Despite his eagerness that October morning, Paul did not then, all at once, write his play. He said that he and the Beggar had got to get to know each other. And before he got to the actual draft, he wrote down a few definite incidents in the later life of the Beggar-Man. He brought the manuscript round to Ursula one day the following Spring when the new flowers were out on Chanctonbury very much as they had been when they sprang into vivid flames of being before the newly-opened eyes of the blind Beggar on the hills of Galilee that he had loved so much. He brought it round to her very early, while the family at the cottage were still at breakfast, which did not perturb him at all.
After greetings, he looked across at Ursula. "Can you come for a long walk this morning?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"At least, not a very long walk. I want you to come to that little wood on the crest of the Downs above Steyning—you know—and let me read this to you."
Mrs. Manning's eyes travelled from one to the other a little anxiously. Really, these two ... But perhaps this time ... Well, if the girl knew her own mind....
"All right," said Ursula. "I'll get a coat."
"Don't forget it's only Spring," said Mrs. Manning at the door. "Don't catch cold."
"We'll remember, mother," said Ursula, and they set out.
At the remembered spot, Paul spread a mackintosh on the ground. "There," he said, "sit down. I'm going to read to you. Do you mind?"
She smiled her own silent slow smile at him, and drew her knees up, and clasped her hands round them, and stared down at the sleepy little town nestling far below.
Paul read. It was the last stage before the actual and now famous play. He had written without introduction as if he were about a short story, and, in main, it was this that was dramatised.
(4)
Paul finished. Ursula, who had hardly moved, put out a hand and laid it gently on his arm.
Paul drew a breath of relieved content, being satisfied now that he knew her so well.
"Now," he said, "I shall begin that play."
"God is silent," said Ursula quizzically.
"But I see," cried Paul eagerly.
"What do you see?"
"I see the wonder and beauty of things as they are. I see that they satisfy. I see that that's enough, that—that they're a kind of avenue down which a man can go forward. And at the end, perhaps, he will find, not all the secret, but a still living lovely lake of water into which he will plunge, content."
"Water?"
Paul nodded, with bright eyes. "The water of life," he said.
"And what is that, do you think?"
"I don't know. It's sure to be beautiful, though."
"Very, Paul, I think," replied Ursula, speaking very quietly as she often did.
Paul studied her face. "I would like you to be there," he said, a little restlessly.
"Would you?" she said. "Well, we shall see."
Next morning, Ursula went up to town and took up residence again in her flat. Mrs. Manning had fluttered about her all the afternoon, and learned nothing. Her daughter seemed wholly unaware that she might have any question to ask, and Mrs. Manning did not dare ask her anything directly. But she thought she might learn more from Paul. So, when her daughter's car had driven off, she and her sister walked round to the Manor with a note Ursula had left for Paul.
They found him at work. He got up, pen in hand, and a look in the back of his eyes that Mrs. Manning saw in her daughter's when she was very busily painting.
"Ursula's gone to town," said her mother, "and she's left you this note."
"Has she?" queried Paul. "She didn't tell me she was going." He tore it open, and read it quickly. It only took him a few seconds to read and he smiled as he finished.
"That's all right," he said. "It's nothing much, Mrs. Manning, only about my work."
"Well, we won't interrupt you now," she said politely. "Come in when you can."
At the end of a long morning's work, Paul picked up the note as if he had not seen it before, and re-read it. "I'm off to town," she had written. "I've had a sudden notion. Give my love to the Beggar-Man. You and he have got your work to do together just now, and I should only interrupt, but call me in at the finish and I want a box the first night. URSULA." Having read it, Paul smiled again. He was still preoccupied with the beauty of the budding limes that arched the avenue of Sight.
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man. It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard the babble and chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before us by what light we have. They may be right; but so, before heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how am I to look for loyalty to others? ...
Although all the world ranged themselves in one line to tell "This is wrong," be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador of God—throw down the glove and answer "This is right." Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn. It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect oneself and utter the voice of God.—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
You see deeper? Thus saw he,And by the light he saw, must walk: how elseWas he to do his part?ROBERT BROWNING:Saviour of Society.
(1)
The day had come at last, and had all but ended. The busy writing, that had been but an interlude, as it seemed afterwards, to the work of curtailing, altering, lengthening and finally staging the play; the alternating moods of despair and hope; the weeks of rehearsals; the immediate days before the performance, spent in town, half lived at the theatre, spent in a new bewildering atmosphere of critical interested faces, critical indifferent faces, toadying sycophant faces, stupid careless faces; all these were over. Arnold and Ursula had stood by him all the time, Arnold giving him sanctuary in his rooms, Ursula ready for his moods, the clearing-house of his thoughts and emotions. Paul had grown ever more clearly aware what good friends these were, and now, for the first night, they two and Tressor had been with him in the box.
He was very tired; that seemed to stand out more clearly than anything else. He was utterly tired of his own work, and utterly tired of the whole dreary business of staging. He had seen the curtain go up chiefly with a kind of dull wonder that anyone should be there to watch the fantastically familiar and now boring thing. He had looked down with the rest, across the footlights, into that Eastern street where passers by came and went, and mules and asses, where a radiant sun shone blindingly, where tall white houses and the gaudy booths of merchants filled the scene; but he had a sudden odd sense of Chanctonbury and dark pines and the cool mellow wind, and a feeling that the beggar-man had no place there. Yet the beggar-man was duly at his corner crouching in the dust, whining, shrinking from the Pharisee's robe, the merchant's stick. Paul found himself staring with aroused interest—his blind beggar-man! And then there had been that confused murmur off the stage; the sudden emptying of the street; that cry of the Son of David, startlingly clear, that had fetched the beggar-man to his feet and drawn him groping off, leaving the deserted stalls, the glaring dust and a tethered beast or two for the audience to study the while the noise without died down, and leaped again into a sudden shout as the miracle was accomplished. That had been his idea, his only, and his the new striding in of that alert figure, thronged, jostled, questioned, who made his resolute revolutionary way back to his old seat for his bowl and his stool ere he marched off home—seeing.
With the fall of the curtain, an eager manager had pushed his way in. "Capital, capital, Mr. Kestern. It's going like a bell. Thoroughwood is here, and he's very impressed, very impressed indeed. I was not sure of him, you know, but if he says the right thing, the play's made. I congratulate you, Mr. Kestern, I do indeed."
Paul had stared at him. Then he bowed and murmured a conventional reply, and sat down heavily by Ursula. She had put her hand on his arm and smiled. "That's all right," she said. "Don't mind him. People will see the right thing, if he doesn't."
"Will they?" he had questioned.
"Boy," she said, "I've never had a doubt. There's no denying sight."
And so it had been. The thing was sight. Even a first-night London theatre audience, attracted by the advertisement of an unusual thing, had seen that. The play as a play was good, but the play as a parable was something more. The clay had touched more eyes than those of the blind beggar that night. When the last curtain fell, it had fallen on a silent house. The weaving of the spell had been complete. Art, poetry, drama and successful staging, all had been there, but the spirit of something more had stolen into the place. Several thousand men and women had looked on truth in its beauty, stripped of the shams and conventionalities of orthodox religion, and the utter loveliness of it had gone straight to their hearts.
Of course, the applause had come, had grown, had begun as a breath of relief and had risen to a crescendo of tumult. People had invaded the box. The manager had gestured towards a sea of upturned faces, looking their way. Paul had gone behind, shaken hands with a sudden grateful eagerness with the men and women who had played in his success, and appeared for a moment before the curtain. He had said something, and bowed, and felt suddenly utterly carried away, so that he had waved his hand boyishly and had, apparently, done just the right thing, whatever that was. At present he had no recollection. But even Ursula had been smiling when he rejoined them.
"Come on," cried Arnold, "the taxi's waiting and we'll get out of this."
"Right," said Paul. "Which way? ... What is it? Lend me a pencil, will you? There, will that do?"
Arnold thrust his arm into his. "Look here," he said, "for heaven's sake don't start signing programmes now. On you go, Ursula. We'll follow."
The porter in his little box smiled at him. The manager appeared again and smiled at him. ("Oh, I say, don't go. Do stay for supper...." "Thanks awfully, but I've got a show fixed up, I fear. Another night....") A little crowd at the door smiled at him and thrust forward. A policeman even smiled at him, and thrust back. Ursula got in; Paul was vividly aware of the dark night, a muddy street, a yellow flare of light over the way, the tail of a poster: "——AR-MAN," and the gleam of the girl's white opera-cloak. Then he too was in, in the dark confined little space, sitting down by her, fumbling to move her wraps a little, stowing his legs away to make room for Arnold. And then Arnold, lingering momentarily to bid the driver make all speed, was in too, and the door banged, and the first performance was over.
"Thank God," said Arnold. "Give me a cigarette, somebody."
"Did you see Muriel?" asked Ursula. "She was in front. She waved to me. I took it to mean that she'd go on."
"Where's Tressor?" demanded Paul.
Arnold laughed. "Hear that, Ursula? Still, I suppose it's excusable. Personally I should have been drunk before this. You're really a marvel, Paul."
"What in the world are you talking about? Ursula, do explain."
Her eyes danced at him. "Oh, it's nothing," she said. "We're all of us too excited to talk sense. Paul, isn't it absolutely priceless?"
"I can't tell you what I feel," said Paul.
"Tressor shook hands with you, and said good-night and that he'd clear off, and you were to let him know when you were going down to Fordham," explained Arnold belatedly.
"Oh, yes, so he did. I say, Mortimer did 'Herod' well, didn't he? And d'you know, that finish is good, isn't it? It was wonderful to-night. In the end, it seemed to me that I hadn't written it, hadn't even seen it before."
"Magic of an excited house," commented Arnold. "Well, you ought to be a happy man. You're a lucky one, anyway."
"I know. I am. I am both. And I'm awfully grateful to you two."
Arnold put his head out of the window. "Here we are," he cried, half in and half out of the taxi. "We've done nothing."
Paul turned suddenly to the girl. "You did everything," he said, with vivid realisation.
It had been Ursula's wish to give Paul a triumphant supper at her flat the night of his success. It was not to be a big affair, the three of them and Muriel Lister only, and Paul had eagerly assented, realising a little how intolerable any other programme would be. So now Ursula went ahead upstairs, and when Paul and his friend came in, was drawing her gloves off before the fire and chatting with her friend. "Here he is," she cried. "Now Muriel."
Muriel Lister took an eager pace forward and held out her hand. "Mr. Kestern," she said, "I don't know how to congratulate you. You've done far more than devise a successful play, far more than write some wonderful poetry. You've preached a new religion, do you know that? You're rightly called Paul; you're an apostle."
Paul laughed. "That's the one role I've sought all my days," he said, "but I thought I should never play it."
"Well, you have. All London will know it to-morrow. You've said the thing the churches are afraid to say. You've said what we've been trying to preach for years. And what's more, you've said it in such a way that people will listen and see. Oh, I do congratulate you!"
"My dear Muriel," said Arnold, "you're intolerable. A parson is bad enough, but a woman parson is worse. Whatever you girls may feel, I'm dying for eats and drinks, and I bet the successful author is too, only, probably, he's too shy to say so. Let's eat first and talk it over afterwards."
Muriel chuckled and turned to Ursula. "What a pig he is," she cried, "but perhaps he's right. We're all four too exalted for life at present. Let's eat, and we shall grow sane. It's a parable. Come on, my dear; shall I dole out chicken?"
They gathered round the table in a corner of the big studio and fell to, talking reminiscently and mostly all at once the while. Finally Paul pushed his chair back a little and laughed aloud.
"What is it now?" mumbled Arnold, still busy.
"Oh," cried Paul, "I can't believe it, you know, I can't believe it! We four, here, and I the author of a play that—that (I know it's conceited, but I can't help it) that perhaps half London will be talking about in a week!"
His little gesture took them all in: Arnold opposite, consuming trifle; Ursula on his left, tall, dark, leaning back in her chair, playing with a spoon, smiling; Muriel on his right, keen-faced, upright, fair; the bare table littered with pleasant things of glass and silver; dishes—the white débris of chicken, the shattered orange of a jelly; the shadowed spaces of the studio about them; the blue curtains; the faded Persian rug; easel; worn, easy chairs; model's throne; a shelf in the corner gleaming with the hammered copper of Ursula's collection of antique Arab coffee-pots and bowls; a standard lamp shaded with blue and old gold; a bookcase with its owner's carefully selected volumes, among which were a couple now bearing his name. And the three looked at him and read his face for a second or two in silence. They all knew what he meant. It was rather wonderful when one considered the Paul Kestern of Lambeth Court.
Muriel Lister broke the little silence. "It's like you not to believe it yet," she said.
Paul studied her and grew puzzled. "Why do you say that?" he asked.
She threw a glance at Ursula. The two were great friends and confided in each other. Then she laughed. "You're still a bit blind, you know," she retorted.
"Why?" queried Paul. "I don't see."
"Exactly," nodded the other. "But come on, let's talk."
Paul chose the big footstool, which, in the studio, had come to be regarded as his special right. Arnold sprawled on a couch. Muriel Lister sat on a chair by Paul. Ursula had a pile of cushions in the corner between Arnold and the fire, and said little as was her wont.
"You've got to preach that new religion of yours," went on Muriel when they were settled. "I hope you realise that."
Paul frowned. He liked Miss Lister, but not especially her rather parsonic manner. "I don't know that I can," he said.
"You must. Why shouldn't you?"
"I'm not sure that I see it like that myself yet."
"Surely you do. Don't you see it's just what the world is waiting for? Men and women have outgrown that old pious talk of a god that is no more than a glorified human being, and especially they've outgrown all those grave-clothes the Greek philosophers and Eastern gnostics wound about the figure of the prophet of Nazareth in order to present to the world a conception, a Jesus of the Nicene Creed. But somehow there was no way out. We all speculated as to the personality of God, except a few, who were agnostics, but you get nowhere with negations."
"I know," said Paul gravely. "That God of theirs is asleep. The oracle is silent. I know."
"Yes, and now by some stroke of genius you've put your finger on the thing that matters. Sight. The beauty of the world. 'He's good, omnipotent, a father'—that's what the theologians have said. 'It's beautiful,' say you, and that's enough."
"The gospel of sheer slothful material sentimentalism," put in Manning lazily.
She flashed on him. "Rubbish," she cried. "That's not the gospel of the Beggar-Man, is it, Mr. Kestern?"
"No," said Paul, "no, no, no; it's not that."
"No, the glory of this is that it is positive. It strides forward. It builds; it——"
"It builds what? Let's be practical. That sort of talk, up to the present anyway, has mostly built Agapemones."
Muriel Lister frowned. "No," she said. "The Temple of Common Things."
Arnold sucked his pipe. "I fear I can't follow so quickly," he retorted cynically.
"You wouldn't. But, don't you see? This creed doesn't seek an æsthetic hybrid sensual beauty. When the beggar-man had his eyes opened, what was it seemed beautiful to him? Eh, what?"
Paul smiled. "His three-legged stool," he said, "and his little hovel."
"Exactly. Clay. The beauty of gold-brown earth." And Miss Lister relapsed into silence.
"I still don't see the gospel," said Arnold.
"You're born blind, then," retorted the girl.
"Well," returned Arnold, "be a little more explicit. Get on with it."
"A gospel that origins and ends don't matter and that we ought to be influenced by them not at all; that God is veiled, but the veil is good; that we are kin to all that is; that barriers are of our own making; that the urge of life within us is our guide; and that moralities and revelations and false spiritualities have themselves made sin. And," she added slowly, "that the true spiritual life consists in the pursuit of learning, experience and beauty, according to vocation, without fear and for themselves alone."
"Fear?" queried Arnold.
"Yes, without fear. The gospel of the Beggar-Man banishes fear. He knows right values. He knows he cannot be robbed of anything that matters. He fears no man; all men are brothers; all are blind beggars with potential sight; he has nothing but pity for your aristocrat, your millionaire."
"'News from Nowhere'," chuckled Arnold.
"True—with the path blazoned to it," she exclaimed.
"It appears to be you and not Paul who is preaching anyway," put in Ursula, staring into the fire.
"He will live it, and he will sing it—and you will paint it," cried Muriel.
"Which reminds me," said Paul gravely, "that I've to go down to Claxted to-morrow."
"Claxted?"
"Yes, to my people. I've utterly neglected them lately. They don't even know I've written a play."
"They will to-morrow," said Arnold, "if they read the newspapers."
"Yes," Paul replied slowly, "I think they will." And was suddenly silent, with a silence that the little company knew to be significant. The firelight danced on his face. Ursula turned her head slowly and studied him.
(2)
Paul went back with Arnold, and next morning the two friends packed up and parted, Arnold going to Cambridge, Paul to Claxted. The latter was to spend some weeks with his people and was restless over the prospect. He did not say much, however; Arnold was almost incapable of understanding just what Claxted meant. He knew that the Kesterns were "old-fashioned" and "strait-laced"; what he could not know was the sincerity, the earnestness on the one hand, and the fierce fanaticism on the other, of their faith. But Paul knew, or thought so. Perhaps he should have realised even more than he did, but the years of partial separation and the mellow influence of Fordham had dulled his memory to some extent.
He had hardly left Claxted station, however, before he got an inkling of what was to be. In Edward Street he ran into Miss Bishop. Now Miss Bishop was Miss Bishop, a unique product of divine providence, but beneath all her angularity and sectarianism ran a kindly current which had hitherto embraced Paul. He therefore smiled at seeing her, shifted a suitcase to his left hand and held out his right. "Why, Miss Bishop," he said, "how do you do?"
The woman's lips compressed and her eyes flashed. "You can be as cheerful as that, can you?" she said. "Do you realise the evil you have done? But I suppose you don't. May God open your eyes in time, that is all I have to say. Good-day." And she passed on, without taking his hand.
Paul's astonishment and dismay were almost ludicrous. A passing small boy with a street urchin's keen perception, perceived vaguely that he had hit on a lucky incident. His arrested whistle and wide grin recalled Paul to his senses.
"Fair cop, mister?" queried the small boy, hopefully.
Paul ignored him, caught a glimmer of the humour of the situation, changed his grip on his suitcase again, and passed on. But as he went, he turned her words over in his mind. Increasingly he could see no sense in them.
Taking the cinder-path that skirts the railway, the kindly touch of familiar things which have ceased to have power to perplex or terrify came to his aid. It was along this path that he had gone to the Mission Hall Sunday by Sunday, the waters of his soul troubled with the frenzy of apostleship, but it was along this path that he had returned often and again arm in arm with a tender kindly Mr. Kestern who had shared all his son's enthusiasms and sympathised in his distresses. Here, as a schoolboy, he had counted trains or trudged eagerly home from school for a Saturday afternoon excursion. Here, more adult, he had been first conscious of sex stimulus (though then and now he did not so label it) in the company of Madeline and Edith. Edith! Yes, it was of Edith that he thought mostly as he walked home. She had been reserved and sorrowful on his going to Fordham, had replied more and more tardily to letters, had finally ceased to write at all. But he too had ceased. Anyone as sensitive as Paul to surroundings would have felt an incongruity between Edith Thornton and Fordham Manor, and then, too, he had been going through an emotional stress big enough to dominate his mind. But now, back here in the home atmosphere, he thought very warmly of her. He longed for her simplicity, her naïve faith. It did not seem to him a barrier between them. After all, with the sight of the Beggar-Man, it was easy to enfold her in tenderness and understanding.
Thus, then, he came at last to his father's door, waited impatiently for the maid to open it, dropped his bag in the little hall, and turned impulsively to the figure of Mr. Kestern irresolute in the study door.
"Dad," he cried, "it is good to see you again! How are you? How's mother?"
"Oh, Paul!"
The love, the sorrow, the yearning of Mrs. Kestern's cry stabbed him suddenly and unexpectedly to the heart. She had rushed past her husband and flung her arms about his neck. Emotion welling up in him, he bent his head to kiss her, and felt the hot tears on her cheek.
"Oh, my boy, my boy.... You've come at last, Paul. Oh, my son, you'll never doubt your mother's love for you, will you? Kiss your father, Paul. I cannot lose either of my men."
Paul was already bewildered. The pathos of her grip on his arm, and the significance of her eagerness to see the greeting between him and his father, were not lost upon him. His mother clinging to him, he turned to his father, who had not stirred.
"Of course I've come, mother darling," he said. "But I've been terribly busy, you know. And it's awfully jolly seeing you and daddy again. (He used the childish word unconsciously.) How are you, father?"
The man moved a little and brushed his son's lips. Paul perceived in a moment that he had aged. Fear slipped suddenly into his mind. He peered a little to see his father's eyes, and then, with something like a catch in his heart, and with a deliberate blindness, pushed them before him into the study. "Oh, it is jolly to be back," he cried again, but with simulated enthusiasm now, refusing to admit what he had seen, stifling his growing apprehension.
Mr. Kestern seated himself in his revolving chair in front of the bureau. His Bible lay open upon it. Paul caught a glimpse of the underlinings, the "railway-lines," the added red and black of the almost microscopic notes in the neat handwriting he knew so well. He looked swiftly round. The case of stuffed birds, the books, the framed portraits, a print of John G. Paton, missionary in the New Hebrides—nothing had changed. His eye fell on a text, the letters of which had been cut out separately with a fretsaw, hung on an invisible thread, and draped on the wall above the bureau. "Jesus Himself drew near and went with them." That was new; and yet, yet, how old! The old Claxted; the old faith; the old obstinate unchanging evangelicalism that was already a lifetime old to him.
"How are all your new friends?" asked his father.
The hidden note of bitterness stung Paul for the first time to something like anger. He choked it down, however. "Very well indeed, thanks," he said evenly. "I had supper with them last night, and saw Manning off to Cambridge this morning."
"The very newspaper told us that much," said Mr. Kestern, with a gesture towards theMorning Postthat lay folded on a side-table. "After the theatre, I understand."
The harshness of the man's voice was too obvious to allow of any further equivocation. Paul moved over to the fireplace, and his mother, seated in an arm-chair, held out a hand appealingly to him.
"Paul, dear," she entreated, "don't anger your father. You know what he feels about the theatre."
"But I've said nothing, mother," cried Paul miserably.
"Nothing!" exclaimed Mr. Kestern, wheeling round on him, no longer able to restrain himself, "nothing! Do you think it is nothing that my boy should write a play? My son, photographed with a stage-manager, appearing—what is your word?—'called' before the curtain! Oh, God, what have I done that my son should come to this!"
"Father, father, don't!" cried Mrs. Kestern. "Of course Paul must take his own place——"
"Mother, you don't know what you say. His own place! But that is the son we gave to God, that is the son of our hopes and prayers, that is the boy for whom we contrived and saved that he might go to college, and now—now, he writes plays! The bitterness is more than I can bear. I have lost my son."
The grim comedy of it was lost on the three of them. Mrs. Kestern burst into tears. "Father, dear," she sobbed, "don't say such terrible things. Oh, I can't bear it!"
Something awoke and flared up in Paul. The thing had come so quickly, with such an appearance of inevitability that he had been taken wholly unawares. He had hoped for a reasonable talk about the theatre, and at least a comfortable agreement to differ. But he had been conscious during the last few minutes of utter helplessness before this incredible attitude, and now the cruel absurdity of it all flamed before him.
"Father," he burst out, "you've no right to speak so. You've no right to judge the theatre as you do. You know nothing about it. You've not seen my play."
"I haven't, thank God, I haven't. But I've read about it. I've read about it with utter shame and dismay. Yet I can't, I won't at least, believe all that the paper hints at. Is it true that you have parodied the Gospel?"
"Parodied?" Paul was utterly bewildered again.
"Yes, parodied. I gather you have taken a story that you learned as a boy at your mother's knee, upon which I have even heard you preach, and have reset it, rewritten it, pushing the Master into the background, denying, so far as I can see, the Son of God."
"Father——" sobbed Mrs. Kestern.
"Mother, that will do. Paul and I must thrash this thing out. Tell me, Paul, once and for all, what is Jesus Christ now to you?"
Paul stared at him. Mr. Kestern, flushed, vehement, terrible, was the father of the old Catholic controversial days, the father from whom he was divided by an impassable gulf. What could he say? How could he explain? He made an involuntary hopeless gesture that was immediately misunderstood, and turned back to the fireplace.
"Ah," cried Mr. Kestern, "you will not answer. This is what your Catholic friends have done for you! I told you so, but you would never believe me. Rome was so reasonable and fair, wasn't it?—an angel of light. Father Vassall believed in Christ as earnestly as I did—did you not say that? But this is the end! You deny the Master who bought you with His own blood!"
The utter injustice of that charge broke down Paul's last reserve. He turned swiftly back, as vehement as the other, the true son of his father if the elder could only have seen it. "You don't know what you say," he cried. "This is utter madness, utter childish folly. Father Vassall has nothing whatever to do with all this. How could he? Do you think he wanted me to go to Fordham, though you did. Why, if he had had his way, I should be a Catholic priest by now, or well on the way to it."
"Just so," stormed his father, "a Catholic priest indeed! Then he would have trapped you finely. As it is, baulked in that, he will send your soul to hell by another road!"
"Oh, I can't bear it, I can't bear it," cried Mrs. Kestern, rocking herself to and fro.
Paul clenched his fists. "You've no right to speak so," he retorted passionately. "How dare you insult Father Vassall in that way? Is it like Christ to talk so? If that is all your evangelicalism can do for you, I am well quit of it."
"So you admit you are quit of it? You turn your back on your father's and mother's faith? You have no use for the Scripture of Truth?"
The boy might, in a saner moment, have caught the tone of invincible bigotry that had crept into his father's words. "Of course I've use for it," retorted Paul again, contemptuously. "Haven't I written a play under its inspiration? But I must make my own judgment on religion."
Mr. Kestern sobered suddenly and terribly. He spoke biting words with slow deliberation. "You must, sir," he said, "only it is blasphemy to speak so of inspiration. And you will be good enough to tell me what is your judgment on the Master Who alone is served in this house."
Paul gazed at him a minute. Phrases rose to his lips. Then he realised how useless they would be. His anger died as quickly as it had arisen. "You would not understand," he said hopelessly.
"I know I have not the new learning of my son," retorted Mr. Kestern bitterly, "but I think I can understand that much. Will you answer a plain question? Are you still on the Lord's side, or not?"
"Of course he is," wept Mrs. Kestern. "Father, how can you ask? Speak, Paul, and tell him you still love and serve the Lord Jesus?"
Mr. Kestern studied his son's face. "Speak, then," he said slowly.
Paul hesitated. Then he drew himself up. "I love and respect and admire Jesus of Nazareth with all my heart," he said. "His teaching it is that has opened my eyes, and his gospel of compassion and brotherliness is as noble as any that the world has yet heard. But I cannot call him God as you do, and as Catholics do."
The anger died in Mr. Kestern's face. The look of an old and broken man crept into it. He turned back to his desk and picked up his Bible. "Do you perhaps remember what this says?" he demanded. "Listen." (He fumbled with the leaves.) "'He that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is the spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.'"
The words lingered in the little room. The three of them, each in his or her own way, quailed before the stark decisiveness of them. Mrs. Kestern it was who first could bear it no longer. "Father, he is your son," she cried. "Nothing can alter that!"
Mr. Kestern was on his feet, two thousand years of Christianity stripped from him, the spirit of the Old Testament glowing in his face. "What saith the Scripture?" he cried. "'Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother.' 'Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way.' Or our Master Himself: 'He that loveth child more than me is not worthy of me.' And you, Paul, have done both these things. My grey hairs you would bring down in sorrow to the grave, but that is not enough. Here, into this very parish of which I am pastor, you have brought your devil's doctrine and broken up one family of Christ's flock already. Shall I spare my son any more than our brother spared his daughter? You will leave this house, and I do not want to see your face till you come as a penitent again."
Mrs. Kestern buried her face in her hands and cowered in her chair with an inarticulate cry of woe so bitter that both father and son shrank before it. The clergyman stepped quickly over to her. "Mother, mother," he cried, "the dear Lord knows. He will save the boy yet. But how can we have such in this house?"
"My son, my son," she wailed. Then, breaking free from her husband, "Oh, Paul, say you don't mean it! Paul, Paul, would you break your mother's heart? Say you don't mean it, Paul, say you don't mean it!"
She flung her arms round his neck, but the boy put her away. He was piecing this and that together, and was no more only the boy. "What do you mean," he demanded, "when you say I have broken up a family in this parish? What charge is that? Tell me, if you have any justice left in you."
"You know," said his father sternly; "don't pretend you do not."
"I do not know," cried Paul passionately. "I begin to think you are mad, all mad. My God, if this is the religion of Christ, Christ would not know it!"
His father started, and for a moment it was almost as if the old man would strike his son. Then, with a gesture, he strode to the door. "Go," he said, "go. Only last month I had to comfort Mr. Thornton when his child, Edith, left his house to become a Papist through you. Papist or atheist, it is all one to me. I will not have such within my house."
"Edith!" cried Paul, utterly dumbfounded.
His tone, and the use of the girl's name, braced Mrs. Kestern. "Oh, Paul," she cried, "you knew of it, don't pretend you didn't! How you could have acted so behind our backs I can't think. Poor, poor girl! Oh, you had better go now. It would be better for us all. May our Father have mercy on us, and may you be spared the agony that your parents know."
His mother's action brought Paul to his senses. He looked from one to the other of them in consternation. "You don't mean it," he cried, "surely you don't mean it!"
"Don't go like that, Paul," sobbed Mrs. Kestern, breaking down again, "I can't bear it."
Paul pulled himself together. "But, mother, father," he said, "this is sheer madness. We are not living in the Middle Ages. This isn't melodrama. I—I differ from you in religion, I know; I can't help it; I must do what seems right to me. But surely, because of that——"
His father opened the study door. Broken and old, there was a certain dignity now in his face. "Paul," he said, "we talk different tongues, but nothing alters the fact that you have turned utterly from the religion of your parents to serve another. 'As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.' You have no place here. Go now, lest we say in our anger what ought not to be said."
Paul looked again heavily round the room. "You have said it already," he replied, and left the house.
(3)
Paul walked down the street like a man in a dream. Once he stopped, turned, and walked a few paces back, telling himself that it could not be true, that it was too theatrical to be true. But his father's face rose before him as he went, and still more the terror of his mother's tears. He recalled the history of a friend of his in training for the Baptist ministry, who had decided he could not accept the doctrine of the deity of Christ and had been cursed by his widowed mother and turned into the street with eighteenpence in his pocket. Somehow it had never seemed possible that it could happen to him. Yet, in the throes of the Catholic stage of his soul's pilgrimage, it had been plain enough that something of that sort would happen if he made his submission to the Church. Once more, the horror of his parents' grief as he had seen it when he knelt in Father Vassall's chapel gripped his heart. And now, and now, suddenly, so ironically, so futilely, so childishly, this thing had swept down upon him. He, Paul Kestern, had been turned from his father's house. The thing was true.
Then, into the stream of his thoughts, drifted the memory of what had been said of Edith Thornton. Of all the incredible happenings of an incredible morning, that, perhaps, was ultimately one of the most incredible. Edith a Catholic! He thought of her face under the lamplight in Lambeth Court—oh, incredible! But one moment: he thought of her prayer under the pines at Keswick, of her answer to his dilemma after his return from Thurloe End. Gradually he began to piece together the mosaic of her simple reasoning, her resolute faith, her ardent love; it was exactly of such souls that Catholic saints are made. That, then, had been the inner meaning of her sorrow over his going to Fordham and of her silence thereafter. This resolution, this terrible domestic retribution, had come crashing down on her head, and she, too, had been driven out alone.
Once more the flame of anger flickered in his heart. As he thought it over, his indignation grew. He pictured her, as he loved best to do, in the quiet neat simplicity of that brown dress of hers, with her clear, trustful eyes. And they had turned her out, had they, to what, he should like to know? Good God, and this was in England to-day! He saw Mr. Thornton, rotund, bald, very respectable, and realised that if, at bottom, he was as bigoted a Protestant as any of them, business was mixed up with religion. The man had never really loved his daughter, Paul thought, he, with his commercial soul, his respectable tradesman's boot-licking servility, his front pew in the side aisle never empty on a Sunday. And as he thought of it all, he came to a resolution. He gripped his stick more firmly and turned off to Edward Street.
A girl assistant came forward. Paul did not know her. Could he see Mr. Thornton? She would enquire. What name?
"Mr. Kestern," said Paul, a little grimly.
A flutter of surprise and then of understanding crossed the girl's face. Would he sit down. She would tell Mr. Thornton.
She disappeared behind a screen and opened a door. Paul, looking round the suburbanly-fashionable shop, knew that she stood in front of a solid, highly polished desk in that little inner sanctum, and wondered if she would say more than his name. If not, it would be his father who would be expected. The immediate appearance of Mr. Thornton round the screen, bowing, smiling, rubbing his hands, showed him that she had not. He walked forward. As the photographer started in surprise, he spoke.
"How do you do, Mr. Thornton? I've come to ask if I may see Edith." (Better to put it that way: the man would not know how much he had been told.)
Edith's father stood and looked at him in amazement. Paul, out of the corner of his eye, saw the interested friendly smile of the girl behind. Possibly Mr. Thornton saw it reflected in the young man's face, for his own flushed angrily. He stumbled for words. "You, you——" he spluttered. "How dare you, sir?"
Paul surveyed him coolly. He was sure of his ground now. "Really, Mr. Thornton..." he said. "Your daughter and I were very good friends in the Mission, and I have not seen her for some time."
"Look here," burst out the man, "you may be a clergyman's son, and you may think to come it over me, but I tell you you were responsible—I know you were responsible. Broke her mother's 'eart, she has, and you——"
He realised suddenly that he was in the shop. Anyone might come in. The girl was there. He took a grip of himself and prepared for a more cold-blooded battle. "Ah," he said conventionally, "I'm very glad you've called. Will you please to come inside a moment."
Paul entered the lion's den.
The little man was still more reassured by the weight and prosperity of his office furniture. He sank into his chair, and motioned Paul to a seat. One glance to see that the door was shut behind him, and then:
"I'mveryglad you've called. If there was a just law in this land, I ought to be able to prosecute you, I ought. You made my girl a Catholic, you did,—a Papist,mygirl! You go to college to learn to be a minister, and you come sneaking back pervertin' a girl like my Edith. And where is she now, I ask you, where is she now? In a convent,that'swhere she is. Fair broke her mother's 'eart it has. A convent! Going to be a nun! And what tricks they'll play on her there, what dirty tricks them Jesuits will be up to——"
Paul cut in decisively. "Mr. Thornton," he said, "that will do. That is utter rubbish, you know. What is more, it is beastly. I won't hear it."
Mr. Thornton knew education and the manner of gentlemen. He had all the Claxted respect for them. So now this peremptory young man momentarily shut him up. "Er—er—I——" he stuttered.
Paul leaned coolly back and waited. He was desperately angry, and he was beginning to be aware of a sense of bitter loss, but both, here, only made him cool. And his coolness enraged the photographer even as he stammered under his set-back. His sense of outrage, of personal injury, came rapidly to the fore again. It grew every second, and at last:
"Well, I've lost my girl, anyway, I have, and through you. What had you got to do with her, anyway, that's what I want to know? Walkin' out with her—as good as—I hear now——"
Paul flushed. There it was, the naked truth, as Alf Vintner and Maud and half the parish probably saw it. He bit his lip. "Mr. Thornton," he said, "I wanted to marry your daughter."
Marry! The man gaped on him. Somehow he had not thought that. He had never thought that Mr. Kestern's son, at Cambridge too, doing so well, going to be a minister, had thought seriously of marrying his daughter. Heavens, what they had missed! And this young man apparently thought he had missed something, too. After all, then, he couldn't have persuaded her to seek a convent. This was a new development.
"You don't say so, now, Mr. Kestern, sir," he said. "Well, Edith was a dear good girl, the best of the lot I always said. Whatever made her take up with that Catholikism, I can't tell. She never heard it in this house, I know. And seeing that you were going High Church, mother and I, we thought..."
"What happened, Mr. Thornton, can you tell me that?"
"Well, sir, she outs with it one evening, six months or so ago it was. Says she's going to be received into the Church—those were her very words. Going to be received into the Church! It made me very hot, Mr. Kestern, it did. No member of our family has ever been a Catholic, thank God, and I said as I wouldn't have a child of mine a Catholic in a good church-going evangelical house like this. Said it out plain and straight, I did. And she ups and walks out of the door that very night."
"You mean you turned her out, I suppose."
"Well, sir, I was hot, I admit. She provoked me, too, knowing better'n her father. 'If you can't go to my church, out you go,' I said. 'You mean that, father?' she asks. 'Yes,' I said, standing on my dignity, and she just walks off. Her mother in tears, too. 'You go to communion with me, or you're no daughter of mine,' that was what I said, Mr. Kestern, and your father, he supported me in it afterwards."
"And you turned her out that night, as she was?"
"As she was, she walked out, Mr. Kestern. Went straight to the Catholic Convent, I believe. Her mother saw her there once. And where she is now,Idon't know. No, I don'tknow. She was going to be a nun, she said, and it seems, she being over-age, nobody can't stop her. If there was a law in this so-called Christian land, Mr. Kestern——"
Paul got up. The look on his face checked the photographer. "I understand, Mr. Thornton," he said, "despite your words. Your Christianity was such that you drove your daughter from your house for the sake of her new faith. I should hardly have thought it possible, but I fear I understand only too well. And I will tell you what I think of it, Mr. Thornton. It was a cowardly, mean, base, unchristian thing of you to do, and that Jesus, in whose name you did it, would never have lent his authority to any such thing. It is utterly foreign to his gospel. As for Edith, I hope to God she knows her own mind, that is all, and in my own sorrow, I can only find heart to be glad that at least she is not here. Good-day." And Paul, not waiting for the other to recover, walked out of the shop.
At the corner of Edward Street and Wellington Road, scarcely reasoning as to what he was about to do, he hailed a cab and drove to the convent. He had bearded the nun who opened the door and was in the parlour waiting to see the Reverend Mother before he realised the futility of his action. Still, he was there now, and he looked curiously about him. It was while he waited in that parlour that he came to a realisation of how far from the religion it represented he had moved. Plainly furnished with a table, a few stiff chairs, a foreign-looking so-called couch with an antimacassar, and a cheap bookshelf with old-fashioned books in it, an oleograph of Pius IX. hung over the mantelpiece, beaming blandly, half a crucifix behind him. A Madonna in coloured plaster stood on a shelf, and on the mantel-piece at one end a cast of Christ pointing to his bleeding dripping heart, and at the other another of St. Theresa gazing seraphically upwards. A crucifix stood between them, the Christ meeting St. Theresa's gaze with agonised eyes, white girt about the waist with a heavy plaster loin-cloth. The table was covered with a faded red cloth. It held an inkstand and a blotter. In the corner aprie-Dieuwas tucked out of the way.
The Reverend Mother was kind and polite. Did he come from the family? No, and Paul hardly cared to explain. Well, of course, he could not, in any case, see Sister Edith. Nor was she there in fact. She had been admitted to the novitiate, and, during training, the rules were strict. She could not promise that a letter would be given; it depended on the letter. Paul understood that it would be read. The sister was very happy, however, much happier than she had been on the night she arrived alone and in tears, turned out from her father's house....
That was all, of course. He might have known it. But one thing after another.... Paul Kestern suddenly took stock of his own heart.
Where, indeed, was he even to sleep that night? In the street, he turned the question over. And afterwards, what was he to do? Manning was at Cambridge; well, Fordham.... But suddenly he hated Fordham. He saw it, proud, aloof, and utterly failing to understand such troubles as were his. Tressor, too, would be there, and Paul shrank from Tressor's dignified quiet kindliness. He suddenly knew himself to be alone. He knew himself to be beaten, bruised, lonely; yes, he, with the morning's paper full of his triumph. Apples of Sodom.... For this he had made the great exchange. This was what it all came to: he was down and out and alone. Ursula?
(4)
He took train to town, engaged a room for the night at the Grosvenor as being the nearest hotel, and took a taxi to her flat. Two at a time he mounted the stairs; damn the lift. He knocked. "Come in," she called.
It was eight o'clock and the lights were on, of course. She was sitting alone in an easy-chair by the fire, clad in a loose simple dress of a rich deep orange that became her well. She was reading, and looked up almost expectantly from her book at his knock. A little fire leaped in the grate, and the room was still, familiar, kind. She smiled enquiringly as she saw him. "Why, Paul," she said.
Paul moved slowly over to her, closing the door behind him. On the rug before the fire, he came to a standstill, looking down into her upturned face with its clear unafraid open eyes, set in its ring of black hair, taking in her regular definite features, her white throat. She smiled at him again as he stood there, tenderly.
"Ursula, Ursula!" he cried, took a hasty step forward, dropped on his knees before her, and buried his face in the kindly flame of her dress.
She reached a hand out and laid it on his head, stroking his hair. For a little neither moved. Then: "I understand, Paul," she said without more words; "I thought it might be so. Your face told me last night."
He looked up. "You're very wonderful," he said slowly. "How could you guess? But it's not only my people, Ursula. That, of course, was just too terrible. Father simply drove me out. Not a word of explanation would he allow. It happened so quickly, too; at first I hardly understood.... But I think it was worse afterwards when I did. Edith has gone to be a nun."
"Edith?"
"Yes." (Words came quicker now.) "Of course you don't know about her though. I was in love with her. Ursula, she was such a dear. Somehow or another I see now what I've lost, desolatingly. Do you know—of course, it sounds absurd—but in my mind she is, as it were, in the balance against the theatre. She was so different. She was so unspoilt, so simple, so loving. Oh, she was a dear, Ursula. And she's gone to be a nun, and it was I who made her."
"You who made her?"
"Well, I set her thinking about the Catholic Church, I suppose. Of course I don't know in the least what brought her to it in the end, but still I can see, somehow. She was made to be a nun."
"Then she could hardly have been made for you."
"Oh, I don't know. She was such a dear. You don't know," he cried bitterly.
Ursula smiled. "You odd, impetuous, eager creature," she said.
"But, Ursula, I'm utterly sick and miserable to-night. I can't put it into words properly. I see what I've lost. My people—of course, they're ignorant, almost mad, but they've got something that I've lost. Their faith is wonderful. Christ is so real to them. They live in an odd world, but it isn't shallow, it isn't a sham, and our world is such a sham, Ursula. I feel that at the theatre so much. You never know what people really think and mean. And afterwards, in the morning light, so to speak, it's all made-up and painted and false."
She said nothing, only shifted her eyes to the fire.
"And then there's Edith. You can't see Edith, Ursula, as I do. She was like a flower. She was so utterly simple and childish and true. She was just the opposite to all this. She saw through things. That's why she's become a nun, of course; just walked straight forward into it. And our worldneverwalks straight forward."
"Our world?"
The tone of her voice held him. She had shaded her face with her hand now and did not look at him. "Our world, Paul?" she queried again.
"What do you mean?"
She did not at once reply. Then, suddenly, she turned and looked at him. "What are you going to do now?" she asked.
"I don't know. There seems nothing to do."
"I thought the blind beggar saw beauty so wonderfully. Didn't it fill his life?"
He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. The room hung very still.
"Then you don't know what you're going to do?" she asked again at last.
"No."
"Come with Muriel and me to Africa."
"What?"
"I thought that would startle you. We only fixed it definitely this morning. Muriel's brother is an assistant commissioner or something of that sort in Basutoland, and he's given her an open invitation to visit him. Yesterday, too, she was asked to go out and address some series of meetings in the Cape and Natal. I should like to see the country and paint. So we settled this morning to go together—about June. Come too."
"Could I?"
"Of course."
"But what about Muriel?"
"She'd love it. And one more in a South African house doesn't matter."
Paul turned it swiftly over. With his books and his successful play he knew he could raise enough money. He drew a deep breath. "Oh," he said, "I'd love it."
"Good," she said, "that's settled. We're travelling East Coast. And now, why not go down and stay with mother for a little?"
Lo, winged with world's wonders,With miracles shod,With the fires of his thundersFor raiment and rod,God trembles in heaven, and the angels are white with the terror of God.
*****
Thought made him and breaks him,Truth slays and forgives;But to you, as time takes him,This new thing it gives,Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE:Hertha.
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.He had not remembered that she was so fair,And that her neck curved down in such a way;And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.RUPERT BROOKE:Menelaus and Helen.
(1)
Paul was staring over Ursula's shoulder at her nearly finished water-colour, and she, leaning back a little, was putting quick touches to it. Her chair was against the rail on the shady side of the boat deck; and just below, the endless procession of natives who had begun carrying coal from lighters alongside to the coal bunkers of the ship since but an hour or two after anchor had been dropped the night before, and who were still apparently as busy as ever, toiled, each man in it naked to the waist-cloth, sooty and perspiring, in the blazing sun. The dingy, clumsy, rough-hewn boats in the utterly clear water through which you could see almost to their keels, were bathed in that vivid light, while, between burning blue above and sparkling blue beneath, the chanting labourers passed up with full baskets and bent shoulders and down with empty ones and laughter. Now and again a fussy launch, usually with a gay flag fluttering in the breeze of its passage, chunked or chortled by. Across the flow, a big P. and O. steamer moved slowly into the Canal, its crowd of emigrants leaning over the side, staring, shouting, talking. On their own ship, people were mostly clustered at the gangways chaffering with pedlars, or dispersed ashore or below. Paul himself was back from a visit to Simon Artz and carried packages under his arm.
"There," Ursula said, holding the block out before her. "Will that do?"
He did not at once reply. She twisted round a bit and glanced up at him.
"Well?" she queried again.
"You've hit it absolutely," he said. "But the whole thing says something besides. It says it plainly, too. It's stupid of me not to be able to put it into words. I shall in a minute."
The boys' monotonous chant came steadily up to them, and a siren shrieked. The P. and O. mail was lost behind a big Jap steamer, and from half a dozen ships about them came the sound of striking bells. As the noise of the last of them died away, Paul spoke.
"I know," he said slowly. "You've got the incredible contrast there. Naked, sweating, tired natives, working endlessly for a mere trifle at a boring weary job in a living world of light and colour, and—and being jolly over it. They are jolly. Look at that chap's face, looking up at us. And that one, chipping his neighbour." (He indicated two figures in the sketch.) "It's just sheer animal spirits."
Ursula said nothing.
"Paganism, too," said Paul.
"Paganism?"
"Yes. It's in the sketch as you've painted it. A fierce vehemently-lived to-day, and no to-morrow or yesterday."
"Write that."
"I shall. Do you realise I've written like blazes since we've been on this stunt?"
She stared over the side, hunching herself up a little.
"I have," Paul went on. "You've made me. You're a perpetual inspiration, Ursula."
Her body relaxed, and she laughed a little, happily. "The next book, please," she said. "'To Ursula: An Inspiration.'"
He moved forward a pace or two, and leaned over the rail, looking out and over the gimcrack shore buildings with their staring, blatant, ugly modernity. "It's all very well," he said, "for you to take it lightly, but it happens to be so amazingly true. I'm always seeing things with you."
Ursula studied his shoulders in her silent way for a minute or two. Then she got up. "I've to wash for luncheon, Paul," she said, as she moved away, "and don't forget we go ashore afterwards."
He half turned. "Shall I take your things?"
"Oh, no. Besides, you've got your own. Coming?"
"Five minutes," he said. "I haven't been painting, you know."
Left alone, he looked away again over the town. In the middle distance, a minaret rose into the hot air. His gaze rested on it, and the train of thought he had had running through his mind more or less consciously all the morning since he had passed beneath its shadow in the street and stared in through the little entrance to the vestibule that was not screened from view, re-occurred to him. It concerned their whole journey. They had come overland to Marseilles, and had stopped twelve hours in Paris as Muriel wanted to do some shopping. Leaving the girls, then, he had gone up to Montmartre with the old ecclesiastical interest still keen in his mind, and thereafter had come down to Notre Dame. And in the two churches, a beginning to the lesson that the voyage seemed to be reading him, had been made.
The great modern church, with its flaunting colour and electric light and garish decorations, had been offered first. Herein the religious half of twentieth-century France placated God. At the door, great lists of names, business-like, methodical, were a perpetual prayer for the dead, the sick, specially needy souls, children, neophytes of the priesthood and all the other classes of that Catholic world. Under the blown bubble of the dome, worshippers came and went with eager faith. Without, the great carven figure of the Sacred Heart looked out across the city that this new temple was to save. Beneath, Paris laughed, and shopped, and went about its business in the more hidden streets and houses with French alacrity.
Notre Dame seemed to him an already half-deserted backwater. All the pageantry of the Middle Ages—bishop and cardinal, noble and king, peasant and soldier—had flowed in and out again through its great sombre austere doors, here, where massive pillars and narrow windows shut out the sun. The ancient stone effigy of the Mother of God was blackened and a little disreputable. She still had her candles, yes; but official France no more bowed before her, and modern France was trying a new supplication up on the hill. Ten thousand thousand prayers had been prayed here. As many broken hearts had wept here.Cui bono? For without, the Seine still slipped lazily by, and over her bridges passed the crowd that laughed and shopped and went about its business.
Naples had shown him Pompeii. It had been an unforgettable day when the three of them trod upon the old chariot-ruts in the gate of the ancient city. The roofless houses, the winding ways, the shops and baths and theatres, had been alive and peopled again in Paul's imagination. Neither the dust nor the tireless sun could daunt him as he toiled with his ultimately protesting companions in and out and up and down. He had seen the patrician roll by in his chariot, the gladiator boast and drink in the tavern, the slave girl laugh with her friends at the street corner, the Greek merchant jostle his way through the crowd with perspiring porters bearing his merchandise behind him. And then, in the temple of Apollo, he had seen the swaying crowd, the sacrosanct priest, the incense, the offering, the smiling god. A place of prayer again; older now; more ruined; an ancient outworn faith, but still the eternal place of prayer from which men had cried to the heavens above for the Kingdom of God on earth. Well, and in the streets of Pompeii, Americans laughed, and Cook's tourists bought spurious curiosities, and Neapolitan guides went about their business.
Here, in Port Said, at the door of the immemorial East, he had seen Jewish synagogue, Mohammedan mosque, Koptic chapel, Catholic cathedral and Anglican church. A thousand tongues of prayer, and all about them Port Said: courtesan, merchant, material, tawdry Port Said. British and French and Egyptian; Levantine and Syrian and Greek; American and Jew and cosmopolite, how they went about their business! They all wooed their gods one way and another, thought Paul, all but perhaps Ursula's nigger boys whose job was the hardest and dirtiest of all, and who laughed in the sun.
And then Paul laughed, and went below to luncheon.
They left at sunset, and after dinner, as in duty bound, the three of them drew chairs forrard the wind-screen and watched the steady blaze of the white searchlights as the ship's great eyes stared ahead at the narrow waterway, the steep engineered banks and the flat endless sands. Here and there dahabeeyahs, moored for the night, stood out for a few minutes with their thin spars black and graceful against that infinite white glare, and then slipped into the shadows behind. Dredging barges loomed monstrous and distorted, and dropped silently behind. Once a lonely Arab on a camel stood revealed in every detail, motionless, on the bank above, and once a long string of mules passed, padding through the night. And always there were the stars, and low down the Cross that Paul saw for the first time. The majority of their fellow-passengers stood and chatted for a few minutes and then went below for music or cards. But Ursula, Muriel and Paul sat on.
"Amazing thing," said Muriel at last. "I suppose the Children of Israel crossed somewhere about here. Moses has always seemed to me a slightly humorous person, but I don't think he will again."
"And to me," said Paul reflectively, "he has always seemed immensely impressive. I don't think he will again."
Ursula laughed quietly.
"Why not?" queried Muriel aggressively. She and Paul on the whole got on very well together, but they nearly always sparred. "All this makes the Exodus so extraordinarily real. One can see it happening."
"Yes," assented Paul, "but don't you see, it makes it also extraordinarily small. Good Lord, look at those immemorial sands. Israelites! Why Egyptians and Assyrians and Ethiopians and Greeks and Romans and scores more whose names are forgotten have passed here. I was taught that the Exodus was the central act of the play, but it's merely an interlude for the shifting of scenery."
"In the play called Kismet," put in Ursula.
Muriel, who was sitting between them, glanced from one to the other. Then she settled herself back in her chair. "Oh, go on, you two," she said contentedly. "I love to hear you. You're both of you making your own lives more than any other two people I know, and you both of you pretend you're not."
Ursula laughed again. "We're marionettes right enough," she said, "but by some odd chance we're alive, and we can thoroughly enjoy the play."
Paul drew a deep breath of content. "I wish this bit of it would continue for a very long time," he said happily. And while the great vessel glided on almost silently with its impression of relentless irresistible purpose, the three sat silent, staring at the stars.
The Red Sea unfolded itself. They saw a dawn in Port Suez. Paul was first on deck in his pyjamas; and with but one glance around rushed excitedly down to the cabin that Muriel and Ursula shared between them. Their door stood on the latch. He thumped on it vigorously.
"Come in," called Ursula at once.
Paul fumbled with the lock and pushed aside the curtain. Ursula was sitting up in bed reading, her hair about her, her thin silk nightdress exposing her shoulders and neck. In the bunk above, Muriel, on her side, covered with a sheet, only half awake, opened her eyes sleepily.
It is odd how moments of understanding come in life, not to be hurried, not to be gainsaid. Paul Kestern had travelled with these two for some days now with all their opportunities of intimacy, and in her own flat he had seen Ursula Manning robed for the evening or making a belated breakfast even more revealingly dressed than now. He might, so to speak, have known himself in love with her fifty times. But not till this minute did his hand clutch with a sudden nervousness at the nearest thing about him (which happened to be the curtain), and his breath catch in his throat. Not till this minute did she seem to him utterly desirable for himself alone, and—for that is the deviltry of love—so supremely lovely that she must be unattainable. Or all but unattainable. Men dare great adventures with a kind of godlike effrontery. But in nothing are they more godlike that when, realising the awe and majesty of love, they conceive deliberately that they may win to it.
Would they, though, if, more often than not, the woman did not divine their thought and hold out the sceptre from her throne? That, at any rate, is another deviltry.