"Well," said Brother Copas, "since the fish are not rising, let us talk. Or rather, you can tell me all about it while I practise casting.… By what boat is she coming?"
"By theCarnatic, and due some time to-morrow. I saw it in the newspaper."
"Well?—" prompted Brother Copas, glancing back over his shoulder as Brother Bonaday came to a halt.
The bent little man seemed to have lost the thread of his speech as he stood letting his gentle, tired eyes follow the flight of the swallows swooping and circling low along the river and over the meadow-grasses.
"Well?—" prompted Brother Copas again.
"Nurse Branscome will go down to meet her."
"And then?—"
"I am hoping the Master will let her have my spare room," said Brother Bonaday vaguely.
Here it should be explained that when the Trustees erected a new house for the Master his old lodgings in the quadrangle had been carved into sets of chambers for half a dozen additional Brethren, and that one of these, differing only from the rest in that it contained a small spare room, had chanced to be allotted to Brother Bonaday. He had not applied for it, and it had grieved him to find his promotion resented by certain of the Brethren, who let slip few occasions for envy. For the spare room had been quite useless to him until now. Now he began to think it might be, after all, a special gift of Providence.
"You have spoken to the Master?" asked Brother Copas.
"No: that is to say, not yet."
"What if he refuses?"
"It will be very awkward. I shall hardly know what to do.… Find her some lodging in the town, perhaps; there seems no other way."
"You should have applied to the Master at once."
Brother Bonaday considered this, while his eyes wandered.
"But why?" he asked. "The boat had sailed before the letter reached me. She was already on her way. Yes or no, it could make no difference."
"It makes this difference: suppose that the Master refuses, you have lost four days in which you might have found her a suitable lodging. What's the child's name, by the by?
"Corona, it seems."
"Seems?"
"She was born just after her mother left me and went to America, having a little money of her own saved out of our troubles." Again Brother Copas, in the act of making a cast, glanced back over his shoulder, but Brother Bonaday's eyes were on the swallows. "In 1902 it was, the year of King Edward's coronation: yes, that will be why my wife chose the name.… I suppose, as you say," Brother Bonaday went on after a pause, "I ought to have spoken to the Master at once; but I put it off, the past being painful to me."
"Yet you told Nurse Branscome."
"Someone—some woman—had to be told. The child must be met, you see."
"H'm.… Well, I am glad, anyway, that you told me whilst there was yet a chance of my being useful; being, as you may or may not have observed, inclined to jealousy in matters of friendship."
This time Brother Copas kept his face averted, and made a fresh cast across stream with more than ordinary care. The fly dropped close under the far bank, and by a bare six inches clear of a formidable alder. He jerked the rod backward, well pleased with his skill.
"That was a pretty good one, eh?"
But clever angling was thrown away upon Brother Bonaday, whom preoccupation with trouble had long ago made unobservant. Brother Copas reeled in a few feet of his line.
"You'll bear in mind that, if the Master should refuse and you're short of money for a good lodging, I have a pound or two laid by. We must do what we can for the child; coming, as she will, from the other side of the world."
"That is kind of you, Copas," said Brother Bonaday slowly, his eyes fixed now on the reel, the whirring click of which drew his attention, so that he seemed to address his speech to it. "It is very kind, and I thank you. But I hope the Master will not refuse: though, to tell you the truth, there is another small difficulty which makes me shy of asking him a favour."
"Eh? What is it?"
Brother Bonaday twisted his thin fingers together. "I—I had promised, before I got this letter, to stand by Warboise. I feel rather strongly on these matters, you know—though, of course, not so strongly as he does—and I promised to support him. Which makes it very awkward, you see, to go and ask a favour of the Master just when you are (so to say) defying his authority.… While if I hide it from him, and he grants the favour, and then next day or the day after I declare for Warboise, it will look like treachery, eh?"
"Damn!" said Brother Copas, still winding in his line meditatively. "There is no such casuist as poverty. And only this morning I was promising myself much disinterested sport in the quarrelling of you Christian brethren.… But isn't that Warboise coming along the path?… Yes, the very man! Well, we must try what's to be done."
"But I have given him my word, remember."
Brother Copas, if he heard, gave no sign of hearing. He had turned to hail Brother Warboise, who came along the river path with eyes fastened on the ground, and staff viciously prodding in time with his steps. "Hallo, Warboise! Halt, and give the countersign!"
Brother Warboise halted, taken at unawares, and eyed the two doubtfully from under his bushy grey eyebrows. They were Beauchamp both, he Blanchminster. He wore the black cloak of Blanchminster, with the silver crosspattéat the breast, and looked—so Copas murmured to himself—"like Caiaphas in a Miracle Play." His mouth was square and firm, his grey beard straightly cut. He had been a stationer in a small way, and had come to grief by vending only those newspapers of which he could approve the religious tendency.
"The countersign?" he echoed slowly and doubtfully.
He seldom understood Brother Copas, but by habit suspected him of levity.
"To be sure, among three good Protestants! 'Bloody end to the Pope!' is it not?"
"You are mocking me," snarled Brother Warboise, and with that struck the point of his staff passionately upon the pathway. "You are a Gallio, and always will be: you care nothing for what is heaven and earth to us others. But you have no right to infect Bonaday, here, with your poison. He has promised me." Brother Warboise faced upon Brother Bonaday sternly, "You promised me, you know you did."
"To be sure he promised you," put in Brother Copas. "He has just been telling me."
"And I am going to hold him to it! These are not times for falterers, halters between two opinions. If England is to be saved from coming a second time under the yoke of Papacy, men will have to come out in their true colours. He that is not for us is against us."
Brother Copas reeled in a fathom of line with a contemplative, judicial air.
"Upon my word, Warboise, I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't pretend to share your Protestant fervour: but hang it! I'm an Englishman with a sense of history, and that is what no single one among your present-day High Anglicans would appear to possess. If a man wants to understand England he has to start with one or two simple propositions, of which the first—or about the first—is that England once had a reformation, and is not going to forget it. But that is just what these fellows would make-believe to ignore. A fool like Colt—for at bottom, between ourselves, Colt is a fool— says 'Reformation? There was no such thing: we don't acknowledge it.' As the American said of some divine who didn't believe in eternal punishment, 'By gosh, he'd better not!'"
"But Englandisforgetting it!" insisted Brother Warboise. "Look at the streams of Papist monks she has allowed to pour in ever since France took a strong line with her monastic orders. Look at those fellows—College of St. John Lateran, as they call themselves—who took lodgings only at the far end of this village. In the inside of six months they had made friends with everybody."
"They employ local tradesmen, and are particular in paying their debts, I'm told."
"Oh," said Brother Warboise, "They're cunning!"
Brother Copas gazed at him admiringly, and shot a glance at Brother Bonaday. But Brother Bonaday's eyes had wandered off again to the skimming swallows.
"Confessed Romans and their ways," said Brother Warboise, "one is prepared for, but not for these wolves in sheep's clothing. Why, only last Sunday-week you must have heard Colt openly preaching the confessional!"
"I slept," said Brother Copas. "But I will take your word for it."
"He did, I assure you; and what's more—you may know it or not—Royle and Biscoe confess to him regularly."
"They probably tell him nothing worse than their suspicions of you and me. Colt is a vain person walking in a vain show."
"You don't realise the hold they are getting. Look at the money they squeeze out of the public; the churches they restore, and the new ones they build. And among these younger Anglicans, I tell you, Colt is a force."
"My good Warboise, you have described him exactly. He is a force— and nothing else. He will bully and beat you down to get his way, but in the end you can always have the consolation of presenting him with the shadow, which he will unerringly mistake for the substance. I grant you that to be bullied and beaten down is damnably unpleasant discipline, even when set off against the pleasure of fooling such a fellow as Colt. But when a man has to desist from pursuit of pleasure he develops a fine taste for consolations: and this is going to be mine for turning Protestant and backing you in this business."
"You?"
"Your accent is so little flattering, Warboise, that I hardly dare to add the condition. Yet I will. If I stand in with you in resisting Colt, you must release Bonaday here. Henceforth he's out of the quarrel."
"But I do not understand." Brother Warboise regarded Brother Copas from under his stiff grey eyebrows. "Why should Bonaday back out?"
"That is his affair," answered Brother Copas smoothly, almost before Brother Bonaday was aware of being appealed to.
"But—you don't mind my saying it—I've never considered you as a Protestant, quite; not, at least, as an earnest one."
"That," said Brother Copas, "I may be glad to remember, later on. But come; I offer you a bargain. Strike off Bonaday and enlist me. A volunteer is proverbially worth two pressed men; and as a Protestant I promise you to shine. If you must have my reason, or reasons, say that I am playing for safety."
Here Brother Copas laid down his rod on the grassy bank and felt for his snuff-box. As he helped himself to a pinch he slyly regarded the faces of his companions; and his own, contracting its muscles to take the dose, seemed to twist itself in a sardonic smile.
"Unlike Colt," he explained, "I read history sometimes, and observe its omens. You say that our clergy are active just now in building and restoring churches. Has it occurred to you that they were never so phenomenally active in building and rebuilding as on the very eve of the Reformation crash? Ask and inquire, my friend, what proportion of our English churches are Perpendicular; get from any handbook the date of that style of architecture; and apply the omen if you will."
"That sounds reassuring," said Brother Warboise. "And so you really think we Protestants are going to win?"
"God forbid! What I say is, that the High Anglicans will probably lose."
"One never knows when you are joking or when serious." Brother Warboise, leaning on his staff, pondered Brother Copas's face. It was a fine face; it even resembled the conventional portrait of Dante, but—I am asking the reader to tax his imagination—with humorous wrinkles set about the eyes, their high austerity clean taken away and replaced by a look of very mundane shrewdness, and lastly a grosser chin and mouth with a touch of the laughing faun in their folds and corners. "You are concealing your real reasons," said Brother Warboise.
"That," answered Brother Copas, "has been defined for the true function of speech.… But I am quite serious this time, and I ask you again to let Brother Bonaday off and take me on. You will find it worth while."
Brother Warboise could not see for the life of him why, at a time when it behoved all defenders of the reformed religion to stand shoulder to shoulder, Brother Bonaday should want to be let off.
"No?" said Brother Copas, picking up his rod again. "Well, those are my terms… and, excuse me, but was not that a fish over yonder? They are beginning to rise.…"
Brother Warboise muttered that he would think it over, and resumed his walk.
"He'll agree, safe enough. And now, no more talking!"
But after a cast or two Brother Copas broke his own injunction.
"A Protestant!… I'm doing a lot for you, friend. But you must go to the Master this very evening. No time to be lost, I tell you! Why, if he consent, there are a score of small things to be bought to make the place fit for a small child. Get out pencil and paper and make a list.… Well, where do we begin?"
"I—I'm sure I don't know," confessed Brother Bonaday helplessly. "I never, so to speak, had a child before, you see."
"Nor I… but damn it, man, let's do our best and take things in order! When she arrives—let me see—the first thing is, she'll be hungry. That necessitates a small knife and fork. Knife, fork and spoon; regular godfather's gift. You must let me stand godfather and supply 'em. You don't happen to know if she's been christened, by the way?"
"No—o. I suppose they look after these things in America?"
"Probably—after a fashion," said Brother Copas with a fine smile. "Heavens! if as a Protestant I am to fight the first round over Infant Baptism—"
"Thereisa font in the chapel."
"Yes. I have often wondered why."
Brother Copas appeared to meditate this as he slowly drew back his rod and made a fresh cast. Again the fly dropped short of the alder stump by a few inches, and fell delicately on the dark water below it. There was a splash—a soft gurgling sound dear to the angler's heart. Brother Copas's rod bent and relaxed to the brisk whirr of its reel as a trout took fly and hook and sucked them under.
Then followed fifteen minutes of glorious life. Even Brother Bonaday's slow blood caught the pulse of it. He watched, not daring to utter a sound, his limbs twitching nervously.
But when the fish—in weight well over a pound—had been landed and lay, twitching too, in the grasses by the Mere bank, Brother Copas, after eyeing it a moment with legitimate pride, slowly wound up his reel.
"And I am to be a Protestant!… Saint Peter—King Fisherman— forgive me!"
When Nurse Branscome reached the docks and inquired at what hour theCarnaticmight be expected, the gatekeeper pointed across a maze of dock-basins, wharves, tramway-lines, to a far quay where the great steamship lay already berthed.
"She've broken her record by five hours and some minutes," he explained. "See that train just pulling out of the station? That carries her mails."
Nurse Branscome—a practical little woman with shrewd grey eyes— neither fussed over the news nor showed any sign of that haste which is ill speed. Scanning the distant vessel, she begged to be told the shortest way alongside, and noted the gatekeeper's instructions very deliberately, nodding her head. They were intricate. At the close she thanked him and started, still without appearance of hurry, and reached theCarnaticwithout a mistake. She arrived, too, a picture of coolness, though the docks lay shadeless to the afternoon sun, and the many tramway-lines radiated a heat almost insufferable.
The same quiet air of composure carried her unchallenged up a gangway and into the great ship. A gold-braided junior officer, on duty at the gangway-head, asked politely if he could be of service to her. She answered that she had come to seek a steerage passenger—a little girl named Bonaday.
"Ach!" said a voice close at her elbow, "that will be our liddle Korona!"
Nurse Branscome turned. The voice belonged to a blond, middle-aged German, whose gaze behind his immense spectacles was of the friendliest.
"Yes—Corona: that is her name."
"So!" said the middle-aged German. "She is with my wive at this moment. If I may ascort you?… We will not then drouble Mister Smid' who is so busy."
He led the way forward. Once he turned, and in the faint light between-decks his spectacles shone palely, like twin moons.
"I am habby you are come," he said. "My wive will be habby.… I told her a dozzen times it will be ol' right—the ship has arrived before she is agspected.… But our liddle Korona is so agscited, so imbatient for her well-belovèd England."
He pronounced "England" as we write it.
"So!" he proclaimed, halting before a door and throwing it open.
Within, on a cheap wooden travelling-trunk, sat a stout woman and a child. The child wore black weeds, and had—as Nurse Branscome noted at first glance—remarkably beautiful eyes. Her right hand lay imprisoned between the two palms of the stout woman, who, looking up, continued to pat the back of it softly.
"A friendt—for our Mees Korona!"
"Whad did I not tell you?" said the stout woman to the child, cooing the words exultantly, as she arose to meet the visitor.
The two women looked in each other's eyes, and each divined that the other was good.
"Good afternoon," said Nurse Branscome. "I am sorry to be late."
"But it is we who are early.… We tell the liddle one she must have bribed the cabdain, she was so craved to arr-rive!"
"Are you related to her?"
"Ach, no," chimed in husband and wife together as soon as they understood. "But friendts—friendts, Korona—hein?"
The husband explained that they had made the child's acquaintance on the first day out from New York, and had taken to her at once, seeing her so forlorn. He was a baker by trade, and by name Müller; and he and his wife, after doing pretty well in Philadelphia, were returning home to Bremen, where his brother (also a baker) had opened a prosperous business and offered him a partnership.
—"Which he can well afford," commented Frau Müller. "For my husband is beyond combetition as a master-baker; and at the end all will go to his brother's two sons.… We have not been gifen children of our own."
"Yet home is home," added her husband, with an expansive smile, "though it be not the Vaterland, Mees Korona—hein?" He eyed the child quizzically, and turned to Nurse Branscome. "She is badriotic so as you would nevar think—
"'Brit-ons nevar, nevar, nev-ar-will be Slavs!'"
He intoned it ludicrously, casting out both hands and snapping his fingers to the tune.
The child Corona looked past him with a gaze that put aside these foolish antics, and fastened itself on Nurse Branscome.
"I think I shall like you," she said composedly and with the clearest English accent. "But I do not quite know who you are. Are you fetching me to Daddy?"
"Yes," said Nurse Branscome, and nodded.
She seldom or never wasted words. Nods made up a good part of her conversation always.
Corona stood up, by this action conveying to the grown-ups—for she, too, economised speech—that she was ready to go, and at once. Youth is selfish, even in the sweetest-born of natures. Baker Müller and his good wife looked at her wistfully. She had come into their childless life, and had taken unconscious hold on it, scarce six days ago—the inside of a week. They looked at her wistfully. Her eyes were on Nurse Branscome, who stood for the future. Yet she remembered that they had been kind. Herr Müller, kind to the last, ran off and routed up a seaman to carry her box to the gangway. There, while bargaining with a porter, Nurse Branscome had time to observe with what natural good manners the child suffered herself to be folded in Frau Müller's ample embrace, and how prettily she shook hands with the good baker. She turned about, even once or twice, to wave her farewells.
"But she is naturally reserved," Nurse Branscome decided. "Well, she'll be none the worse for that."
She had hardly formed this judgment when Corona went a straight way to upset it. A tuft of groundsel had rooted itself close beside the traction rails a few paces from the waterside. With a little cry— almost a sob—the child swooped upon the weed, and plucking it, pressed it to her lips.
"I promised to kiss the first living thing I met in England," she explained.
"Then you might have begun with me," said Nurse Branscome, laughing.
"Oh, that's good—I like you to laugh! This is real England, merry England, and I used to 'spect it was so good that folks went about laughing all the time, just because they lived in it."
"Look here, my dear, you mustn't build your expectations too high. If you do, we shall all disappoint you; which means that you will suffer."
"But that was a long time ago. I've grown since.… And I didn't kiss you at first because it makes me feel uncomfortable kissing folks out loud. But I'll kiss you in the cars when we get to them."
But by and by, when they found themselves seated alone in a third-class compartment, she forgot her promise, being lost in wonder at this funny mode of travelling. She examined the parcels' rack overhead.
"'For light articles only,'" she read out. "But-but how do we manage when it's bedtime?"
"Bless the child, we don't sleep in the train! Why, in little over an hour we shall be at Merchester, and that's home."
"Home!" Corona caught at the word and repeated it with a shiver of excitement. "Home—in an hour?"
It was not that she distrusted; it was only that she could not focus her mind down to so small a distance.
"And now," said Nurse Branscome cheerfully, as they settled themselves down, "are you going to tell me about your passage, or am I to tell you about your father and the sort of place St. Hospital is? Or would you," added this wise woman, "just like to sit still and look out of window and take it all in for a while?"
"Thank you," answered Corona, "that's what I want, ezactly."
She nestled into her corner as the train drew forth beyond the purlieus and dingy suburbs of the great seaport and out into the country—our south country, all green and glorious with summer. Can this world show the like of it, for comfort of eye and heart?
Her eyes drank, devoured it.—Cattle knee-deep in green pasture, belly-deep in green water-flags by standing pools; cattle resting their long flanks while they chewed the cud; cattle whisking their tails amid the meadow-sweet, under hedges sprawled over with wild rose and honeysuckle.—White flocks in the lengthening shade of elms; wood and copse; silver river and canal glancing between alders, hawthorns, pollard willows; lichened bridges of flint and brick; ancient cottages, thatched or red-tiled, timber-fronted, bulging out in friendliest fashion on the high road; the high road looping its way from village to village, still between hedges. Corona had never before set eyes on a real hedge in the course of her young life; but all this country—right away to the rounded chalk hills over which the heat shimmered—was parcelled out by hedges—hedges by the hundred—and such hedges!
"It's—it's like a garden," she stammered, turning around and meeting a question in Nurse Branscome's eyes. "It's all so lovely and tiny and bandboxy. However do they find the time for it?"
"Eh, it takes time," said Nurse Branscome, amused. "You'll find that's the main secret with us over here. But—disappointed, are you?"
"Oh, no—no—no!" the child assured her. "It's ten times lovelier than ever I 'spected—only," she added, cuddling down for another long gaze, "it's different—different in size."
"England's a little place," said Nurse Branscome. "In the colonies— I won't say anything about the States, for I've never seen them; but I've been to Australia in my time, and I expect with Canada it's much the same or more so—in the colonies everything's spread out; but home here, I heard Brother Copas say, if you want to feel how great anything is, you have to take it deep-ways, layer below layer."
Corona knit her small brow.
"But Windsor Castle is a mighty big place?" she said hopefully.
"Oh, yes!"
"Well, I'm glad of that anyway."
"But why, dear?"
"Because," said Corona, "that is where the King lives. I used to call himmyKing over on the Other Side, because my name is Corona, and means I was born the year he was crowned. They make out they don't hold much stock in kings, back there; but that sort of talk didn't take me in, because when youhavea King of your own you know what it feels like. And, anyway, they had to allow that King Edward is a mighty big one, and that he is always making peace for all the world.… So now you know why I'm glad about Windsor Castle."
"I'm afraid it is not quite clear to me yet," said Nurse Branscome, leading her on.
"I can't 'splain very well."—The child could never quite compass the sound "ex" in words where a consonant followed.—"I'm no good at 'splaining. But I guess if the job was up to you to make peace for all-over-the-world, you'd want to sit in a big place, sort of empty an' quiet, an' feel like God." Corona gazed out of window again. "You can tell he's been at it, too, hereabouts; but somehow I didn't 'spect it to be all lying about in little bits."
They alighted from the idling train at a small country station embowered in roses, the next on this side of Merchester and but a short three-quarters of a mile from St. Hospital, towards which they set out on foot by a meadow-path and over sundry stiles, a porter following (or rather making adétourafter them along the high road) and wheeling Corona's effects on a barrow. From the first stile Nurse Branscome pointed out the grey Norman buildings, the chapel tower, the clustering trees; and supported Corona with a hand under her elbow as, perched on an upper bar with her knees against the top rail, she drank in her first view of home.
Her first comment—it shaped itself into a question, or rather into two questions—gave Nurse Branscome a shock: it was so infantile in comparison with her talk in the train.
"Does daddy live there? And is he so very old, then?"
Then Nurse Branscome bethought her that this mite had never yet seen her father, and that he was not only an aged man but a broken-down one, and in appearance (as they say) older than his years. A great pity seized her for Corona, and in the rush of pity all her oddities and grown-up tricks of speech (Americanisms apart) explained themselves. She was an old father's child. Nurse Branscome was midwife enough to know what freakishness and frailty belong to children begotten by old age. Yet Corona, albeit gaunt with growing, was lithe and well-formed, and of a healthy complexion and a clear, though it inclined to pallor.
"Your father is not a young man," she said gently. "You must be prepared for that, dear.… And of course his dress—the dress of the Beauchamp Brethren—makes him look even older than he is."
"What is it?" asked Corona, turning about as well as she could on the stile and putting the direct question with direct eyes.
"It's a long gown, a gown of reddish-purple, with a silver rose at the breast."
"Save us!" exclaimed this unaccountable child. "'Seems I'd better start right in by asking what news of the Crusades."
In the spare room pertaining to Brother Bonaday he and Brother Copas were (as the latter put it) making very bad weather with their preparations. They supposed themselves, however, to have plenty of time, little guessing that the captain of theCarnatichad been breaking records. In St. Hospital one soon learns to neglect mankind's infatuation for mere speed; and yet, strange to say, Brother Copas was discoursing on this very subject.
He had produced certain purchases from his wallet, and disposed them on the chest of drawers which was to serve Corona for dressing-table. They included a cheap mirror, and here he felt himself on safe ground; but certain others—such as a gaudily-dressed doll, priced at 1s. 3d., a packet of hairpins, a book of coloured photographs, entitledSouvenir of Royal Merchester—he eyed more dubiously. He had found it hard to bear in mind the child's exact age. "But she was born in Coronation Year. I have told you that over and over," Brother Bonaday would protest. "My dear fellow, I know you have; but the devil is, that means something different every time."
—"The purpose of all right motion," Brother Copas was saying, "is to get back to the point from which you started. Take the sun itself, or any created mass; take the smallest molecule in that mass; take the world whichever way you will—"
'Behold the world, how it is whirlèd round!And, for it so is whirl'd, is namèd so.'
'Behold the world, how it is whirlèd round!And, for it so is whirl'd, is namèd so.'
'Behold the world, how it is whirlèd round!And, for it so is whirl'd, is namèd so.'
"(There's pretty etymology for you!) All movement in a straight line is eccentric, lawless, or would be were it possible, which I doubt. Why this haste, then, in passing given points? If man did it in a noble pride, as atour de force, to prove himself so much the cleverer than the brute creation, I could understand it; but if that's his game, a speck of radium beats him in a common canter. I read in a scientific paper last week, in a signed article which bore every impress of truth, that there's a high explosive that will run a spark from here to Paris while you are pronouncing its name. Yet extend that run, and run it far and fast as you will, it can only come back to your hand.… Which," continued Brother Copas, raising his voice, for Brother Bonaday had toddled into the sitting-room to see if the kettle boiled, "reminds me of a story I picked up in the Liberal Club the other day, the truth of it guaranteed. Ten or eleven years ago the Mayor of Merchester died on the very eve of St. Giles's Fair. The Town Council met, and some were for stopping the shows and steam roundabouts as a mark of respect, while others doubted that the masses (among whom the Mayor had not been popular) would resent this curtailing of their fun. In the end a compromise was reached. The proprietor of the roundabouts was sent for, and the show-ground granted to him, on condition that he made his steam-organ play hymn tunes. He accepted, and that week the merrymakers revolved to the strains of 'Nearer, my God, to Thee.' It sounds absurd; but when you come to reflect—"
Brother Copas broke off, hearing a slight commotion in the next room. Brother Bonaday, kneeling and puffing at the fire which refused to boil the water, had been startled by voices in the entry. Looking up, flushed of face, he beheld a child on the threshold, with Nurse Branscome standing behind her.
"Daddy!"
Brother Copas from one doorway, Nurse Branscome from the other, saw Brother Bonaday's face twitch as with a pang of terror. He arose slowly from his knees, and very slowly—as if his will struggled against some invisible, detaining force—held out both hands. Corona ran to them; but, grasped by them, drew back for a moment, scanning him before she suffered herself to be kissed.
"My, what a dear old dress!… Daddy, youarea dude!"
"Ah, good evening, Mr. Simeon!"
In the British Isles—search them all over—you will discover no more agreeable institution of its kind than the Venables Free Library, Merchester; which, by the way, you are on no account to confuse with the Free Public Library attached to the Shire Hall. In the latter you may study the newspapers with all the latest financial, police and betting news, or borrow all the newest novels—even this novel which I am writing, should the Library Sub-Committee of the Town Council (an austerely moral body) allow it to pass. In the Venables Library the books are mostly mellowed by age, even when naughtiest (it contains a whole roomful of Restoration Plays, an unmatched collection), and no newspapers are admitted, unless you count the monthly and quarterly reviews, of whichThe Hibbert Journalis the newest-fangled. By consequence the Venables Library, though open to all men without payment, has few frequenters; "which," says Brother Copas, "is just as it should be."
But not even public neglect will account for the peculiar charm of the Venables Library. That comes of the building it inhabits: anciently a town house of the Marquesses of Merchester, abandoned at the close of the great Civil War, and by them never again inhabited, but maintained with all its old furniture, and from time to time patched up against age and weather—happily not restored. When, early in the last century, the seventh Marquess of Merchester very handsomely made it over to a body of trustees, to house a collection of books bequeathed to the public by old Dean Venables, Merchester's most scholarly historian, it was with a stipulation that the amenities of the house should be as little as possible disturbed. The beds, to be sure, were removed from the upper rooms, and the old carpets from the staircase; and the walls, upstairs and down, lined with bookcases. But a great deal of the old furniture remains; and, wandering at will from one room to another, you look forth through latticed panes upon a garth fenced off from the street with railings of twisted iron-work and overspread by a gigantic mulberry-tree, the boughs of which in summer, if you are wise enough to choose a window-seat, will filter the sunlight upon your open book,
Annihilating all that's madeTo a green thought in a green shade.
Annihilating all that's madeTo a green thought in a green shade.
Annihilating all that's madeTo a green thought in a green shade.
Lastly, in certain of the rooms smoking is permitted; some bygone trustee—may earth lie lightly on him!—having discovered and taught that of all things a book is about the most difficult to burn. You may smoke in 'Paradise,' for instance. By this name, for what reason I cannot tell, is known the room containing the Greek and Latin classics.
Brother Copas, entering Paradise with a volume under his arm, found Mr. Simeon seated there alone with a manuscript and a Greek lexicon before him, and gave him good evening.
"Good evening, Brother Copas!… You have been a stranger to us for some weeks, unless I mistake?"
"You are right. These have been stirring times in politics, and for the last five or six weeks I have been helping to save my country, at the Liberal Club."
Mr. Simeon—a devoted Conservative—came as near to frowning as his gentle nature would permit.
"You disapprove, of course," continued Brother Copas easily. "Well, so—in a sense—do I. We beat you at the polls; not in Merchester—we shall never carry Merchester—though even in Merchester we put up fight enough to rattle you into a blue funk. But God help the pair of us, Mr. Simeon, if our principles are to be judged by the uses other men make of 'em! I have had enough of my fellow-Liberals to last me for some time.… Why are you studying Liddell and Scott, by the way?"
"To tell the truth," Mr. Simeon confessed, "this is my fair copy of the Master's Gaudy Sermon. I am running it through and correcting the Greek accents. I am always shaky at accents."
"Why not let me help you?" Brother Copas suggested. "Upon my word, you may trust me. I am, as nearly as possible, impeccable with Greek accents, and may surely say so without vanity, since the gift is as useless as any other of mine."
Mr. Simeon, as we know, was well aware of this.
"I should be most grateful," he confessed, in some compunction. "But I am not sure that the Master—if you will excuse me—would care to have his sermon overlooked. Strictly speaking, indeed, I ought not to have brought it from home: but with six children in a very small house—and on a warm evening like this, you understand—"
"I once kept a private school," said Brother Copas.
"They are high-spirited children, I thank God." Mr. Simeon sighed. "Moreover, as it happened, they wanted my Liddell and Scott to play at forts with."
"Trust me, my dear sir. I will confine myself to the Master's marginalia without spying upon the text."
Brother Copas, as Mr. Simeon yielded to his gentle insistence, laid his own book on the table, and seated himself before the manuscript, which he ran through at great speed.
"H'm—h'm…here isoxyton—here and always… andproparoxyton: you have left it unaccented."
"I was waiting to look it up, having some idea that it held a contraction."
Brother Copas dipped pen and inserted the accent without comment.
"I see nothing else amiss," he said, rising.
"It is exceedingly kind of you."
"Well, as a matter of fact it is; for I came here expressly to cultivate a bad temper, and you have helped to confirm me in a good one.… Oh, I know what you would say if your politeness allowed: 'Why, if bad temper's my object, did I leave the Liberal Club and come here?' Because, my dear sir, at the Club—though there's plenty—it's of the wrong sort. I wanted areligiouslybad temper, and an intelligent one to boot."
"I don't see what religion and bad temper have to do with one another," confessed Mr. Simeon.
"That is because you are a good man, and therefore your religion doesn't matter to you."
"But really," Mr. Simeon protested, flushing; "though one doesn't willingly talk of these inmost things, you must allow me to say that my religion is everything to me."
"You say that, and believe it. Religion, you believe, colours all your life, suffuses it with goodness as with a radiance. But actually, my friend, it is your own good heart that colours and throws its radiance into your religion."
'O lady, we receive but what we give,And in our life alone does Nature live'—
'O lady, we receive but what we give,And in our life alone does Nature live'—
'O lady, we receive but what we give,And in our life alone does Nature live'—
"—Or religion either.… Pardon me, but a thoroughly virtuous or a thoroughly amiable man is not worth twopence as a touchstone for a creed; he would convert even Mormonism to a thing of beauty.… Whereas the real test of any religion is—as I saw it excellently well put the other day—'not what form it takes in a virtuous mind, but what effects it produces on those of another sort.' Well, I have been studying those effects pretty well all my life, and they may be summed up, roughly but with fair accuracy, as Bad Temper."
"Good men or bad," persisted Mr. Simeon, "whatcanthe Christian religion do but make them both better?"
"WhichChristian religion? Catholic or Protestant? Anglican or Nonconformist?… I won't ask you to give away your own side. So we'll take the Protestant Nonconformists. There are a good many down at the Club: you heard some of the things they said and printed during the Election; and while your charity won't deny that they are religious—some of 'em passionately religious—you will make haste to concede that their religion and their bad temper were pretty well inseparable. They would say pretty much the same of you Anglo-Catholics."
"You will not pretend that we show bad temper in anything like the same degree."
"Why should you?… I don't know that, as a fact, there is much to choose between you; but at any rate the worse temper belongs very properly to the under dog. Your Protestant is the under dog in England to-day; socially, if not politically.… Yes, and politically, too; for he may send what majority he will to the House of Commons pledged to amend the Education Act of 1902: he does it in vain. The House of Lords—which is really not a political but a social body, the citadel of a class—will confound his politics, frustrate his knavish tricks. Can you wonder that he loses his temper, sometimes inelegantly? And when the rich Nonconformist tires of striving against all the odds—when he sets up his carriage and his wife and daughters find that it won't carry them where they had hoped—when he surrenders to their persuasions and goes over to the enemy—why, then, can you wonder that his betrayed coreligionists roar all like bears or foam like dogs and run about the city?… I tell you, my dear Mr. Simeon, this England of ours stands in real peril to-day of merging its class warfare in religious differences."
"You mean it, of course, the other way about—of merging our religion in class warfare."
"I mean it as I said it. Class warfare is among Englishmen a quite normal, healthy function of the body politic: it keeps the blood circulating. It is when you start infecting it with religion the trouble begins.… We are a sane people, however, on the whole; and every sane person is better than his religion."
"How can you say such a thing?" "How can you gainsay it—nay, or begin to doubt it—if only you will be honest with yourself? Consider how many abominable things religion has taught, and man, by the natural goodness of his heart, has outgrown. Do you believe, for example, that an unchristened infant goes wailing forth from the threshold of life into an eternity of punishment? Look me in the face, you father of six! No, of course you don't believe it. Nobody does. And the difference is not that religion has ceased to teach it—for it hasn't—but that men have grown decent and put it, with like doctrines, silently aside in disgust. So it has happened to Satan and his fork: they have become 'old hat.' So it will happen to all the old machinery of hell: the operating decency of human nature will grow ashamed of it—that is all… Why, if you look into men's ordinary daily conduct—which is the only true test—theyneverbelieved in such things. Do you suppose that the most frantic Scotch Calvinist, when he was his douce daily self and not temporarily intoxicated by his creed, ever treated his neighbours in practice as men predestined to damnation? Of course he didn't!"
"But religion," objected Mr. Simeon, "lifts a man out of himself—his daily self, as you call it."
"It does that, by Jove!" Brother Copas felt for his snuff-box. "Why, what else was I arguing?"
"And," pursued Mr. Simeon, his voice gaining assurance as it happened on a form of words he had learnt from somebody else, "the efficacy of religion is surely just here, that it lifts the individual man out of his personality and wings him towards Abba, the all-fatherly—as I heard it said the other day," he added lamely.
"Good Lord!"—Brother Copas eyed him over a pinch. "You must have been keeping pretty bad company, lately. Who is it?… That sounds a trifle too florid even for Colt—the sort of thing Colt would achieve if he could… Upon my word, I believe you must have been sitting under Tarbolt!"
Mr. Simeon blushed guiltily to the eyes. But it was ever the mischief with Brother Copas's worldly scent that he overran it on the stronger scent of an argument.
"But it's precisely a working daily religion, a religion that belongs to a man when heishimself, that I'm after," he ran on. "You fellows hold that a sound religious life will ensure you an eternity of bliss at the end. Very well. You fellows know that the years of a man's life are, roughly, threescore and ten. (Actually it works out far below that figure, but I make you a present of the difference.) Very well again. I take any average Christian aged forty-five, and what sort of premium do I observe him paying—I won't say on a policy of Eternal Bliss—but on any policy a business-like Insurance Company would grant for three hundred pounds? Thereisthe difference too," added Brother Copas, "thathegets the eternal bliss, while the three hundred pounds goes to his widow."
Brother Copas took a second pinch, his eyes on Mr. Simeon's face. He could not guess the secret of the pang that passed over it—that in naming three hundred pounds he had happened on the precise sum in which Mr. Simeon was insured, and that trouble enough the poor man had to find the yearly premium, due now in a fortnight's time. But he saw that somehow he had given pain, and dexterously slid off the subject, yet without appearing to change it.
"For my part," he went on, "I know a method by which, if made Archbishop of Canterbury and allowed a strong hand, I would undertake to bring, within ten years, every Dissenter in England within the Church's fold."
"What would you do?"
"I would lay, in one pastoral of a dozen sentences, the strictest orders on my clergy to desist from all politics, all fighting; to disdain any cry, any struggle; to accept from Dissent any rebuff, persecution, spoliation—while steadily ignoring it. In every parish my Church's attitude should be this: 'You may deny me, hate me, persecute me, strip me: but you are a Christian of this parish and therefore my parishioner; and therefore I absolutely defy you to escape my forgiveness or my love. Though you flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, you shall not escape these: by these, as surely as I am the Church, you shall be mine in the end.'… And do you think, Mr. Simeon, any man in England could for ever resist that appeal? A few of us agnostics, perhaps. But we are human souls, after all; and no one is an agnostic for the fun of it. We should be tempted—sorely tempted—I don't say rightly."
Mr. Simeon's eyes shone. The picture touched him.
"But it would mean that the Church must compromise," he murmured.
"That is precisely what it would not mean. It would mean that all her adversaries must compromise; and with love there is only one compromise, which is surrender.… But," continued Brother Copas, resuming his lighter tone, "this presupposes not only a sensible Archbishop but a Church not given up to anarchy as the Church of England is. Let us therefore leave speculating and follow our noses; which with me, Mr. Simeon—and confound you for a pleasant companion!—means an instant necessity to cultivate bad temper."
He picked up his volume from the table and walked off with it to the window-seat.
"You are learning bad temper from a book?" asked Mr. Simeon, taking off his spectacles and following Brother Copas with mild eyes of wonder.
"Certainly.… If ever fortune, my good sir, should bring you (which God forbid!) to end your days in our College of Noble Poverty, you will understand the counsel given by the pilot to Pantagruel and his fellow-voyagers—that considering the gentleness of the breeze and the calm of the current, as also that they stood neither in hope of much good nor in fear of much harm, he advised them to let the ship drive, nor busy themselves with anything but making good cheer. I have done with all worldly fear and ambition; and therefore in working up a hearty Protestant rage (to which a hasty promise commits me), I can only tackle my passion on the intellectual side. Those fellows down at the Club are no help to me at all.… My book? It is the last volume of Mr. Froude's famousHistory of England. Here's a passage now—
"'The method of Episcopal appointments, instituted by Henry VIII, as a temporary expedient, and abolished under Edward as an unreality, was re-established by Elizabeth, not certainly because she believed that the invocation of the Holy Ghost was required for the completeness of an election which her own choice had already determined, not because the bishops obtained any gifts or graces in their consecration which she herself respected, but because the shadowy form of an election, with a religious ceremony following it, gave them the semblance of spiritual independence, the semblance without the substance, which qualified them to be the instruments of the system which she desired to enforce. They were tempted to presume on their phantom dignity, till a sword of a second Cromwell taught them the true value of their Apostolic descent.…
"That's pretty well calculated to annoy, eh? Also, by the way, in its careless rapture it twice misrelates the relative pronoun; and Froude was a master of style. Or what do you say to this?—
"'But neither Elizabeth nor later politicians of Elizabeth's temperament desired the Church of England to become too genuine. It has been more convenient to leave an element of unsoundness at the heart of an institution which, if sincere, might be dangerously powerful. The wisest and best of its bishops have found their influence impaired, their position made equivocal, by the element of unreality which adheres to them. A feeling approaching to contempt has blended with the reverence attaching to their position, and has prevented them from carrying the weight in the councils of the nation which has been commanded by men of no greater intrinsic eminence in other professions.'
"Yet another faulty relative!
"'Pretensions which many of them would have gladly abandoned have connected their office with a smile. The nature of it has for the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities. The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice, and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some high-bred, worn-out animal, useless in himself, but infinitely valuable for some mysterious purpose of spiritual propagation.'"
Brother Copas laid the open volume face-downward on his knee—a trivial action in itself; but he had a conscience about books, and would never have done this to a book he respected.
"Has it struck you, Mr. Simeon," he asked, "that Froude is so diabolically effective just because in every fibre of him he is at one with the thing he attacks?"
"He had been a convert of the Tractarians in his young days, I have heard," said Mr. Simeon.
"Yes, it accounts for much in him. Yet I was not thinking of that— which was an experience only, though significant. The man's whole cast of mind is priestly despite himself. He has all the priesthood's alleged tricks: you can never be sure that he is not faking evidence or garbling a quotation.… My dear Mr. Simeon, truly it behoves us to love our enemies, since in this world they are often the nearest we have to us."