CHAPTER THIRTY-ONEThe Procession of a Flea
MR. TRIMBLERIGG stopped to breathe; and while he did so I made a psychological examination of that poor work of art which was yet, in its way, so perfect a masterpiece. Had Mr. Trimblerigg been more of an expert in old wash-drawings and brushwork, had he been gifted with a more sceptical turn of mind than that which had fitted his views to such differing situations, he might have examined those initials, and that spot of mildew defacing the supposititious features, more minutely, analytically and chemically than he actually did. That the wash-drawing as a whole was well over a hundred years old any expert would probably have agreed; whether he would have given the same date to the initials, and a few other salient touches I had my doubt, and the doubt remains unresolved; no expert has ever been called in to decide the matter. If Miss Sparling herself limed that snare, she certainly did it well; the obliteration of the face, with just the suggestion of a likeness left, was finely controlled; and yet the control may have only been Father Time’s; and whether it was luck, or whether Susannah Walcot was in truth a prophetess of penetrating power, who is now to say? The lengths to which the human faculties can go have often filled me with astonishment; Mr. Trimblerigg was only one instance among many. On this occasion, however, he did not astonish me in the least; he did what I expected him to do.
Before that culminating piece of evidence—that silent but resounding call—he sank upon his knees, and remained on them for a long time.
I watched the motions of his mind; they were veryinteresting; but they had not really to go far. That he was called to be a shining light to the whole civilized world did not at this stage of things surprise him. As a probability he had thought so ever since he could remember; recently he had been made sure of it. It was only the strange manner of this final call, and its clearly miraculous accompaniments that did a little stagger him. It also caused a definite shift—a shift to the right—in his always adjustable theology. It drew him definitely from modernism back toward True Belief. For this was something with which modernism could not be reconciled; it was primitive, apocalyptic, ultra-evangelical, it made, amongst other things, for the literal interpretation of Scripture: if this was true, the other was not.
And so it became clear that in accepting the call from such a source, his own cast of faith must be simplified once and for all,—that he must revert to the earlier faith of his Uncle Phineas.
Uncle Phineas was right. It might still be true that the sun did not actually go round the earth, that the earth was not literally fixed, or flat, as Uncle Phineas had wished him to believe; but there was nevertheless a principle of fixture in eternal truth, fixture rather than evolution or motion, going much deeper into the nature of things than he had supposed. He became, all at once, curiously doubtful of his doctrine of Relative Truth, for he saw that to his exposition of this more divine and direct dispensation it might prove a hindrance.
It was for his followers he was now troubled. As regards himself he had no difficulty in getting rid of it. For the recovery of that purer faith his early training now stood him in good stead, and Uncle Phineas became a rock inwhose shadow he could hide. What he had trained himself to believe in his ’teens, what he had broken away from in his early twenties, what he had exploitively used for opportunist purposes in the propaganda of war and of Mosaic reprisals on savages who could not otherwise be taught better, was still in his blood—waiting to give him the upward push. In his new childlikeness he thanked whatever gods there be that he had always treated with tender allowance and regard the primitive views of Caroline, both as wife and mother; and that he had never allowed the scepticism of Davidina—Davidina, who had now found a new sphere for her dispensing powers in the exploration and humane taming of savage tribes—to discolour the rainbow gradients of his mind. The theological problems she had maliciously presented to him in old days, he had happily ignored: they had at least done him no permanent harm. Reversion to type, in his case at all events, was not difficult. In a certain sense Relative Truth helped him; for even if the simpler faith were not as absolutely true as it now seemed to him, it was true relatively to the immediate purpose in hand. And so still, as one might say, upon two legs—one numbed and quiescent but the other lithe and active—he entered confidently and with singleness of purpose into the Kingdom that had been prepared for him.
Going up to bed in the small hours he was very tired, and did not stop to look in the glass, did not stop to do anything. He switched out the light and got into bed. Only then did the great recovery he had made dawn on him.
Turning his head sideways in comfortable adjustment for slumber, he saw upon the pillow a patch of yellowlight, faint, but for small immediate use efficient. In the centre of its radiance marched a flea.
Mr. Trimblerigg did not like fleas; he made an instinctive pounce, and the flea died the death. Then the wonder of it occurred to him. He sat up, he got out of bed, he went to the glass. In the darkness he could see himself: Crocean dawn was round him once more. His surreptitious action of the last few hours, Heaven had now justified. He had no longer any doubts, any fears; he did not even see difficulties, for now the world was running to meet him, and millions of his fellow-creatures were prepared to take without question anything he offered them.
Faint with bliss, he tottered back to bed, laid his crowned head upon the pillow, and slept.