‘You’ve taught me something, Arnison, and I’ll tell you what it is. Oh, it hasn’t been anything definitely said in your sermons, though those have helped me, as they’ve helped other folks. Let me put it this way. After all, you’re only a kid—four years younger than I am, aren’t you?—and I know I should be in all sorts of fussing and wretchedness if I hadn’t had a wife to talk to. And it comes back to me, I’ve sometimes dropped on you for advice and help—hasn’t the whole village, and half a dozen other villages as well? Yet you’ve never once had any from me!’ He waved John’s disclaimer aside. ‘Oh, nothing to speak of! Nothing of the kind of thing I mean! And I’ve come to see what a parson’s job is! to be giving out, out, out all the time! and never taking in! to be at the mercy of any old hag or rascal who feels maudlin and wants a bit of comforting, or anyone who’s having bad dreams, and as a rule jolly well deserves them! to have to carry their burdens, and such silly burdens most of them! and to have to have a message ready that’s supposed to have come from God Almighty, and to be good for the man who was yesterday sacked by his foreman and doesn’t know where he’s to turn for a job ‘

That did it. John found himself telling what had happened.

It was Charlie’s turn to be silent; and he was silent for a great while, listening. At the end he said, ‘You did the right thing, Arnison.’ He asked a few idly friendly questions about the job, the town and Mr. ‘Tubbs, did you say?’

‘Stubbs. S. K. Stubbs, General Stores.’

‘Stubbs,’ said Charlie. ‘Stubbs. S. K. Stubbs, General Stores.’

Next day was Saturday. John finished his preparation in good time and with a good heart, after the terror of the last few weeks; and in the afternoon called for Charlie, to take a cycle with him. Mrs. Venables told him her husband had gone off for the day.

Charlie dropped in, however, late that night, as John was reading poetry after his supper. He said, ‘I took a liberty, for which I am not going to apologise! I ran over to see your Mr. Stubbs. I told him a few things, and among them I stopped the notion that he’s going to get a chap who’s been trained in the Grand Bank to do his wretched accounting for twenty-five bob a week. I stood out for thirty, but failed. However, I managed to wring twenty-eight-and-sixpence out of him.’

John started up. ‘I can’t go back on my word. I accepted twenty-five shillings, and that was more than he would have paid to anyone else. He told me so himself.’

‘Shucks! You haven’t gone back on your word! Stubbs has. Look!’ He flourished a paper.

Dear Mr. Arnison,

Thinking the matter of your engagement over, and on account of you’re being a trained accountant, I am prepared to reconsider our agreement and will pay you 28/6 a week, though this is really more than the business can properly afford.

Yours truly

Samuel K. Stubbs

‘But I gave my word, Charlie.’

Charlie looked hard at him, as was his manner. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you, Arnison. You’re half-witted.’

‘I think,’ said John, suddenly seeing the North staring out with granite obstinate visage, as void of thought as its own fells, ‘that all Arnisons are.’ And smiled. ‘Still, how can I go back on my promise?’

‘This,’ said Charlie, flourishing Mr. Stubbs’s letter, ‘is how! Do you think I’m going to have all my sixty miles’ cycle for nothing! Not to speak of my all-in wrestling match with Mr. Stubbs! A good name that, for that chap! I tell you, I have wrestled with beasts in Ephesus—with a bull in a china shop—with a Stubbs surrounded by tins and groceries, and ever and anon casting an agonised glance towards his till. You’re worth every penny of this measly screw to him, and he knows it! He’s in terror of having to fall back on another accountant like the last one—I took the trouble (never mind how I managed it!) to find out all about him—he cost Stubbs a pretty penny by his incompetence, if it wasn’t something worse! I’m going to give you an ultimatum, John. If you go back on me, I’ll proclaim to Lichlea what you are doing, and then the village will have a whip round to raise the extra three-and-sixpence out of its own pocket!’

‘All right,’ said John. ‘And—if I consent—will you keep secret what I’m doing? No one would understand it.’

‘Of course I will. And, John, I’m glad you’re still within cycling distance. For I’ll tell you another thing that’s wrong with you.’

‘Tell away! You won’t begin to exhaust the things that I know are wrong!’

‘I doubt if you’ve guessed this one! It’s this. I don’t believe you’ve ever had a single person to advise you about yourself.’

‘No,’ John admitted. ‘I don’t believe I have. Which is why I’m glad (and it’s only one, and the most selfish, of the reasons) that I got to know you, Charlie.’

‘Good lad!’ said Charlie. ‘You’re beginning to get sense.’

Part IV — Lettcombe

Chapter I

1

He had been only a week at Lettcombe when forwarded letters from Hugh and Thomas reached him.

Thomas wrote:

Hugh rages and says you’re wasting your time. It hasn’t been a waste of time! You’ve done something for those people that no one else could have done. But why have you left us for so long without a word? I say, and I know, that it’s because you’ve been busy, giving every minute of yourself. But Hugh’s worried, for he thinks it’s because our paths have been what he calls diverging! He hasn’t much sense! But now, if friends can be any use to you, let us come over and see you, and if there’s anything to thrash out we’ll thrash it out together. And if Hugh’s right, and by any chance you’ve learnt that your present line isn’t meant to be yours for life, we shall rescue you!

Hugh’s letter said the same:

Thomas is right. And I’m right, too. Your present job is lunacy—for you! You’ve got to come into our movement, the only one that matters in the world to-day. We need you, and mean to have you. Ever since I first set eyes on you, I vowed to myself, ‘We’re going to have that chap!’ Thomas vowed it too, and I believe even before I did. We can’t offer you much, but we can give you bread and raiment, and the knowledge that every minute of your life and every power you possess is being used, and not left to rust! Be sure that we are going to tear you, willy-nilly, out of this mesh of ineffectiveness! I see that Thomas is going to cross that word out, but I’ve written it, and it’s what I mean. Ineffectiveness.

He repeated it, and underlined it.

It lightened the heart to read the letters, a reminder that he was not the helpless fool he felt. It was also a grey glimmer of dawn within his mind, when he read Thomas’s words about what he had done for his people, and something of it he accepted, knowing his need for comfort, and in a way his title to it.

It was only a little comfort that he accepted, however. Re-reading her words, and pondering them, he saw more and more clearly, looking back on his Lichlea experience, that he had moved merely on the surface of their lives. Where religion was concerned, and the emotion that went with it and was stirred by the lift and rhythm of a hymn and by the mood which gave that hymn significance, he had helped, no doubt. Or his spirit had been touched by a phrase in Scripture, and had been enabled to convey its own mysticism; or, listening to him, men and women had found a mysticism for themselves—as Tom Swales had found it, when ‘They shall hunger and thirst no more’ had linked up the eternity for which he prayed and longed with the miseries and weakness of still-remembered, poverty-ravaged childhood.

But of the things that made men and women grow old before time made them grow old John had known nothing. Their lives with themselves, herded in those drab houses, so picturesque outside, so cramped inside—the struggles of vital energy against the necessities and straits that drove it down—of all this the preacher had known exactly nothing. He came from a world which, however poor, was not sordid or twisted with passion and desire. It was a world where you read the Idylls of the King and could quote (and feel comforted) ‘We needs must love the highest when we see it’; where reading Shakespeare you could somehow slide by the places where agony and utter disaster are laid bare and could see only the places where they were sublimated into triumphant beauty.

‘O Eastern star!’
‘Peace! peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?

‘’Tis the god Hercules, whom Anton loved,
Now leaves him!’

What have such glories to do with that whole tremendous side of human existence where suffering has nothing of dignity, nothing of grace or poetry?

In the new suppressed life to which he had come, he could see and guess and begin to understand.

Lichlea had proudly considered ‘our Mr. Arnison’ as a minister; it raised its status that the village and its chapel should have their own minister. True, there were half a dozen other village ‘causes’ to which he had to minister equally. But it was at Lichlea that he lived.

Here in Lettcombe no such glamour encompassed him and set him apart. He was merely Mr. Stubbs’s clerk, a personable young man presumably looking for personable young men’s amusements. The girl at the post-office counter in the building across the way expected him to flirt with her, as his predecessor had done—each one of his predecessors, for there had been a short-lived succession of them. She was a healthy bouncing creature who thought well of herself and her charms, and could not understand the young man’s dulness to them. He had no objection to her brightness, but found it (a fact he could not explain and did not think it necessary to try to explain) wanting in subtler attractions. He was not blind to the fact that sex has been set in the scheme of things, as he once had been blind—he had leisure to see many things now. But he was blind to this particular expression of it, and she plagued him the more insistently because of his blindness. ‘He seems rather nice,’ she told her particular friend. And that particular friend, whose work did not allow him to see her as often as he imagined that John was seeing her, became unnecessarily jealous. John thought the girl a pest, with her kindness and readiness to engage him in chatter, and wished she did not find so many reasons to drop into his own shop. There were other shops that stocked chocolates.

At first his main feeling was a certain numbed relief, so tremendous as to be almost happiness. He rested himself from thinking, and got through his jobs. It kept him occupied, learning to check up every item in parcels of stationery or boxes of tinned pears—keeping account of this item returned because it was a substitute for what had been ordered, or that packet of soap rejected because a mouse had tunnelled into one end—seeing that new goods were put in their proper nooks and on their rightful shelves (for this, apparently, was part of the duty of Mr. Stubbs’s clerk of all work) where the two actual selling assistants could find them. He had to write and send out letters to those whose accounts were unsettled. And ‘I expect my young man, Mr. Arnison, to keep an eye on advertisements, for fresh lines of goods that will appeal to the public.’ And ‘I expect my young man, Mr. Arnison’—to do this and that.

It was an incongruous life for the boy whose body was that of a Norseman from Cumbrian fells, and whose brain held generations of inherited memory of crags and screes and tarns—at a desk in a flat south country village, with his eyes all the time on groceries that he was unpacking or farmers’ accounts for meal and corn. But there is a power of self-repression which can make all pressure of outside repression an irrelevance. It is related of Captain James Arnison that when he served under Major-General Harrison at the storming of Basing House he endured brow-beating and tyrannous direction for days together, saying nothing and obeying—until Major-General Harrison ordered him to take up for the assault a position which to his eyes invited disaster. Then Captain Arnison met General Harrison face to face, quiet brow to flushed and angry brow, flatly mutinous; and that was that. Captain Arnison was put under arrest, while his company under another commander made the assault, to be driven back with heavy slaughter. It was then the survivors that were mutinous; General Cromwell brought Harrison and his captain together, and Harrison had the grace to see his error. ‘My spirit is rebuked by thy spirit, Arnison, for I forgot that I was speaking with a soldier who had proved himself. Let all be forgotten between us and make the assault thine own fashion.’ Captain Arnison made his dispositions accordingly, and carried the north-eastern wall, which opened up the rest of the fortress. ‘He that governeth his own spirit,’ admitted Harrison, ‘is greater than he that taketh a city.’

So if John Arnison were a drudge again, he was a drudge whose own mind held him to his faithfulness. And Mr. Stubbs, watching him, could not believe his good fortune and trembled to lose that which was so cheap at the twenty-eight-and-sixpence which he paid for it. He could not understand a self-control and quietness so free from resentment, and in a duty so dull and undistinguished (hardly higher than an errand-boy’s, and like it leading to nothing beyond itself) so self-respecting and so earning respect. He began to surmise an unhappy love-affair, which no doubt had driven this young man out of his path to the ministry. He called him, with a scrupulousness that surprised himself, ‘Mr.’ Arnison always. He wavered once into just plain ‘Arnison,’ but met his employee’s eye, and corrected himself.

Yet he had misunderstood John’s look; John was not thinking of the withheld prefix, he had not even heard Mr. Stubbs’s lapse; he was suddenly remembering what that evening light which slanted inward through the door would be looking like on Cotswold uplands, and his thought within his eyes had seemed a questioning one.

And Mr. Stubbs—for Mr. Stubbs—wasn’t so bad.

2

No, he wasn’t so bad. John repeatedly assured himself of this, and though the assurance hardly brought him comfort it at least got him past some particularly intolerable moment which he needed to hurry past and get it over. That is the value of proverbs and clichés; they get you past a mood when to think would be insanity.

This truth of old was Sorrow’s friend—
Times at the worst will surely mend.
The difficulty’s then to know
How long Oppression’s clock can go.

It can go to the end of life, we have learnt that; and for uncounted millions has done so, in every age and every land.

But Fate, that was unwilling he should die,

was going to interpose in John’s favour. He was of the lucky few for whom fate sometimes does this. Not of the luckiest and fewest of all, whom it lifts into a world where beauty and mind are all that they need give their thoughts to—but of those who at any rate are given something to do, besides sheer daily drudgery that begins and ends in itself, with nothing beyond it. I have quoted that line of verse prematurely, and shall presently have to return to it.

After John had been three weeks with Mr. Stubbs, Charlie Venables called, on a Sunday, as the one day when he could be sure of finding Mr. Stubbs’s young man at liberty. He had had the world, or that part of it which mattered to him, about his ears, and was all apologies that he had not come sooner. His school was getting ready for inspection, and his wife, with a child down with bronchitis, was fully occupied, so that he had had to see to the household and its running. His days had hummed by distractedly.

John and Charlie had tea together. John impassively related his life as he knew it so far, and Charlie commented. ‘Mr. Stubbs expects this, does he? He looked to me the sort of man who would expect a hell of a lot, and I pretty nearly told him so.’

‘He’s not bad,’ said John.

‘No! But he’s not particularly good, either! In fact, he’s a fair general average, from what you’ve told me and from what I’ve guessed for myself. The land is full of them!’

John agreed; and added, ‘Well—I’m coming to see that they didn’t make themselves what they’ve been made. It was the scheme of things inside which they have to get their living.’

‘And that’s true,’ said Charlie. ‘Anyway, he’s damned lucky to have a fellow like you, a first-rate accountant totting up his cheeses and what their sales come to! And don’t you forget it! If he ever turns the least bit querulous, stand up to him! He knows he’s in luck, and he’s not going to fall out of it! As I told you, I learnt a lot about your predecessors! There was the lad whose way home passed the Dun Bull—when it did pass it, which wasn’t always, by any means! And there was the one who helped a dairymaid to go wrong, and is now paying her maintenance money—when he has any money! Old Stubbs is damned lucky, John—damned lucky!’

Charlie when with his friends did a deal of swearing, or what was then held to be swearing. As he had explained to John in Lichlea days, this was because his work as chief instructor of the young in his village made him have to stand on redoubled guard in their presence. ‘I take, whenever I can get it, what Charles Lamb’ (his favourite author) ‘advises; and that’s a moral holiday.’

Before he went, John showed him Hugh’s and Thomas’s letters, explained who they were, and his difficulty in answering, which had caused him to delay doing this. ‘They might think I had got myself in a hole and was asking to be pulled out. And they’ve got their own hands full.’

‘They might think nothing of the sort, judging by these letters and by what you have told me,’ Charlie thought. And Charlie meddled again.

So it happened that on the following Thursday, about five in the afternoon, a lady called at John’s lodgings and asked if Mr. Arnison were in.

His landlady, Mrs. Borden, replied that Mr. Arnison was kept at his work until half-past six. Then he came home to a light supper, and afterwards usually went out for a walk alone.

She seemed to think that this concluded the business. The visitor, however, thought otherwise. ‘If I may, I’ll come in and wait until Mr. Arnison comes.’

‘Was he expecting you? He didn’t say anything about expecting anyone. Not to me, anyway.’

‘No, he isn’t expecting me. But I’ll wait. My husband will be coming along later.’

So the visitor had a husband. That made it different. She was admitted, and shown to the parlour.

‘May I wait in Mr. Arnison’s study? I am sure that is where my husband and he will see each other.’

The door happened to be ajar—Mrs. Borden had been clearing a place for his supper—and it was easy to see that John used it for meals and had been allowed to stack his books here. The visitor with a dazzling smile thanked Mrs. Borden for showing her in, which Mrs. Borden had not done but began to think she had done. ‘Don’t bother about me further, please. I can find some book or paper to look at while I am waiting.’

‘Very good. What name shall I tell Mr. Arnison when he comes?’

‘Don’t tell him any name. Let him just find me here. It will be a surprise.’

‘Very good. A pleasant surprise, I hope.’

Thomas laughed. And Mrs. Borden, who had merely got a cliché off her tongue, was embarrassed. ‘What I mean is—well, all surprises that come to us aren’t pleasant, are they?’

‘You are quite right. They are not. But I hope this one may be.’

Thomas sat down, and was left alone. She looked round the room, whose forlornness seemed to witness to the forlornness and perplexity of the spirit that used it. The books were few, yet for the resources from which they had come far too many. Mrs. Borden used to say, ‘Po’try, now! I think my young man must have every p’ote that ever wrote. I can’t see what he sees in it!’ Canterbury Poets, Muses’ Library, Scott Library, Little Classics, Mermaid Series, and a careful selection of the more serious Everyman volumes. A shelf of theological works, of the more humanist (rather than dogmatic and strictly orthodox) kind.

It was something which the spirit, haunting here by itself, gathered round it like a garment.

Then she began to do what was very wrong. Under a Latin Dictionary lay a pile of manuscripts and—with hesitant glances towards the door—she began to peer at these. There was the beginning of a letter to his mother; this she did not read. There was a list of things to be done—what, she remembered, he used to call his ‘megatherium.’ ‘Why ever megatherium, John?’ ‘Oh, because megatherium means great beast. You know, megas, great, and ther, meaning beast of the wild.’ ‘Ah, the classical scholar! I begin to see!’ ‘Yes. I’ve got to get this great beast out of the way before I can do anything worth doing.’ ‘Such as—write sonnets?’ ‘Hugh, you beast, you’ve got to stop digging at John! His poetry is worth all your flaring silly speeches!’ ‘Yes’ (John, unperturbed). ‘Sonnets. Or—well, anything that isn’t just chores. I got in the habit when I was at school of listing jobs that had to be got out of the way before the sun would shine again, and I called it my megatherium.’

There was a megatherium here, and items had been crossed out or added—the different shades of the ink and a scribble or two in pencil proved this. But the top item had remained unchanged since (she guessed) he had received their letters. ‘Write to Hugh and Thomas.’

She looked beneath the megatherium, and found verses, and began to read.

They were not good verses, they were the verses of a boy who knew only what had been written in the past, and knew little of the way men’s minds were stirring now, and of the rhythms to which those stirrings moved. Shelley, Keats, Milton, the Elizabethans; especially, it seemed, Shelley.

There is a ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ which has had a queer knack of speaking out the disquiet and yearning in adolescent minds; it has done this often, and for minds of many differing racial textures. In later life no doubt there is nothing to it beyond a mournfulness of reverie, rising with quickening beats to a guess at life’s meaning (the meaning which we are doomed to learn is not there at all, but has been put there by our imaginings). It expresses this guess by figures of god and ghost and faery. ‘While yet a boy I sought for ghosts.’

But you know the poem. Or did, when youth was with you, and Hope a fiery column in your darkest night.

Thomas found unfinished verses: ‘Ode to Moral Beauty.’ She read, knowing well she should not have read:

That loveliness which, even while we gaze,
Doth suffer a celestial sad eclipse
From clouds, that interpose their pallid lips. . . .

Bad, bad, and with how little of the writer in them! The cadence of one poet, with the language of another! ‘Pallid lips’; a tagging rhyme!

Read on, Thomas.

She paused, musingly, as through the outworn phrase and cadencing rose some exhalation of the spirit that had its home in this drab room (the curtains were awful, the pictures—terrible!). There was something of that spirit under all the convention of thought and word:

With faith’s eternal candle unput out,
Celestial Beauty! to whom dedicate
Is each dear hour of mine appointed fate!
I journey on, unwearied! thee without,
Long had the road been overpressed with doubt,
And I, alone in that untravelled way,
Had taken darkness by the hand, and, led
By mocking fiends, through devious paths astray
And haunted bogs, had joined the unnumbered dead!

But Fate, that was unwilling I should die,
Decreed that thou should’st lead me by the hand
Till therefore now upon this height I stand,
Released a space from progress, and mine eye
Cast at the path behind me. Yonder lie
The wildernesses where my soul was tried,
Nor wanting found, I trust. Before me still
Much lies indeed, but thou art at my side!
Oh, never leave it, goddess, come what will!

Her eyes misted at the absurd lines, which told so much more than the writer knew was in them, or in himself. All this about a ‘goddess,’ from a boy who had in his veins adolescence and in his mind—well, some fire for which there was no other name than imagination! Not imagination as it lives in those minds whose expression shakes and moves other minds as long as men can read and pause in reverie and reflection. But yes, imagination! for in this dark silent room, and amid the cheeses and oranges of Mr. Stubbs’s shop, it was peopling its inner world with figures and shapes that stood for beauty. ‘Not a great poet, John my dear! perhaps not a poet at all, as the world counts poetry in the last assessment! But a poet in your dreams and the way you have decided to walk! a poet with courage, and an idea of yourself that I at any rate don’t think quite good enough! And I know that you are right, and that there is in the universe something which you used to call God and now, more hesitatingly, will dare to call only by this unmeaning name of Fate, which is, as you say, unwilling that you shall die! And I am unwilling too!’

She heard the door open, and steps in the hall. She pushed the papers under the Dictionary where they belonged, and jumped up. She heard him pause to hang up his hat. Then the door of the study opened, and John entered.

‘John, my dear! You never told us!’

She kissed him.

3

They talked together of all that had happened since they met. She told him of Hugh’s battles and disappointments in the Election; of a brewer who had taken the field against him, and how the Nonconformists had turned sour, because it had been put abroad that he was an atheist, and an atheist who was the son of a parson, the worst and most ungrateful kind.

‘Still, he’s not worrying. He says he learnt a whole lot that he never knew before. And, what I think most important of all, he has learnt what I think not only Hugh, but all of our set, have been queerly blind to. We live in a dream-world, John! We imagine that all that is needed is a lot of fine talk and of rushing about to hold meetings, and that, if we can only get the right doctrine across, people are bound to see it and accept it, and the millennium will come, almost of itself, ever so easily! We were fooled by what happened in 1906. Then—the enemy was taken by surprise, and fairly swept off his feet, before he was ready, and before he realised how the whole country was simply sick of years of muddling and idiocy! And we didn’t even see that among those who were most noisily fighting for us were ever so many whose presence merely weakened us! They cared nothing for our cause, and nothing for anyone but themselves! But they thought we happened to be winning for the time being, so they might as well ride into places of influence and power on the crest of our tide! Thank God we are beginning to lose them, and to lose them fast, so that we shall soon be able to count heads and to know who really and truly is for us and with us! And Hugh, who’s so quick to believe that everyone is at heart decent and wants decent things—for you know that his wildness is only letting off steam——’

‘I do know it,’ said John.

‘Well, Hugh has learnt that the millennium isn’t coming by mere talk and singing mildly revolutionary songs——’

‘I know,’ said John again. And quoted William Morris softly:

‘Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would stay the Day.’

‘Hugh was beaten because of enemies he could never see. We could feel they were there, that they were everywhere! and sometimes one seemed to catch a kind of terrible malignant darkness, like an eye looking out of a demon’s face that was in corner and shadow. We were beaten because men were terrified of losing their job and livelihood, and of having to watch their families starve, if Hugh were elected. All the same, Hugh did jolly well, and you’ll find him a man who knows ten times what he knew before this experience.’

‘And now,’ said Thomas, ‘you’ve got to get your hat, John, and come with me to The Saracen’s Head. Hugh and I are stopping the night there, and I promised Hugh—he always manages to find political work wherever he goes, and to do something to stir up the local Socialists; he’s the born agent, as you know—I promised him to collect you and bring you along for supper.’

At The Saracen’s Head they found Hugh, at the door, engaged in last words with a man John knew by sight. As they went by Hugh caught his hand and said, ‘John, old boy, I’ll be with you in half a second. Just wait in there with Thomas.’

Hugh came presently, and sat down at a table, opposite John, and stretched both hands across and took John’s. They stared at each other. ‘John!’

Then Hugh rose up, and began to stride about. ‘I can’t tell you how light my heart is! Thomas and I—Thomas could tell you, if she hasn’t told you already—haven’t known such sheer happiness since we said goodbye to you and let you go off to that crazy——’

He saw distress and warning in Thomas’s face, and checked himself.

‘All right! all right! I’m sorry, John! The point is, you are now ours! Ours! Ours till you die, one with us, and shoulder to shoulder with us, in the greatest fight that Time has known, the only fight to-day that matters! You’ve tried out this other thing, to which your saint of a mother dedicated you—as mine dedicated me, but unlike you I never tried it out! That fellow who wrote to us——’

‘Fellow who wrote to you?’ asked John.

‘Yes. Chap called Venables. He says you were first-rate, but were not meant for preaching. It was your own volition that sent you to it! But, by God! it’s an Act of God that sends you away!’

‘And it’s been nothing but good really, John,’ said Thomas. ‘For it has meant that you’ve learnt something which so many never learn—what a terror by night it is to have to lie awake and dread unemployment and the shadow of starvation——’

‘I have,’ thought John. And the bleakness of that lonely cycle ride which first brought him to this village returned on his mind. Its misery and sense of utter helplessness; the humiliation of plucking up courage and self-effacement to interview Mr. Stubbs.

‘So you’re going to give Mr. Stubbs,’ said Thomas, ‘whatever you think is the decent minimum of notice——’

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Hugh. ‘He’s going to give him not more than one month’s notice at most. I don’t trust John. Nor do you, Thomas, you know that! How much notice has the old spider got to give you, John?’

‘One month.’

‘Then you give him one month. And then you come down to us. We’re running a weekly paper—merely local as yet, but we plan to get its circulation wider and wider——’

‘Hugh means to shake the nation,’ said Thomas, smiling.

‘Hugh does,’ said her husband. ‘And the dream comes a whole big jump nearer, now that we’ve got John! I haven’t time to edit it decently, and I’m going to put you in as assistant editor. You’ve got to learn fast, and to take over completely as soon as possible. We need a chap who’s as watchful as Argus, and as interested in everything as Leonardo da Vinci was, for we plan to run printed pamphlets and open-air speaking that’ll change the thought of London first——’

‘And, ultimately, the world,’ laughed Thomas. ‘Always, ultimately, the world! Nothing less for the Napoleon whom I have married! ‘

‘And nothing less for me, Thomas!’ said John exultantly.

He remembered his dedication. ‘There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John.’

Sent to serve as a junior in an East End slum and an understaffed office—sent to check up soap and cheeses in a dingy ‘emporium’ in an untidy sprawling Wiltshire semi-town, semi-village—sent because his name was John, the commonest denominator of a name that could be found, and because God at last was really troubling himself about the common people, and was sending them not aristocrats like Dante, or comfortably placed middle-class folk like Bright and Wordsworth, or natural Fascists like Carlyle, but boys whose bodies had been checked and their minds stunted by service in places where light came dimly filtered. He remembered his dedication, and a ‘hang-over’ from his upbringing troubled the false conscience that still plagued him—this new work was Godless! It was not like preaching and praying before all the people!

But in that parlour of a country inn—they had it to themselves, and the maid was beginning to lay supper for them—these three were friends, knit in a passion of mutual knowledge and an enterprise to which they meant to give everything that was in them; and between them, without a work spoken, passed electric currents of understanding and interpretation.

Hugh and Thomas saw his face, and read its thought. And Hugh, who had sat down, sprang up again, and with that gravity which sometimes came over his manner strode up and down as he had done at first, and repeated those words which were the ones John had heard from him before they met. ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath sent me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’

Infinite Pity! Infinite Love! Infinite Courage that climbed the Hill of Calvary! Is it true that every day and all day long Thy hands are stretched out to bring home to Thee men and women whose lives are so brief and full of sorrow, whose minds are so troubled and set against each other? For men and women have imagined this, and in this imagination have lived their lives!

In the affection and understanding in their faces, John saw that his friends were sure that what they wanted from him most of all (and because of it were holding out their hands to draw him to their side and cause) was that pity and love which his mind had caught from Christ.

Chapter II

1

John gave Mr. Stubbs notice. Mr. Stubbs expressed his dissatisfaction.

‘You are treating me very badly, Mr. Arnison. You came to me at a time when you were without employment, and would have found it very hard to find employment, and I took you on without references, and without making enquiries, and I have paid you three-and-sixpence more than we contracted for weekly. I am paying you twenty-eight shillings-and-sixpence weekly—a very considerable sum to pay to a young man without references and without experience in the work for which I need him.’

The ‘without references’ hardened John’s heart, when he had been wavering towards offering to go back, for this last month, to the twenty-five shillings originally arranged for. The Arnisons do not give references. They merely ask you to look them in the face.

John remained silent, and looked at him.

Thus encouraged, Mr. Stubbs continued.

‘You seem to me a young man not without good qualities. I have found you on the whole, so far as I have been able to check your work, satisfactory and hard-working and honest——’

‘Honest!’ The arnisonian heart took in a granite tuck, and stiffened, as the rocks when the Ice Age was finishing its work. But John had learnt that the poor must put up with insolence, and the crown of insolence, patronage condescending to be elaborately and heavily just. Mr. Stubbs had found John Arnison honest!

‘You are obviously a young man whose disposition is dangerously restless. Very very dangerously restless, Mr. Arnison! Let me tell you, as an older man not without experience in the world, that a rolling stone gathers no moss. And such a stone you are obviously in very grave danger of becoming!’

When a young man is staring grimly at you, and in his silent face something that throws only shadows (yet such tensely nervous and muscular shadows) is working fast and hard, even a Mr. Stubbs cannot altogether suppress curiosity. He asked what John intended to do.

The interview passed into a queer repetition of the one with Lady Lichlea. ‘I am going to work as a journalist for the Labour Party.’

This time Mr. Stubbs was shocked. ‘You are going to—what?’

‘Work for the Labour Party.’

‘You are going to become a Socialist! When you have been a Christian minister! a minister of the Gospel!’

‘Yes.’ Until this minute John had not known that he was going to become a Socialist.

‘Then,’ said Mr. Stubbs, ‘I must consider myself fortunate that you are leaving me! I cannot afford to have my young man one who does not believe in God or religion or the rights of property and ordinary honesty.’ Hard words! but, you must remember in 1911 ‘Socialist’ aroused all the tremors that ‘Communist’ does now. The Socialists planned to take away the middle-class man’s till and all that it contained, his goods and shop and villa, and his wife, and his God. After this flight into sentiment, Mr. Stubbs came down to business earth. ‘Since you are leaving me in the lurch in this manner, I think that we must revert to our original agreement, and to twenty-five shillings a week. That seems to me only honest, Mr. Arnison.’

‘No,’ said Mr. Arnison. ‘I have your letter stating that my wages are to be twenty-eight-and- sixpence.’ Mr. Stubbs had said too much about honesty.

Mr. Stubbs sighed heavily, and moved away.

2

When he had left Lettcombe, John, revisiting his family, was surprised to notice, and almost for the first time, how much had happened in these years when he had been so fussed about his own soul.

Robert was twenty-one, and after many starts and failures seemed to have settled down with a kindly Christian stationer whose parcels he took round, and learnt to do up with some adequacy. It was true that he began with a month of absence, caused by dismounting from a moving tram, and dismounting, moreover, with foot not in the direction in which it was going, but the opposite one—which led him to execute a parabola that (spectators testified) was of lightning speed and remarkable agility, finishing with a cracking together of head and tramlines at quite a distance from the car. But his patron managed to keep his place open, and to take him back when he returned, still in plasters. Robert sank into employment therefore, and his mind lost a wretchedness that had often been close to melancholia. He remained the one entirely and enthusiastically religious of the younger Arnisons.

Trixie was nineteen. She taught in a local girls’ school. There were people who said she was not pretty, but they were of her own sex. She gave the impression of being a spirt of vivid flame, in a body light and agile, and the impression was severely just. She loved her brothers with the fierceness that only a girl can feel who has grown to womanhood in an atmosphere where all was penury and struggle and the ever-present knowledge that penury and struggle on this scale is monstrous. The Arnisons, though they did not analyse their feelings, and did not consciously know this, in their bones knew that the world was caddish and vile, as well as lovely. Against this vileness vows had been made for them, in their spirits’ depth; and Trixie was the one that had vowed most implacably. She was the spearhead of arnisonian battle (whenever battle was necessary).

Harold was eighteen, and was a clerk in a shipping firm in London. His physical stockiness guaranteed, as well as suggested, some stockiness within, and week by week, and almost insensibly, his employer more and more made him a colleague. His future seemed secure. Perhaps because his work dealt with the sea, he had become a Royal Naval Volunteer Reservist, and annually spent a week afloat. It was what some of his friends did, and no one took it very seriously. There had been a certain amount of talk about war with Germany. But England felt secure; war was not a thing that happened to England, except on far-off frontiers, when from time to time she chastised some recalcitrant tribe.

Peter was sixteen, and in the summer of 1912 would leave Grammand. He was not a brilliant scholar, and not an outstanding athlete, except in gymnastic exercises, where his slim wiry body excelled. But he was a decent average; and in his sunny selflessness personal injustice and obscurity were something he never bothered to notice. He was leaving because he was not doing much at his studies, and might as well start earning. He would be a clerk, of course.

The family were still living at Bottelstowe, but had moved out a little further, to where everything was not yet quite built up. Nimrod was still with them, ageing a little, and if possible a little more lethargic. But chickens are apt to be lethargic also, especially in their early days. John presented him with a large bell as a Christmas gift, and as a result spring chicken passed almost entirely off Nimrod’s menu.

The family’s affairs had begun to take a turn for the better. Mrs. Arnison, for all her bitterness of disappointment that her first-born had looked back, after putting his hand to the plough (yet this faltering, she hoped and prayed, would prove temporary), responded to the general lightening of their burden, as she had responded through all the gruesome past, whenever winds of spring had touched her spirit—even though those winds had been so trifling that only Madge Hendred could have felt them. Within that body which had borne so much was a spirit of gaiety and courage that sprang up to the least lifting of the load upon it.

It sprang up now, to see John again, and to have him nearer. The Christmas of 1911 was a great reunion, with Peter back from school, and John from his work with Hugh and Thomas.

3

Uncle Hamlet? Yes, he wrote from time to time and said, ‘Dear Sister, I feel that love must continue and that I must at all costs keep in touch with you. . . .’

‘“At all costs,”’ observed Trixie, ‘means at all costs to somebody else. No one ever heard of any costs falling on Uncle Hamlet and Aunt Muriel.’

When news trickled out to him that John’s semi-ministerial course was ended for the time being, Uncle Hamlet expressed his grief. He said a good deal, and said it eloquently, about backsliders and the fate which would be theirs in the hereafter. Then the letter, subsided into the usual wail; and hinted that his sister must now be disgustingly opulent, ‘with so many of you earning.’ But into these laments a note of despair began to enter. Uncle Hamlet was beginning to sense that behind Madge Hendred was some new stiffness, that held her back from her duty. He spoke much of his impending death—a relapse from his lifelong conviction that he would be caught up to meet the Lord when ‘the Fifth Dispensation’ actually arrived; and the thought moved him to one of his rare flights into sporting simile. ‘If the Lord should call me shortly, dear sister, then I shall always say that though I have been called upon to endure much hardness and malice of men, and much neglect and unkindness from some that should have helped me because they were near and dear to me and God had blessed them with this world’s goods, yet I have known times of great power and refreshing, and in a sense have had a good run for my money.’

The letter was impounded as soon as Mrs. Arnison had read it, as all this good man’s letters were, and Trixie read it aloud to an informal family council. When she reached the end, she paused. ‘Uncle Hamlet means, he has had a good run for other people’s money,’ she concluded.

And Madge Arnison began to accept the family viewpoint. Uncle Hamlet was not an object for pity at all, certainly not for charity; and was not an object for even resentment and annoyance. He was sheerly funny, a man who wrote funny letters and had a funny idea of them and himself. She had moulded this family of hers, all through the years when life was nothing except the physical, and the physical always in straits and anxiety. Now this family were remaking her, their mother, and from them youth was flowing into the stream of incorrigible youthfulness in her.

The End