Very glad to have had the opportunity of reading your interesting
discourse. If I had not known it was yours, and a sermon, I should have
said "a posthumous work of Robert Louis Stevenson." It does credit to
your imagination. If you care to publish, I should suggest "The
Cornhill." I know nothing about their terms.
Yours faithfully,
_G.R.E. Stepton._
By return of post, there came an urgent invitation to the professor to
visit Chichester's rooms in Hornton Street, "to continue a discussion
which has a special interest for me at this moment."
"Discussion!" thought Stepton, sitting down to accept, "What my man wants
is for me to goad him into revelation; and I'll do it."
The professor knew enough of psychology to be aware that in the very
depths of the human heart there is a desire which may perhaps be called
socialistic--the desire to share truth with one's fellow-men. Chichester
was scourged by this desire. But whether what he wished to share was
truth, or only what he believed to be truth, was the question. Anyhow,
Stepton was determined to make him speak. And he set off to Hornton
Street little doubting that he would find means to carry his
determination into effect.
He arrived about half-past five. He did not turn the corner into
Kensington High Street on his homeward way until darkness had fallen,
having passed through some of the most extraordinary moments that had
ever been his.
When he was shown into the curate's sitting-room, his first remark was:
"Sent that very interesting story to 'The Cornhill' yet?"
"I don't think you quite understand, Professor," replied Chichester.
"I did not type it with a view to sending it in anywhere for publication.
You'll have tea with me, I hope? Here it is, all ready."
"Thank you."
"Oh, Ellen!"
Chichester went to the door, and Stepton heard the words, "Nobody, you
understand," following on a subdued murmuring.
"And Mr. Harding, sir?" said the maid's voice outside.
"Mr. Harding won't come to-day. That will do, Ellen."
The professor heard steps descending. His host shut the door and
returned.
"You typed it for your own use?" said Stepton.
"That sermon? Yes. I wished to keep it by me as a record."
He sat down, and poured out the tea.
"A record of an imagined experience. Exactly. Then why not publish?"
"It is not fiction."
"Well, it isn't fact."
The professor drank his tea, looking at his host narrowly over the cup.
"Do you say such an experience as that described in my sermon is
impossible?"
"Do you say it is possible?"
"If I were to say so would you believe me?"
"Certainly not, unless I could make an investigation and personally
satisfy myself that what you said was true. You wouldn't expect anything
else, I'm sure."
"You can believe nothing on the mere word of another?"
"Very little. I am an investigator. I look for proof."
"With your pencil in one hand, your note-book in the other."
In Chichester's last remark there was a note of sarcasm which thoroughly
roused Stepton, for it sounded like the sarcasm of knowledge addressed
to ignorance. Stepton had a temper. This touch of superiority, not
vulgar, but very definite, fell on it like a lash.
"Now I'll go for the reverend gentleman of St. Joseph's!" he thought.
And for a moment he forgot his aim in remembering himself. Afterward,
in thinking matters over, he offered a pinch of incense at the altar
of his egoism.
"So, the modern clergyman still believes in slip-slop, does he?" he
exclaimed in his most aggressive manner. "Even now hasn't he learnt the
value of the matter-of-fact? The clergyman is the doctor of the soul,
isn't he? And the doctor, isn't he the clergyman of the body? I wonder,
I do wonder, how long the average doctor would keep together his practice
if he worked with no more precision than the average clergyman. The
contempt of the pencil and note-book! The contempt of proper care in
getting together and coordinating facts! The contempt of proof--the
appeal to reason! And so we get to the contempt of reason. And let me
tell you--" he struck the tea-table with his lean hand till the curate's
cups jumped--"that scarcely ever have I heard a sermon in which was not
to be found somewhere the preacher's contempt for reason, the bread of
the intellect of man."
"The soul is not the intellect."
"Don't you think it higher?"
"I do."
"And so you put it on slops!"
The professor got up from his chair, and began to sidle up and down the
small room.
"You put it on slops, as if it were a thing with a disordered stomach.
That's your way of showing it respect. You approach the shrine with an
offering of water gruel. Now look ye here!"--The professor paused beside
the tea-table--"The soul wants its bread, depends upon it, as much as
the body, and the church that is free with the loaves is the church to
get a real hold on real men. Flummery is no good to anybody. Rhetoric's
no good to anybody. Claptrap and slipslop only make heads swim and
stomachs turn. The pencil and note-book, observation and the taking down
of it, these bring knowledge to the doors of men. And when you sneer at
them, you sneer at bread, on the eating of which--or its equivalent,
basis-nourishment--life depends."
"I wonder whether you, and such as you, really know on what the true life
of the soul depends," said Chichester, with an almost dreadful quietness.
The professor sat down again.
"Such as I?" he said. "You are good enough to do me the honor of putting
me in a class?"
"As you have so far honored me," returned Chichester.
"Ha!" ejaculated Stepton.
He had quite got the better of his egoism, but he by no means regretted
his outburst.
"Do you claim to stand outside the ranks of the clergy?" he asked.
"Do you claim to stand outside the ranks of the scientists?"
"Oh, dear, no. And now--you?"
Chichester said nothing for a moment. Then, lifting up his head, and
gazing at the professor with a sort of sternness of determination, he
said:
"Remember this! You yourself told me that in a crowd of a thousand you
must have fixed your attention on me."
For a moment the professor had it in his mind to say that this statement
of his had been a lie invented to make an impression on Chichester. But
he resisted the temptation to score--and lose. He preferred not to score,
and to win, if possible.
"I did," he said.
"Could this be so if I were like other men, other clergymen?"
"Well, then, what is the mighty difference between you and your reverend
brethren--between you, let us say, and your rector, Mr. Harding?"
Very casually and jerkily the professor threw out this question.
Not casually did Chichester receive it. He moved almost like a man who
had been unexpectedly struck, then seemed to recover himself, and to
nerve himself for some ordeal. Leaning forward, and holding the edge of
the table with one hand, he said:
"How well do you know Mr. Harding?"
"Pretty well. Not intimately."
"You have seen him since he--altered?"
"I saw him only the other day when I was at a specialist's in Harley
Street."
"A specialist's?"
"For nervous dyspepsia."
Again the look of contempt flickered over Chichester's face.
"Do you think the alteration in Mr. Harding may be due to nervous
dyspepsia?"
"Probably. There are few maladies that so sap the self-confidence of a
man."
Chichester laughed.
For the first time since he had entered the little room the professor
felt a cold sensation of creeping uneasiness.
"Apparently you don't agree with me," he said.
"I am not a doctor, and I know very little about that matter."
"Then I'm bound to say I don't know what you find to laugh at."
"For a man who has spent so much time in psychical research you seem to
have a rather material outlook upon--"
"Mr. Harding?"
"And all that he represents."
"Suppose we stick to Mr. Harding," said the professor, grittily. "He is
typical enough, even if you are not."
"In what respect do you consider Mr. Harding typical?"
"I am speaking of the Harding before the fall into the abysses of nervous
dyspepsia."
"Very well. In what respects was Mr. Harding typical?"
"In the sublime self-confidence with which he proclaimed as facts, things
that have never been proved to be facts."
"Do men want facts?" said Chichester, almost as one speaking alone to
himself.
"I do. I want nothing else. Possibly Mr.
Harding had none to give me. I don't blame
him."
"Perhaps it is a greater thing to give men faith than to give them
facts."
"Give them the first by giving them the second, if you can! And that,
by the way, is the last thing the average clergyman is able to do."
Chichester sat silent for nearly a minute looking at the professor with a
strange expression, almost fiery, yet meditative, as if he were trying to
appraise him, were weighing him in a balance.
"Professor," he said at last, "I suppose your passion for facts has led
men to put a great deal of faith in you. Hasn't it?"
"I dare say my word carries some weight. I really don't know," responded
Stepton, with an odd hint of something like modesty.
"I had thought of Malling first," almost murmured Chichester.
"What's that about Malling?"
"I think he would have accepted what I have to give more readily than you
would. There seems to me something in him which stretches out arms toward
those things in which mystics believe. In you there seems to me something
which would almost rather repel such things."
"I beg your pardon. I am quiescent. I neither seek to summon nor to
repel."
"I couldn't tell Malling," said Chichester. "His readiness stopped me. It
struck me like a blow."
"Malling prides himself on being severely neutral in mind."
"And you on being skeptical?"
"I await facts."
"Shall I give you some strange facts, the strangest perhaps you have ever
met with?"
Stepton smiled dryly.
"You'll forgive me, but some such remark has been the prelude to so many
figments."
"Figments?"
"Of the imagination."
An expression of anger--almost like a noble anger it seemed--transformed
Chichester's face. It was as a fine wrath which looked down from a
height, and in an instant it melted into pity.
"How much you must have missed because of your skepticism!" he said. "But
I shall not let it affect me. You are a man of note-book and pencil. Will
you promise me one thing? Will you give me your word not to share what I
shall tell you with any one, unless, later on, I am willing that you
should?"
"Oh, dear, yes!" said the professor.
And again he smiled. For even now he believed the curate to be wavering,
swayed by conflicting emotions, and felt sure that a flick of the whip
to his egoism would be likely to hasten the coming of what he, the
professor, wanted.
A loud call rose up from the street. A wandering vender of something
was crying his ware. In his voice was a sound of fierce melancholy.
Chichester went to the window and shut it down.
"I wish it was night," he said as he turned.
The professor jerked out his watch.
"It must be getting late," he observed. "Past six! by Jove!"
He made an abrupt movement.
"What?" said Chichester. "You are going!"
He came up to the table.
"Sometimes I think," he said, "that men hate and dread nothing as they
hate and dread facts which may upset the theories they cherish."
"You're perfectly right. Well, very glad to have seen you in your
own room." The professor got up. "By their rooms shall ye know them."
He glanced round.
"Ah, I see you have Rossetti's delightfully anemic Madonna, and Holman
Hunt's 'Light of the World.' A day or two ago I was talking to a lady
who pronounced that--" he extended his finger toward the Hunt--"the
greatest work of art produced in the last hundred years. Her reason?
Its comforting quality. I am sure you agree with her. Good-by."
He made a sidling movement toward the door. Perhaps it was that movement
which finally decided the curate to speak.
"Professor," he said, "I don't want you to go yet."
"Why not?" jerked out Stepton, with one hand on the door-knob.
"You collect 'cases.' I have a case for you. You are a skeptic: you say
men should be brought to faith by facts. Sit down. I will give you some
facts."
The professor came slowly back, looking dry and cold, and sat down by the
table, facing the Rossetti Madonna.
"Always ready for facts," he said.