Eleanor came back to him more beautiful, it seemed to him, than she had ever been. They walked together, hand in hand, on the moor. She wanted to show him how strong she was. And coming to the old white thorn at the parting of the ways, she had raised her face to his; and he had drawn her to him and their lips had met, as if it had been for the first time.
She would be unable to bear more children, but that did not trouble them. Little Jim and Norah grew and waxed strong and healthy. Norah promised to be the living image of her mother. She had her mother’s faults and failings that Anthony so loved: her mother’s wilfulness with just that look of regal displeasure when any one offended or opposed her. But also with suggestion of her mother’s graciousness and kindness.
Jim, likewise, took after the Coomber family. He had his uncle’s laughing eyes and all hisobstinacy, so Eleanor declared. He was full of mischief, but had coaxing ways and was the idol of the servants’ hall.
John was more of the dreamer. Lady Coomber had taught him to read. She had grown strangely fond of the child. In summertime they would take their books into the garden. They had green hiding-places known only to themselves. And in winter they had their “cave” behind the great carved screen in the library.
As time went by, Eleanor inclined more towards the two younger children. They were full of life and frolic, and were always wanting to do things. But Anthony’s heart yearned more towards John, his first-born.
A God needing man’s help, unable without it to accomplish His purpose. A God calling to man as Christ beckoned to His disciples to follow him, forsaking all, to suffer and to labour with Him. The thought had taken hold of him from the beginning: that summer’s night when he and Landripp had talked together, until the dawn had drawn a long thin line of light between the window curtains.
And then had come Eleanor’s sudden recovery, when he had almost given up hope, on the very day of the laying of the foundation-stone of the new model dwellings; and it had seemed to him that God had chosen this means of revealing Himself. The God he had been taught. The God of his fathers. Who answered prayers, accepted the burnt offering, rewarded the faithful and believing. What need to seek further? The world was right. Its wise men and its prophets had discovered the true God. A God who made covenants and bargains with man. Why not? Why should not God take advantage of Anthony’s love for Eleanor to make a fair businesslike contract with him?“Help me with these schemes of yours for the happiness of my people and I will give you back your wife.” But the reflection would come: Why should an omnipotent God trouble Himself to bargain with His creatures, take round-about ways for accomplishing what could be done at once by a movement of His will? A God who could have made all things perfect from the beginning, beyond the need of either growth or change. Who had chosen instead to write the history of the human race in blood and tears. Surely such a God would need man’s forgiveness, not his worship. The unknown God was yet to seek.
Landripp had been killed during the building of the model dwellings. It had been his own fault. For a stout, elderly gentleman to run up and down swaying ladders, to scramble round chimney stacks, and balance himself on bending planks a hundred feet above the ground was absurd. There were younger men who could have done all that, who warned Mr. Landripp of the risks that he was running. He had insisted on supervising everything himself. The work from its commencement had been to him a labour of love. He was fearful lest a brick should be ill-laid.
Anthony had a curious feeling of annoyance as he looked upon the bruised and broken heap ofrubbish that had once been his friend. Landripp had been dead when they picked him up. They had put him on a stretcher and carried him round to his office. Anthony had heard the news almost immediately, and had reached Bruton Square as the men were coming out. The body lay on the big table in the room where he and Anthony had had their last long talk. The face had not suffered and the eyes were open. There may have been a lingering consciousness still behind them for it seemed to Anthony that for an instant they smiled at him. And then suddenly the light went out of them.
It was tremendously vexing. He had been looking forward to renewal of their talks. There was so much he wanted to have said to him: questions he had meant to put to him; thoughts of his own, that he had intended to discuss with him. Where was he? Where had he got to? It was ridiculous to argue that Landripp himself—the mind and thought of him—had been annihilated by coming into contact with a steel girder. Not even a cabbage dies. All that can happen to it is for it to be resolved into its primary elements to be reborn again. This poor bruised body lying where the busy brain had been at work only an hour before, even that would live as long as the solarsystem continued. Its decay would only mean its transformation. Landripp himself—the spirit that came and went—could not even have been hurt. The machinery through which it worked was shattered. Anthony could not even feel sorry for him. He was angry with him that he had not been more careful of the machinery.
Landripp had been the first person with whom he had ever discussed religion. As a young man he had once or twice ventured the theme. But the result had only reminded him of his childish experiments in the same direction. At once, most people shrivelled up as if he had suggested an indelicate topic, not to be countenanced in polite society. Especially were his inquiries discouraged by the clergy of all denominations. At the first mention of the subject they had always shown signs of distress—had always given to him the impression that they were seeking to guard a trade secret. Landripp had opened his mind to the conception of a religion he could understand and accept. God all-powerful and glorious; the great omnipotent Being who had made and ordered all things! What could man do for such? As well might the clay ask how it could show its gratitude to the potter. To praise God, to adore Him, to fall down before Him, to worship Him, what use could thatbe to Him? That the creatures He had made should be everlastingly grovelling before Him, proclaiming their own nothingness and His magnificence: it was to imagine God on a par with an Oriental despot. To obey Him? He had no need of our obedience. All things had been ordered. Our obedience or disobedience could make no difference to Him. It had been foreseen—fore-ordained from the beginning. Even forgetting this—persuading ourselves that some measure of freewill had been conferred upon us, it was only for our own benefit. Obey and be rewarded, disobey and be punished. We were but creatures of His breath, our souls the puppets of His will. What was left to man but to endure? Even his endurance bestowed upon him for that purpose. It was death not life that God—if such were God—had breathed into man’s nostrils.
But God the champion, the saviour of man. God the tireless lover of man, seeking to woo him into ever nobler ways. God the great dreamer, who out of death and chaos in the beginning had seen love; who beyond life’s hate and strife still saw the far-off hope, and called to men to follow Him. God the dear comrade, the everlasting friend, God the helper, the King. If one could find Him?
Landripp had left his daughter a few thousands; and she had decided to open a school again at Bruton Square, in the rooms that her father had used for his offices. Inheriting his conscientiousness she had entered a training college to qualify herself as a teacher. Towards the end, quite a friendship had existed between Mrs. Strong’nth’arm and the Landripps. With leisure and freedom from everlasting worry her native peasant wit had blossomed forth and grown; and Landripp had found her a wise talker. She had become too feeble for the long walk up to The Abbey, but was frightened of the carriage with its prancing horses. So often Eleanor would send little John down to spend the afternoon with her. Old Mrs. Newt was dead; and, save for a little maid, she was alone in the house. She made no claim with regard to the two younger children. It was only about John she was jealous.
One day she took the child to see the house in Platt’s Lane where his father had been born. Old Witlock had finished his tinkering. His half-witted son Matthew lived there by himself. No one else ever entered it. Matthew cooked his own meals and kept it scrupulously clean. Most of the twenty-four hours he spent in the workshop. His skill and honesty brought him more jobs than heneeded, but he preferred to remain single-handed. The workshop door was never closed. All day, summer and winter, so long as Matthew was there working it remained wide open. At night Matthew slept there in a corner sheltered from the wind, and then it would be kept half-closed but so that any one who wished could enter. He would never answer questions as to this odd whim of his, and his neighbours had ceased thinking about it. They took a great fancy to one another, Matthew and the child. Old Mrs. Strong’nth’arm would sometimes leave him there, and his father would call for him on the way home. He had taken for his own the stool on which wandering Peter had many years ago carved the King of the Gnomes. And there he would sit by the hour swinging his little legs, discussing things in general with Matthew while he worked. At the child’s request Anthony had bought the house and workshop so that Matthew might never fear being turned out.
There grew up in the child a strange liking for this dismal quarter, or rather three-quarters of the town of Millsborough that lay around Platt’s Lane. Often, when his father called for him of an afternoon at Bruton Square he would plead for a walk in their direction before going home. He liked the moorland, too, with its bird life and its littlecreeping things in brake and cover that crouched so still while one passed by. There he would shout and scamper; and when he was tired his father would carry him on his shoulder. But in the long sad streets he was less talkative.
One day, walking through them, Anthony told him how, long ago, before the mean streets came, there had been green fields and flowers with a little river winding its way among the rocks and through deep woods.
“What made the streets come?” the child asked.
Riches had been discovered under the earth, so Anthony explained to him. Before this great discovery the people of the valley had lived in little cottages—just peasants, tilling their small farms, tending their flocks. A few hundred pounds would have bought them all up. Now it was calculated that the winding Wyndbeck flowed through the richest valley in all England.
“What are riches?” asked the child. “What do they do?”
Riches, his father explained to him, were what made people well off and happy.
“I see,” said John. But he evidently did not, as his next question proved conclusively.
“Then are all the people happy who live here now?” he asked. They had passed about a scoreof them during the short time they had walked in silence. “Why don’t they look it?”
It had to be further explained to John that the riches of the valley did not belong to the people who lived and died in the valley, who dug the coal and iron or otherwise handled it. To be quite frank, these sad-eyed men and women who now dwelt beside the foul black Wyndbeck were perhaps worse off than their forbears who had dwelt here when the Wyndbeck flowed through sunlit fields and shady woods, undreaming of the hidden wealth that lay beneath their careless feet. But to a few who lived in fine houses, more or less far away, in distant cities, in pleasant country places. It was these few who had been made well off and happy by the riches of the valley. The workers of the valley did not even know the names of these scattered masters of theirs.
He had not meant to put it this way. But little John had continually chipped in with those direct questions that a child will persist in asking. And, after all, it was the truth.
Besides, as he went on to explain still further to little John, they were not all unhappy, these dirty, grimy, dull-eyed men and women in their ugly clothes living in ugly houses in long ugly streets under a sky that rained soot. Some of themearned high wages—had, considering their needs, money to burn, as the saying was.
“I see,” said John again. It was an irritating habit of his, to preface awkward questions with, I see. “Then does having money make everybody happy?”
It was on the tip of Anthony’s tongue. He was just about to snap it out. Little John mustn’t worry his little head about things little Jacks can’t be expected to understand. Little boys must wait till they are grown-up, when the answer to all these seemingly difficult questions will be plain to them. But as he opened his lips to speak there sprang from the muddy pavement in front of him a little impish lad dressed in an old pair of his father’s trousers, cut down to fit him, so that the baggy part instead of being about the knee was round his ankles—a little puzzled lad who in his day had likewise plagued poor grown-up folk with questions it might have been the better for them had they tried to answer.
“No, John,” he answered. “It doesn’t make them happy. I wonder myself sometimes what’s the good of it. How can they be happy even if they do earn big money, a few of them. The hideousness, the vileness that is all around them. What else can it breed but a sordid joyless race.They spend their money on things stupid and gross. What else can you expect of them. You bring a child up in the gutter and he learns to play with mud, and likes it.”
They were walking where the streets crept up the hillside. Over a waste space where dust and ashes lay they could see far east and west. The man halted and flung out his arms.
“The Valley of the Wyndbeck. So they call it on the map. It ought to be the gutter of the Wyndbeck. One long, foul, reeking gutter where men and women walk in darkness and the children play with dirt.”
He had forgotten John. The child slipped a hand into his.
“Won’t the fields ever come back?” he asked.
Anthony shook his head. “They’ll never come back,” he said. “Nothing to do for it, John, but to make the best of things as they are. It will always be a gutter with mud underneath and smoke overhead, and poison in its air. We must make it as comfortable a gutter as the laws of supply and demand will permit. At least we can give them rainproof roofs and sound floors and scientific drainage, and baths where they can wash the everlasting dirt out of their pores before it becomes a part of their skin.”
From where they were they could see the new model dwellings towering high above the maze of roofs around them.
“We’ll build them a theatre, John. They shall have poetry and music. We’ll plan them recreation grounds where the children can run and play. We’ll have a picture gallery and a big bright hall where they can dance.”
He broke off suddenly. “Oh, Lord, as if it hadn’t all been tried,” he groaned. “Two thousand years ago, they thought it might save Rome. Bread and circuses, that is not going to save the world.”
They had reached, by chance, Platt’s Lane. The door of the workshop stood open as ever. They could hear the sound of Matthew’s hammer and see the red glow of the furnace fire. John slipped away from his father’s side, and going to the open door called to Matthew.
Matthew turned. There was a strange look in his eyes. The child laughed, and Matthew coming nearer saw who it was.
It was late, so after exchanging just a greeting with Matthew they walked on. Suddenly John caught his father by the sleeve.
“Do you think he is still alive,” he said, “Christ Jesus?”
Anthony was in a hurry. He had ordered the carriage to wait for them in Bruton Square.
“What makes you ask?” he said.
“Matthew thinks he is,” explained the child, “and that He still goes about. That is why he always leaves the door open, so that if Christ passes by He may see him and call to him.”
Anthony was still worried about the time. He had to see a man on business before going home. He promised little John they would discuss the question some other time. But, as it happened, the opportunity never came.
There came a day when Betty returned to take up her residence at The Priory. Since her father’s death she had been travelling. At first she and Anthony had corresponded regularly. They had discussed religion, politics, the science of things in general; he telling her of changes and happenings at home, and she telling him of her discoveries abroad. She wanted to see everything there was to be seen for herself, and then seek to make use of her knowledge; she would, of course, write a book. But after his eldest son’s death, which had happened when the child was about eight years old, Anthony for a time had not cared to write. Added to which there were long periods during which Betty had disappeared into ways untrodden of the postman. Letters had passed between them at ever-lengthening intervals, dealing so far as Anthony was concerned chiefly with business matters. It seemed idle writing about himself: his monotonous prosperity and unclouded domestic happiness. There were times when he would have been glad of a friend to whom he could have trusted secrets, butthe thread had been broken. Conscious of strange differences in himself, he could not be sure that Betty likewise had not altered. Her letters remained friendly, often affectionate, but he no longer felt he knew her. Indeed there came to him the doubt that he ever had.
It was on a winter’s afternoon that Anthony, leaving his office, walked across to The Priory to see her. She had been back about a week, but Anthony had been away up north on business. She had received him in the little room above the hall that had always been her particular sanctum. Mr. Mowbray, when he had let the house furnished to his cousin, had stipulated that this one room should remain locked. Nothing in it had been altered. A wood fire was burning in the grate. Betty was standing in the centre of the room. She came forward to meet him with both hands:
“It’s good to see you again,” she said. “But what have you done to your hair, lad?” She touched it lightly with her fingers. She pushed him into the easy chair beside the blazing fire and remained herself standing.
He laughed. “Oh, we grow grey early in Millsborough,” he said.
He was looking up at her puzzled. “I’ve got it,” he said suddenly.
“Got what?” she laughed.
“The difference in you,” he answered. “You were the elder of us when I saw you last, and now you are the younger. I don’t mean merely in appearance.”
“It’s a shame,” she answered gravely. “You’ve been making money for me to spend. It’s that has made you old. They’re all so old, the moneymakers. I’ve met so many of them. Haven’t you made enough?”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” he answered. “It gets to be a habit. I shouldn’t know what else to do with myself now.”
She made him talk about himself. It was difficult at first, there seemed so little to tell. Jim was at Rugby and was going into the Guards. His uncle, Sir James, had married, and had three children, a boy and two girls. But the boy had been thrown from his pony while learning to ride and was a cripple. So it was up to young Strong’nth’arm to take over the Coomber tradition. As he would have plenty of money all would be easy. His uncle was still in India, but was coming back in the spring. He had been appointed to Aldershot.
Norah was at Cheltenham. The Coomber girls had always gone to Cheltenham. She had ideas of her own and was anxious herself to cut school lifeshort and finish her education abroad in Vienna. One of the disadvantages of being rich was that it separated you from your children. But for that the boy could have gone to his old friend Tetteridge. So far as education was concerned, he would have done better. The girl could have gone to Miss Landripp’s at Bruton Square. They would have been all together and it would have been jolly.
Eleanor was wonderful. Betty would find her looking hardly a day older than when she had last seen her.
Betty laughed. “Good for you, lad,” she said. “It means you are still seeing her through lover’s eyes. It’s seventeen years ago, the date you are speaking of.”
Anthony could hardly believe it at first, but had to yield to facts. He still maintained that Eleanor was marvellous. Most women in her position would have clamoured for fashion and society—would have filled The Abbey with her swell friends and acquaintances, among whom Anthony would always have felt himself an outsider—would have insisted on a town house and a London season, Homburg and the Riviera—all that sort of thing: leaving Anthony to grind away at the money mill in Millsborough. That was what his mother had always feared. His mother had changed heropinion about Eleanor long ago. She had come to love her. Of course, when Norah came home there would have to be changes. But by that time it would all fit in. He would be done with money-making. He had discovered—or, rather, Eleanor had discovered it for him—that he was a good speaker. She had had to bully him, at first, into making the attempt; and the result had surprised even her. He might go into Parliament. Not with any idea of a political career, but to advocate reforms that he had in his mind. Parliament gave one a platform. One spoke to the whole country.
Tea had been brought. They were sitting opposite to one another at a small table near the fire.
“It reminds one of old times,” said Betty. “Do you remember our long walks and talks together up on the moor, we three. We had to shout to drown the wind.”
He did not answer immediately. He was looking at a reflection of himself in a small Venetian mirror on the opposite wall. It came back to him what old Mr. Mowbray had once said to him, as to his growing likeness to Ted. There was a suggestion, he could see it himself, especially about the eyes.
“Yes,” he answered. “I remember. Ted was the dreamer. He dreamed of a new world. Youwere for the practical. You wanted improvements made in the old.”
“Yes,” she answered. “I thought it could be done.”
He shook his head.
“You were wrong,” he said. “We were the dreamers. It was Ted had all the common sense.”
“Oh, yes, I go on,” he said in answer to her look. “What else is to be done. There used to be hope in the world. Now one has to pretend to hope. I hoped model dwellings were going to do away with the slums. There are miles more slums in Millsborough today than there were ten years ago; and myself, if I had to choose now I’d prefer the slums. I’d feel less like being in prison. But we did all we could. We put them in baths. It was a new idea in Millsborough. The local Press was shocked. ‘Pampering the Proletariat,’ was one of their headlines. They could have saved their ink. Our bath was used to keep the coals in. If they didn’t do that, they emptied their slops into it. It saved them the trouble of walking to the sink. We gave them all the latest sanitary improvements, and they block the drains by turning the places into dustbins. And those that don’t, throw their muck out the window. They don’t want cleanliness and decency. They were born and bred in mudand the dirt sticks to them; and they bring up their children not to mind it. And so it will go on. Of course, there are the few. You will find a few neat homes in the filthiest of streets. But they are lost among the mass, just as they were before. It has made no permanent difference. Millsborough is blacker, fouler, viler than it was when we started in to clean it. Garden suburbs. We began one of those five years ago on the slopes above Leeford, and already it has its Alsatia where its disreputables gather together for mutual aid and comfort. What is it all, but clearing a small space and planting a garden in the middle of a jungle. Sooner or later the jungle closes in again. Every wind blows in seeds.
“This profit-sharing. I can see the end of that. They quarrel among themselves over the sharing. Who shall have the most. Who shall be forced to accept least. And the strong gather together: it is for them to dictate the division; and the weaker snarl and curse, but have to yield. And brother is against brother, and father is against son. And so the old game of greed and grab begins anew. Co-operative shops. And the staff is for ever insisting on the prices being raised to their own kith and kin, so that their wages may be increased out of the profits. And when I expostulate they talkto me about my own companies and the fine dividends we earn by charging high prices to our neighbours.” He laughed.
“You remember Sheepskin,” he went on, “the old vicar? The Reverend Horace Pendergast has got the job now. He’s a cousin of Eleanor’s—rattling good preacher. We’re hoping to make him a bishop. I went to see the old man once, when I was a youngster, to arrange about my uncle’s funeral, and he threw me in a sermon. I don’t know why—I wasn’t worrying much about religion in those days—but I can still see his round, pink, puzzled face and his little fat hands that trembled as he talked. It was near Christmas time—Christ’s birthday; and all that he could think about, he told me, were the Christmas bills and how to meet them. It wasn’t his fault. How can a respectable married man be a Christian? ‘How can I preach Christ?’—there were tears in his eyes. ‘Christ the outcast, the beggar, the servant of the poor, the bearer of the Cross.’ That’s what he had started out to preach. The people would only have laughed at him. He lives in a big house, they would have said, and keeps four servants and a gig. His sons go to college, and his wife and daughters wear rich garments. ‘Struggle enough I find it, Strong’nth’arm,’ he confessed to me. ‘But I ought not to bestruggling to do it. I ought to be down among the people, preaching Christ, not only with my lips but with my life.’ It isn’t talkers for God, it is fighters for God that are wanted. Men who are not afraid of the world!”
The daylight had faded. Betty had pushed the table into a corner. They sat beside the blazing logs.
“Some years ago,” said Betty, “I travelled from San Francisco to Hong Kong in company with a Chinese gentleman. It was during the off-season, and half a dozen of us had the saloon to ourselves. There were two commercial travellers and a young missionary and his wife. By process of natural selection—at least so I like to believe—Mr. Cheng and myself chummed on. He was one of the most interesting men I have met, and I think he liked talking to me. I remember one brilliantly clear night we were alone together on the deck. I was leaning back in my chair looking up at the Southern Cross. Suddenly I heard him say that the great stumbling block in the way of man’s progress was God. Coming from anybody else the remark would have irritated me; but I knew he wasn’t trying to be clever; and as he went on to explain himself I found myself in agreement with him. Man’s idea of God is of some all-powerful Being who isgoing to do everything for him. Man has no need to exert himself; God, moving in mysterious ways, is labouring to make the world a paradise where man may dwell in peace and happiness. All man has to do is to trust in God and practise patience. Man if he took the task in hand for himself could turn this world into a paradise tomorrow without waiting for God. But it would mean man giving up his greeds and passions. It is easier to watch and pray. God has promised man the millenium, in the dim and distant future. Men by agreeing together could have the millenium ready in time for their own children. When man at last grasps the fact that there is no God—no God, that is, in the sense that he imagines—that whatever is going to be done for him has got to be done by himself, there will be born in man the will to accomplish his own salvation. It is this idea of man as the mere creature—the mere puppet of God—powerless to save himself, helpless to avert his own fate, that through the ages has paralysed man’s spiritual energies.
“God is within us. We are God. Man’s free will is boundless. His future is in his own hands. Man has only to control his evil instincts and heaven is here; Man can conquer himself. Of his own will, he does so every day. For the purposesof business, of pleasure, of social intercourse, he puts a curb upon his lusts and passions. It is only the savage, the criminal that lets them master him. Man is capable of putting greed and selfishness out of his life. History, a record of man’s sin and folly, is also a record of man’s power to overcome within himself the obstacles that stand in the way of his own progress.
“Garibaldi called upon his volunteers to disregard all worldly allurements, to embrace suffering, wounds and death for the cause of Italian unity. And the young men flocked to his banners. Let the young men once grasp that not God but they themselves can win for all mankind freedom and joy, and an ever-increasing number of them will be willing to make the necessary sacrifice.
“One man showed them the way. There have, at various times, been born exceptional men through whom the spirit we call God has been able to manifest itself, to speak aloud to men. Of all these, your Christ was perhaps more than any of the others imbued with this spirit of God. In Christ’s voice we recognize the voice of God. It is the voice we hear within us, speaking to each of us individually. Christ’s one commandment: ‘Love one another,’ is the commandment that God has been whispering to us fromthe beginning of creation. Out of that Commandment life sprang. Through that commandment alone can life be made perfect. Love one another. It would solve every problem that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the Eocene epoch. It would recall man’s energies from the barren fields of strife to mutual labour for the husbandry of all the earth. In the words of your prophet: ‘The Wilderness be made glad, the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose.’ Why has man persisted in turning a deaf ear to this one supreme commandment? Why does man persistently refuse to follow the one guide who would lead him out of all his sorrows? To love is as easy as to hate. Why does he set himself deliberately to cultivate the one and not the other? There is no more reason for a French peasant hating a German farm labourer, for a white man hating a brown man, for a Protestant hating a Catholic, than for loving him. But our hate we take pains to nourish, it is a part of our education. We teach it to our children. At the altar of hate man is willing to make sacrifice; he will give to his last penny. On the altar of hate the mother will consent to the slaying of her own first-born. All things that are good come to man through love. No man denies this. No man but seeks, within the circle of his own home, to surround himself withlove. Life without love is every man’s fear. To gain and keep love man sacrifices his own ease and comfort. To love is sweeter than to hate. Man watches himself, lest by sloth or indifference he should let love die; plans and labours to strengthen and increase love. If he would, he could love all men. If man took the same pains to cultivate his will to love that he takes to cultivate his will to hate, he could change the world.
“Man excuses himself for disregarding Christ’s express commandment by telling himself that the salvation of the world is God’s affair, not his. God’s love will make for man’s benefit a new heaven and a new earth. There is no need for man to bestir himself. While man pursues his greeds and hatreds God is busy preparing the miracle. One day, man is to wake up and find, to his joy, that he loves his fellow man; and the tears of the world will be wiped away. It is not God, it is man that must accomplish the miracle. It is by man’s own endeavour that he will be saved; by cleansing himself of hate, by setting himself in all seriousness to this great business of loving. Until he obeys Christ’s commandment he shall not enter the promised land.
“I have put it more or less into my own words,” she explained, “but I have given you the sense ofit. He thought the time would come—perhaps soon—when the thinkers of the world would agree that civilization had been progressing upon a wrong line—that if destruction was to be avoided, man must retrace his steps. He thought that, apart from all else, the mere instinct of self-preservation would compel the race to turn aside from the pursuit of material welfare to the more important work of its spiritual development. He did not expect any conscious or concerted movement. Rather he believed that men and women in increasing numbers would withdraw themselves from the world, that they might live lives in conformity with God’s laws. He was a curious mixture of the religious and the scientific. He often employed the word God, but could not explain what he meant beyond that he ‘felt’ him. He held that the only altar at which a reasonable man could worship was the altar erected by the Greeks: ‘To the Unknown God.’ Christ he regarded as a Promethean figure who had received the fire from heaven and brought it down to men. That fire would never be extinguished. The spirit of Christ still moved about the world. It was the life force behind what little love still glowed and flickered among men. One day the smouldering embers would burst into flame.”
Betty put in two or three years at The Priory on and off, occupying herself chiefly with writing. But the wanderlust had got into her blood, and her book finished she grew restless.
One day Anthony and Eleanor had dined with her at The Priory. Eleanor had run away immediately after dinner to attend a committee meeting of the Children’s Holiday Society of which she was the president. Betty, she was sure, sympathized sufficiently with the movement to forgive her. She would be back soon after nine. Betty and Anthony took their coffee in the library.
“I wanted you both to come tonight,” she explained. “I’ve got into a habit of acting suddenly when an impulse seizes me. I may wake up any morning and feel I’ve got to go.”
“Whither?” he asked.
“How much money can I put my hands on within the next few months?” she asked.
She had warned him that she might be talking business. He mentioned a pretty considerable sum.
“All earned by the sweat of other people’s brows,” she commented with a smile.
“You give away a pretty good deal of it,” he reminded her consolingly.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am very good. I take from them with one hand and give them back thirty per cent. of it with the other; that’s what our charity means. And it doesn’t really help, that’s the irritating part of it. It’s just the pouring out of a libation to the God-of-Things-as-they-are. ‘The poor always ye have with you.’”
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that Christ, when he told the young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, was thinking rather of the young man than of the poor. It would have done them but such fleeting good. But to the young man it meant the difference between slavery and freedom. To be quit of it all. His horses and his chariots. His fine houses and his countless herds. His army of cringing servants. His horde of fawning clients. How could he win life, bound hand and foot to earth? Not even his soul was his own. It belonged to his great possessions.”
She was going into central Russia. She had passed through there some years ago and had happened upon one of its ever recurring famines. There was talk of another in the coming winter.
“The granary of Europe,” she continued. “I believe we import one-third of our grain from Russia. And every year the peasants die there of starvation by the thousands. That year I was therethey reckoned a hundred thousand perished in one valley. They were eating the corpses of the children. And on my way to St. Petersburg I passed stations where the corn was rotting by the roadside. The price had fallen and it wasn’t worth transporting. The devil must get some fun looking down upon the world.”
He had been standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. It was still twilight. He swung round suddenly.
“I believe in the Devil,” he said. “I don’t mean the devil that we sing about—the discontented angel that God has let out at the end of a chain, that is finally to be destroyed when he has served God’s purpose. But the eternal spirit of evil that is a part of all things—that brooded over chaos before God came. He also must be our father. Hate, cruelty, lust, greed: how else were we born with them? Would they have come to us from God. Evil also claims us for his children—is fighting for possession of us, is calling to us to labour with him, to turn the world into hell. Hate one another. Do ill to one another. That is his commandment. Which does the world obey: God or the Devil? Does hate or love rule the world? Whom does the world honour? The greedy man, the selfish man, the man who ‘gets on’by trampling on his fellows. Who are the world’s leaders? The makers of war, the preachers of hate. Who dares to follow Christ—to fight for God. How many? That’s the trouble of it. ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross.’ Poverty, self-denial, contempt, loneliness. We are afraid.”
He took a cigar from his case.
“It could be done,” he said. “That’s the tragedy of it. The victory won for God: if only a few of us had the courage. There are thousands of men and women in this England of ours alone who believe—who are convinced that the only hope of the world lies in our following the teaching of Christ. If these thousands of men and women were to say, each to himself, ‘I will no longer sin against the light that is within me. Whatever others may do—whatever the difficulties, the privations to myself may be, I will lead Christ’s life, I will obey his commandments.’ If here in Millsborough there were, say, only a handful of men and women known to be trying to lead Christ’s life, some of them rich men who had given up their possessions, feeling that so long as there is poverty in the world no man who loves his neighbour as himself can afford to be rich. Others, poor men and women content to remain poor, knowing that to gain richesone must serve Mammon and not God. A handful of men and women, scattered, silent, putting themselves forward only when some work for Christ was to be done. A handful of men and women labouring in quietness and in confidence to prepare the way for God: teaching their children new desires, new ambitions.
“Some would fail. But others would succeed. More would follow. It needs only a few to set the example. It would appeal to all generous men and women, to the young. Fighting for God. Fighting with God to save the world. Not to save oneself—not to get one’s own sweet self into heaven. That is the mistake that has been made: Appealing to the self that is in man, instead of to the Christ that is in man. ‘Believe and thou shalt be saved.’ It is an appeal to man’s greed, to his self-interest. It is heroes God wants, not mercenaries. Never mind yourself. Forget the wages. Help God to save the world. This little land of England, this poor, sad, grimy town of Millsborough, where each man hates his neighbour and the children play with dirt. Help God to make it clean and sweet. Help God to wipe away the tears of the world. Help God to save all men.
“We talk about the Spirits of Good and Evil, as if Evil were of its own nature subordinate to theGood—as if God’s victory were certain; a mere matter of time. How do we know? Evil was the first-born. All things that do not fight against it revert to it. How do we know it will not triumph in the end. God is not winning. God is being driven back. Man will not help. Once His followers were willing to suffer—to die for Him. Today we are afraid of a little ridicule—of a few privations. We think it can be done by preaching—by the giving of alms. There is but one way to fight for God: the way of Christ. Let the young man deny himself, take up his cross.”
There had followed a silence. How long it lasted neither could have told. The door opened and Eleanor entered.
She was full of her meeting. The committee had settled to send two hundred children for a fortnight to the seaside. She had let Anthony in for a hundred guineas. She laughed.
Betty explained that they might not be meeting again for some time. She was off to Russia. Eleanor was curious and Betty explained her plans.
Eleanor was seated on the arm of Anthony’s chair. She had noticed he was not smoking, and had lighted his cigar for him.
“It was poor mother’s sorrow,” she said. “‘I have never done anything,’ she confided to me oncetowards the end. I have given away a little money, but it was never mine to give. It never cost me anything. I want to give myself. It is the only gift that heals.”
Eleanor jumped down from her perch, and taking Betty’s face in her hands kissed her.
“How fine of you,” she said. “I rather envy you.”
How to tell her? The door was not quite closed. He could hear her voice giving directions to the maid, the rustling of garments, the opening and shutting of drawers. Later, he would hear her wish the maid good night; and then the door would open and she would come in for their customary talk before going to bed. It was the hour when she had always seemed to him most beautiful, clad in loose shimmering robes, veiling her wonderful whiteness. Tonight she would clasp her soft arms round his neck and, laughing, tell him how proud she was of him. All the evening he had read the promise of it in her eyes. And they would kiss, perhaps for the last time.
Could he not put it off—again, for the hundredth time? Was it not cruel to choose this night? It had been a day of roses, and she had been so happy. In the morning there had been the unveiling of the war memorial, the great granite cross with the four bronze guns at its base. It stood high up on the crest of the moor, for all the town to see, the sky for its background; and carved in goldenletters round its pedestal, so that the cold grey cross seemed, as it were, to have grown out of their blood, the names of the young men who had given their lives that England might rejoice. His speech had been a supreme success. It had moved the people as such speeches rarely do, for with every word he uttered he had been thinking of himself.
Even his two children, occasionally critical of him, had congratulated him. The boy had had tears in his eyes. He had looked very handsome in his weather-stained uniform, in spite of the angry scar across his cheek. He had taken things into his own hands at the beginning of the war, had enlisted as a private, and had won his commission on the field. For Norah, the war had happened at a providential moment. During the suffrage movement she had caused Eleanor many a sleepless night. The war had caught her up and directed her passions into orthodox channels. It had done even better for her. It had thrown her into the company of quite a nice boy, with only a consumptive cousin between him and an ancient peerage. To Anthony himself, the war had brought, without any effort of his own, increasing wealth and power. Millsborough had become a shining centre for the output of munitions. Anthony’s genius for organization had been the motive force behind. At theluncheon that had followed the unveiling of the memorial a Cabinet Minister had dropped hints. Eleanor’s prophecy of long ago that Anthony would become a millionaire with a seat in the House of Lords would all come true.
In the evening the great new dining-room, fashioned out of the ruins of what had once been the monk’s refectory, had been thrown open for the first time. All their world and his wife had dined there; his fellow-townsmen who had grown up with him, who had watched, admired and envied his marvellous career; county folk from far and near; famous folk, humble folk. The Reverend Horace Pendergast, most eloquent of divines, and soon to be a bishop, had proposed the toast of “The uncrowned king of Millsborough,” his dear and well-beloved cousin Anthony Strong’nth’arm—had quoted scripture appropriate in speaking of one so evidently singled out for favour by the Lord. General Sir James Coomber, in a short, blunt speech, had seconded the toast, claiming merit for himself as having from the first, and against family opposition, encouraged his sister to stick to her guns and marry the man of her choice. Not that she had needed much encouragement, Jim had added amid laughter. She would have done it, was Jim’s opinion, if all the King’s horses, and allthe King’s men had tried to prevent her. And from Eleanor, seated at the other end of the long table, had come a distinct “Hear, hear,” followed by more laughter. Others, one after another, had risen spontaneously to add their testimony to the honour and affection with which he was regarded throughout Millsborough, and all round about.
And then an odd thing had happened. As he rose to respond there came into his mind the sudden thought that here within the space of these same walls must often have supped his namesake, the monk Anthony. And with the thought there came the face and form of the young monk plainly before him. It entered by a small serving door that stood ajar, and slipped into a vacant seat left empty by a guest who had been called away. He knew the whole thing was an hallucination, a fancy that his sudden thought had conjured up. But the curious part of it was that the face of the young monk, who with elbows resting on the table was looking at him with such earnestness, was not the face of the monk in the picture with which he was familiar, the hero, the martyr, but the face of a timid youth. The hands were clasped, and the eyes that were fixed on Anthony seemed to be pleading with him.
He could not remember what he had said. Hedid not think it was the speech he had intended. He had the feeling he was answering the questioning eyes of the young monk still fixed upon him. But it seemed to have gone all right, though there had been no applause when he had sat down. Instead, a little silence had followed; and when the conversation round the table was renewed it had been in a subdued tone, as though some new note had been struck.
Foolish though it seemed, it was this slight episode that had finally decided him that he must speak with her this very night. Too long he had put it off, whispering to himself now one excuse, now another. It had come to him while he had been preparing his speech for the unveiling of the war memorial: How long was he going to play the coward? When was he going to answer the call of his King, his country?
When had that call first come to him? What voice—what vision had first spoken to him? He tried to think. There had been no trumpet call. No pillar of light had flashed before his eyes. It had come to him in little whispers of the wind, in little pluckings at his sleeve. Some small wild creature’s cry of pain. The sorrow of a passing face. The story of a wrong done, when or whereit did not matter. Always the darkness was full of reproachful eyes accusing him of delay.
It seemed to him that he was standing beside God in some vast doorless chamber, listening to the falling of the tears of the world—the tears of all the ages that were past, the tears of the ages yet to come; and God’s sad eyes were watching him.
If he could take her with him. If only she would come with him. There had been a moment at the beginning of the war when it might have been: those days of terror when the boy lay wounded unto death; and he had heard her cry out in the night: “Oh, God, take all I have but that.” Had he urged her then? Honours, riches! In that moment she would have known their true value. But the child had lived, and all her desires were now for him. She would resent whatever might make to his detriment. No, he would have to go alone.
How was he going to put it into words? How could he hurt her least, while at the same time leaving no opening for false hope? He had purposely avoided thinking it out. It would be useless coming to her with cut and dried phrases. He would not be laying down the law. He would be pleading for forgiveness, for understanding.He could picture the bewilderment that would come into her eyes as slowly his meaning dawned upon her: giving place to anger, despair. It would seem to her that she had never known him, that she had been living with a strange man. Why had he not taken her into his confidence years ago, made her the sharer of his dreams—his visions? How did he know she would not have sympathized with him? It was his love for her that had made him false—or rather his love for himself. He had wanted to come to her always with gifts, so that she might be grateful to him, proud of him. Now it was too late. It would seem to her that all these years he had been living apart, her husband only in body. She would feel herself a woman scorned.
He smiled to himself, recalling how at the beginning of the Great War, as they had named it, the hope had come to him that after all he might not have to drink this cup. God was going to do without man’s help. Out of one stupendous sacrifice of blood and tears the world was to be born anew. Sin was to destroy her own children; man’s greed and hate was to be burned up in the fire man’s evil passions had kindled. It was a strange delusion. Others had shared it. With the bitter awakening a dumb apathy had seized him, paralysing his soul. Of what use was the struggle. The gibe was true:“Mankind would always remain a race of low intelligence and evil instincts.” Let it perish, the sooner the better.
And then, gradually, out of his despair, had arisen in him a great pity for God. It startled him at first. It was so grotesque an idea. And yet it grew upon him. The mysterious warfare between Good and Evil. It shaped itself in his brain, a thing concrete, visible. The loneliness of God. He saw Him as a Leader betrayed, deserted; his followers fleeing from him, hastening to make their peace with evil. He must find his way to God’s side. God wanted him.
It was no passing mood. The thought took possession of him. All other voices sounded to him faint and trivial.
His sorrow was for her. If he could but have spared her. For himself he felt joy that the struggle was over, that he had conquered, that nothing now could turn him from his purpose. He would get rid of all his affairs—of everything, literally. Not for the sake of the poor. If all the riches of the world were gathered together and given to the poor it would be but a stirring of the waters, a moment’s shifting of the social landmarks. Greed and selfishness would shape themselves anew. From time immemorial the rich hadflung money to the poor, and the poor had ever increased in numbers, had sunk ever poorer. Money was a dead thing. It carried with it the seeds of destruction. Love, service, were the only living gifts. It was for his own sake—to escape, in the words of Timothy, from many hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdiction, that he must flee from his great possessions. No man could possess money without loving money. Only in common poverty—in common contentment with having food and raiment could there be brotherhood, love.
He had made his plans. He would rent a small house, next door to where his mother still lived in Bruton Square, and practise there as a solicitor. The old lady was still active and capable. If need be—if he had to go alone—she could keep house for him. He was keen on Bruton Square. It was where the mean part of the town began. It would not be too far for the poor to come to him. The little modest house would not frighten them with suggestion of charges beyond their means, of contemptuous indifference to their unprofitable bits of business. He would be able to help them, to keep them from falling into the hands of charlatans. They would come to trust him in their troubles. He might often be able to serve as mediator, aspeacemaker between them. It would be a legitimate way of earning his living.
It was essential that he should earn his living. That seemed to him of tremendous importance. If the world were to be saved it must be saved by all men working together for God. That must be the dream, the goal. He wanted to tell men that the Christ-life could be lived not by the few but by all; not alone by celibates and mendicants—of what use would that be—but by men with wives and children. It must come to be the life of the street, the market-place, the home.
If she would come with him, join her voice with his, tell the people that man and woman could live happily together without this luxury and ostentation for which Youth daily sold its birthright of love and joy, condemned itself to frenzied toil and haunting fear; that life was not a thing of furniture and clothes, of many servants, of fine houses and rich foods; that a man and woman who had known these things could choose to give them up, find comfort and content without them; that having food and raiment there was no need of this savage struggling for more—this greed and covetousness that for so long had pierced the world with many sorrows. If only she would come with him. Together they might light a lamp.
How could he ask her? The mere physical discomforts and privations, it would not be the fear of these that would hold her back. Demand the heroic of her—call upon her, in the name of any cause worth fighting for, to face suffering, death itself, and she would put her hand in his and go with him gladly. She had envied Betty, going out alone to fight starvation and disease amid the terrors of a winter in the Russian steppes.
“I’d have loved to be going with her,” she had told him. “It must be from my mother that it comes to me. Some strange thing happened to her when she was a girl. She would never tell me what, though I knew it had been her trouble all her life. And when she lay dying she drew me down to her, and whispered to me that in her youth God had called to her and she had not obeyed. It was dad and we children that had hindered her. She had married a husband so she could not come.”
She had laughed and kissed him. He remembered the tears in her eyes and the little catch in her voice.
But there was nothing heroic about this thing that he wanted to do. It was the littleness, the meanness of it that would freeze her sympathies. Her sense of humour would rise up against it. Was there no better way of serving Christ than bysetting up as a pettifogging solicitor in a little square of faded gentility. And a solicitor of all professions! A calling so eminently suggestive of the Scribe and Pharisee. Was there not danger of the whole thing being smothered under laughter?
And why here in Millsborough where everybody knew him? Where they would be stared at, called after in the street, snapshotted and paragraphed in the local Press; where they would be the laughing stock of the whole town, a nuisance round the neck of all their friends and acquaintances. The boy’s career: he would be the butt of the messroom. Norah’s engagement: it would have to be broken off. What man wants to marry into a family of cranks? Could it serve Christ for His would-be followers to cover themselves with ridicule.
It was just because his going on with his own business had seemed to him the simplest, plainest path before him that he had chosen it. He had thought at one time of asking Matthew Witlock to let him come as his assistant in the workshop. He had retained much of his old skill as a mechanic. With a little practice it would come back to him. He would have enjoyed the work: the swinging of the hammer, the flashing of the sparks, the harmony of hand and brain. His desk had alwaysbored him. The idea had grown upon him. It would have been like going home. He would have met there the little impish lad who had once been himself. Old Wandering Peter would have sat cross-legged upon the bench and talked to him. He would have come across his father, pottering about among the shadows; would have joked with him. Strong kindly Matthew of the dreamy eyes would have been sweet, helpful company. Together they would have listened to the passing footsteps. There, if anywhere, might have come the Master.
It had cost him an effort to dismiss the desire. He so wanted to preach the practical, the rational. We could not all be blacksmiths. We could not all do big things, heroic things. But we could all work for God, wherever and whatever we happened to be; that was the idea he wanted to set going.
He wanted to preach to men that the Christ-life was possible for all: for the shop-keeper, for the artisan, for the doctor, for the lawyer, for the labourer, for the business man. He wanted to tell the people that Christ had not to be sought for in any particular place, that he was here; that we had only to open the door and He would come to us just where we were. One went on with one’s work, whatever it was, the thing that lay nearest to one,the thing one could do best. We changed the Master not the work, took other wages.
He wanted to tell it in Millsborough for the reason that it was the only place where he could be sure of being listened to. Nowhere else could he hope to attract the same attention. He wanted to attract attention—to advertise, if any cared to put it that way. It was the business man in him that had insisted upon Millsborough. In Millsborough, for a time—for quite a long time—this thing would be the chief topic of conversation. Men would discuss it, argue around it, think about it when alone.
In Millsborough he had influence. In Millsborough, if anywhere, he might hope to find followers. For twenty years he had been held up to the youth of Millsborough as a shining example: the man who had climbed, the man who had “got on,” the man who had won all the rewards the devil promises to those who will fall down and worship him, wealth, honour, power—the kingdoms of the earth. He stood for the type of Millsborough’s hero: the clever man, the knowing man, the successful man; the man who always got the best of the bargain; the man who always came out on top; the man who whatever might happen to others always managed to fall on his feet. “Keep your eye onAnthony Strong’nth’arm.” In Millsborough it had become a saying. The man to be in with, the man to put your money on, the man God always prospered.
He could hear them—see their round, staring eyes. He could not help but grin as he thought of it. Anthony Strong’nth’arm declines a peerage. Anthony Strong’nth’arm resigns his chairmanship of this, that and the other most prosperous concern; his directorship in half a dozen high dividend-paying companies; gets rid of his vast holdings in twenty sound profitable enterprises; gives up his great office in St. Aldys Close, furniture, fittings and goodwill all included; writes a courteous letter of farewell to all his wealthy clients; takes a seven-roomed house in Bruton Square, rent thirty-two pounds a year; puts up his plate on the door: “Anthony John Strong’nth’arm, Solicitor. Also Commissioner for Oaths. Office hours, ten to four.” What’s the meaning of it? The man is not a fool. Has never, at any time, shown indications of insanity. What’s he up to? What’s come into his head? If it’s God he is thinking of, what’s wrong with the church or the chapel, or even the Pope, if he must have a change? Does he want a religion all to himself? Is it the poor that are troubling him? He’d do better for them, going onwith his money-making, giving them ten—twenty, fifty per cent., if he liked, of his profits. What is the explanation? What does he say about it—Anthony Strong’nth’arm himself?
They would have to listen to him. If only from curiosity they would hear him out to the end. It might be but a nine days’ wonder; the talk grow tiresome, the laughter die away. That was not his affair. He wanted to help. He was sure this was the best thing he could do.
He had not noticed the door open. She was standing before him. She drew his face down to her and kissed him.
“Thank you,” she whispered, “for one of the happiest days of my life.”
He held her to him for a while without speaking. He could feel the beating of her heart.
“There is something I want to tell you,” he said.
She put a hand upon his lips. “I know,” she answered. “In three minutes time. Then you shall tell me.”
They stood with their arms round one another till the old French clock upon the mantelpiece had softly chimed the twelve hours. Then she released him, and seating herself in her usual chair, looked at him and waited.