A FEW days after the conversation I have described my visit to the old
man came to an end, and my work drew me back to London; but I left
behind me a promise to return and spend Christmas at his house. He in
the meantime would, he promised me, try to put together some other
stories for me against the time that I should return. There were many
others, he said, that he had come across in his life which he hoped
would interest me, besides a few more personal experiences of his own.
And so I left him smiling and waving to me from his bedroom window that
overlooked the drive (for I had to go by an early train), with the
clean-shaven face of his old servant looking at me discreetly and
gravely from the clear-glass chapel window next to the priest’s room,
where he had been setting things ready before his master was dressed.
* * * * *
It was a dark winter afternoon when I returned, a week or so before
Christmas.
The coachman told me on my inquiry that his master seemed very much aged
during the autumn and winter, that he had scarcely left the house since
the leaves had fallen, except to sit for an hour or two in sunshiny
weather in the sheltered angle of the wall where was the tiled platform
that I have spoken of; and that he was afraid he had been suffering from
depression. There had been days of almost complete silence, at least so
Parker had told him, when the master had sat all day turning over
letters and books and old drawers.
I reproached myself with having troubled the old man with demands for
more stories; and feared that it had been in the attempt to please me
that he had fallen brooding over the past, perhaps dwelling too much on
sorrows of which I knew nothing.
As we passed under the pines that tossed their sombre plumes in the
wind, the sun, breaking through clouds in an angry glory on my right,
blazed on the little square-paned windows of the house on my left. The
chapel-window on the top story seemed especially full of red light
streaming from within, but the flame swept across the upper story as we
drove past, and left the windows blank and colourless just before we
turned the corner at the back of the house.
The old man met me in the hall, and I was startled to see the change
that had come to him. His eyes seemed larger than ever, and there was a
sorrow in them that I had not seen before. They had been the eyes of a
stainless child, wide and smiling; now they were the eyes of one who was
under some burden almost too heavy to be borne. In the stronger light of
the sitting-room as the candles shone on his face, I saw that my
impression had only been caused by a drooping of the eyelids, that now
hung down a little further. But it looked a tired face.
He welcomed me, and said several charming things to me that I should be
ashamed to quote, but he made me feel that he was glad that I had come;
and so I was glad too. But he said among other things this:
“I am glad you have come now, because I think I shall have something
further to tell you. I have had indications during this autumn that the
end is coming, and I think that if I have to pass through a dark
valley,––and I feel that I am at its entrance even now,––I think that He
will give me His staff as well as His rod. But I am an old man and full
of fancies, so please do not question me. But I am very glad,” and he
took my hand and stroked it for a moment, “very glad that you are here,
because I do not think that you will be afraid.”
During the following days he told me many stories, bringing out the old
books and letters of which the coachman had spoken, and spelling out
notes through his tortoiseshell glass, as he sat by the open fireplace
in the central sitting-room, with the logs crackling and overrun with
swift sparks as they rested on their bed of ashes. The door into the
garden where the old drive had once been was now kept closed, and a
heavy curtain hung over it.
We did not go out very much together––only in the early afternoons we
would walk for an hour or so, he leaning on my arm and on a stick, up
and down the terraced walk that lay next the drive under the pines, as
the sunset burned across the hills like a far-away judgment. Some day
perhaps I will write out some of the stories that he told me, although
not all. I have the notes by me.
Here is one of them.
We were walking on one of these dark winter afternoons very slowly
uphill towards the village that the priest might get a change from the
garden. The morning had been gusty and wet, with sleet showers and even
a sprinkle of pure snow as the sky cleared after lunch-time; and now the
weather was settling down for a frost, and the snow lay thinly here and
there on the rapidly hardening ground.
“It is remarkable,” the old man was saying to me, “how in spite of our
Lord’s words people still think that faith is a matter more or less of
intellect. Such a phrase as ‘intelligent faith’ is, of course, strictly
most incorrect.”
He stopped and looked at me as he said this, as if prepared for dispute.
I did not disappoint him.
“You are very puzzling;” I said. “I cannot believe that you do not value
intellect. Surely it is a gift of God, and therefore may adorn faith, as
any other gift may do.”
“Yes,” he said, walking on, “it may adorn it; but it has nothing more to
do with it really than jewels have to do with a beautiful woman. In
fact, sometimes faith is far more beautiful unadorned, and it is quite
possible to crush a delicate and growing faith with a weight of learned
arguments intended to adorn and perfect it. Christian apologetics, it
seems to me, are only really useful in the mouth of one who realises
their entire inadequacy. You can demonstrate nothing of God. You can, by
arguments, draw a number of lines that converge towards God, and render
His existence and His attributes probable; but you cannot reach Him
along those lines. Faith depends not on intellectual but on moral
conditions. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ said our Saviour, not
‘Blessed are the profound or acute of intellect’––‘for they shall see
God.’ It is certainly true of intellectual as of all other riches that
they who possess them shall find difficulty in entering into the kingdom
of God.”
“And so,” I said, “you think that intellectual powers are not things to
covet, and that education is not a very important question after all?”
“No more than wealth,” he answered, “at least so far as you mean by
education instruction in demonstrable facts or exact sciences. The point
of our existence here is to know God. Well, you know for yourself how
the race for wealth is ruining millions of souls to-day. No less surely
is keen intellectual competition ruining souls. Mr. ––––, for instance,”
he said, naming a well-known critic and poet; “was there ever a man of
keener and finer intellect, or of more unerring instinct in matters of
literary taste? Well, once I talked with that man most of a day on all
his own subjects; in fact, he did nearly all the talking, and I was
astonished, I must confess, at the perfection of the training of his
already brilliant powers. So much I could perceive, though of course I
could not follow him. And of course there were many delicate shades of
beauty, if not much more, invisible to me in his talk and criticism. His
scale of intellectual beauty ran up out of my sight altogether. But what
astonished me more was the coarseness and dulness of his spiritual
instinct. I will not call him a child in matters of faith, because that
would be high praise; but he was just an ill-bred boor. I have known
many a Sussex villager of far purer and finer spiritual fibre. No, no;
faith can and does exist quite apart from intellect; and to increase or
develop the one often means the decrease and incoherence of the other.
_Seigneur, donnez-moi la foi du charbonnier!_”
I must confess that this was a new point of view for me; and I am not
sure now whether I do not still think it exaggerated and dangerous; but
I said nothing, because it did seem to open up difficult questions, and
also to throw light on other difficult questions. The priest turned to
me again as he walked.
“Why, it must be so,” he said; “if it were not, clever people would have
a better hope of salvation than stupid people; and that is absurd––as
absurd as if rich people should be nearer God than poor people. No, no;
talents are distributed unevenly, it is true: to one ten and to another
five; but each has one pound, all alike.”
We had reached the top of the slope, and the towering hedges had
gradually fallen away, so that we could now see far and wide over the
country. Away behind us, as we paused for breath, we could see the misty
Brighton downs, while in the middle distance lay tumbled wooded hills,
with smoke beginning to curl up here and there from the evening fires of
hidden villages. The sky was clear overhead, but in the west, where the
sunset was beginning to smoulder, a few heavy clouds still lingered.
“And God sees all:” said the priest. “Can you put up with another story
as we walk home again? I think I ought to be turning now.”
We turned and began to retrace our steps downhill.
“This is not an experience of my own,” he said. “It was told me by a
friend of mine in Cornwall. He was the squire of a little village a few
miles out of Truro, and lived there most of the year except a few weeks
in the spring, when he would go abroad. He was a man of great learning
and taste, but had the faith of a little child. It was like a spring of
clear water to hear him speak of God and heavenly things.
“There was a boy in the village who was an idiot. His parents were dead,
and he lived alone with his old grandmother, who was a strict Calvinist,
and who regarded her grandson as hopelessly damned because his faith and
his expression of it were not as hers. There were evident signs, she
said, that God’s inscrutable decrees were against him. The local
preachers there would have nothing to do with the boy; and the clergyman
of the parish, after an attempt or two, had given the child up as
hopeless. I think my friend told me that the clergyman had tried to
teach him Old Testament history.
“Well, the boy was a terrible and disgusting case. I will not go into
details beyond saying that the boy’s head had the look of a mule about
it; his mother, I think, had had a fright shortly before his birth, and
the boy used to think sometimes that he was a horse or mule, and the
village children used to encourage him in it, and ride and drive him on
the green, for he was quite harmless. And so he grew up, neglected and
untaught, spending much of his time out of doors, and creeping home on
all fours in the evening, snorting and stamping and neighing when he was
much excited; and he would stable himself in a corner of the wide dark
kitchen, and munch grass; while his grandmother sat in her high chair by
the fire reading in her Bible, or looking over her spectacles at the
poor misshapen body in the corner that held a damned soul.
“Now my friend hated to see this child. It was the one thing that
troubled his faith. Those who have the faith of children have also the
troubles of children; and this living example before his eyes of what
looked like the carelessness of God, or worse, was a greater offence to
my friend’s faith than all infidel arguments, or the mere knowledge that
such things happened.
“On a certain Christmas Eve my friend had been a long tramp over the
hills with a guest who was staying with him for the shooting. They were
returning through his own property towards evening, and were just
dropping down from the hill. Their path lay along the upper edge of an
old disused stone-quarry, whose entrance lay perhaps a hundred yards
away from the valley-road that led into the village––so it was a lonely
and unfrequented place. The evening was closing in; and my friend, as he
led the way along the path, was trying to make out the outlines of
stones and bushes on the floor of the quarry, which lay perhaps seventy
feet below them. All at once his eye was caught by the steady glimmer of
light somewhere in the dimness beneath, and the sound of a voice. He
guessed at once that there were tramps below, and was angry at the
thought that they must have wilfully disregarded the notice he had put
up about making a fire so close to the wood: and he determined to turn
them out, and, if need be, to give them shelter for the night in one of
his own outhouses. So he stopped and explained to his friend which path
would take him home, while that he himself intended to make his way
along the lip of the quarry to the entrance, and then to go on into its
interior where the tramps had made their camp; and he promised to be at
the house five minutes after his friend.
“So they separated, and he himself soon found his way down a narrow
overgrown path that brought him to the opening of the quarry.
“It was a good deal darker here, as the hill shadowed it from the west,
and high trees rose on one side; but he was able to stumble along the
stony path which led to the interior, though it grew darker still as he
went. Presently he turned the corner of a tall boulder, and emerged into
the kind of semi-circus that formed the heart of the quarry: before him,
about a third way up the slope, burned the glimmer of light he had
noticed from above, but even as he saw it it went out: my friend stood
in the path and called out, explaining who he was, not threatening at
all, but offering, if it was any one who wanted shelter, to provide it
for the night. There was no answer, only the sound of scuffling in the
dimness in front, and then the confused sound of footsteps scrambling:
my friend ran forward, calling, and made out presently an oddly shaped
thing scrambling over the silt and stone towards a shoulder of rock that
stood out against the sky on his left (I think he said). He tried to
follow, but it was too dark, and after he had stumbled once or twice, he
gave up the pursuit. In a moment more the climbing figure stood out
clear against the sky for an instant, and then disappeared: and the
squire saw with a shock of disgust the mule-like head and tangled hair
rising from the high shoulders of the village idiot, and his hands
dangling on each side of him; and he heard a high-screaming neighing.
But at least, he thought to himself, he would go and see what the boy
had been doing.
“He made his way up the slope of silted gravel and mud that lay against
the face of the rock, and at last reached a little platform apparently
stamped and cut out at the top of the skree just where it touched the
quarry-side. It was too dark for him to distinguish anything clearly, so
he struck a match and held it in the still sheltered air while he looked
about him. This is what he saw.
“There was a short halter, with a kind of rude head-stall, fastened to a
rusty iron staple driven into the rock. There was a little pile of cut
grass below it. There was a kind of mud trough constructed against the
stone, with a little straw sprinkled in it and holly berries and leaves
in front of it; but this showed signs of having been hastily trampled
down, though parts of it survived: there were marks of hob-nailed boots
in it here and there. So much my friend had noticed when the match
burned his fingers: but just before he dropped it he noticed something
else which made him open his box and light another match: and then he
saw the end of a farthing taper sticking out of the ground into which it
had been pushed, and another crushed into a ball. He drew out the first
and lighted it, and then noticed this last thing. Quite plainly marked
on the soft edge of the mud-trough, in a place which the hob-nailed
boots had not touched, was the mark of a tiny child’s naked foot, as if
a baby had stood in the trough or manger, with one foot on the floor and
another on the edge.
“Now I do not know what you think of this, but I know what my friend
thought of it, and what I myself think of it. But before he went home he
went first to the cottage where the boy lived and found him as usual
tethered in the corner, with his grandmother nodding before the fire.
The boy would do nothing but snort and stamp: and the grandmother could
only say that ten minutes ago the boy had run in and gone straight to
his corner as usual. The squire asked whether the boy had been trusted
with a child by any one; but the grandmother said it was impossible. Nor
indeed did he ever after hear a word of a child having been missed on
that afternoon.
“Then, before he went home, he went to the little church, already
decorated for the festival, and there with the fragrance of the holly
and yew in the air about him, and the glimmer of a candle near the altar
where the church-cleaner was sweeping, he praised the Holy Child whose
Birth-night it was, and who had not disdained to lie in a manger and be
adored by the beasts of the stall.
“The following morning on his way back from church he went to the quarry
again with his friend to show him what he had seen; but the manger and
the holly-berries and crumpled taper were all gone, and there was
nothing to see but the iron staple and the platform beaten hard and
flat.”
We had reached the avenue of pines by now that led to the house, and
turned in by the little garden-gate.
“The story seems to show,” the priest added, “that intellect has not
much to do with the knowledge of God; and that the things which He hides
from the wise and prudent He reveals to babes.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------