He invited me to smoke—that queer old practice!—and then when I
declined, began talking in a confidential tone of this “dreadful
business” of the strikes. “The war won’t improve _that_ outlook,” he
said, and was very grave for a moment.
He spoke of the want of thought for their wives and children shown by
the colliers in striking merely for the sake of the union, and this
stirred me to controversy, and distracted me a little from my
resolution to escape.
“I don’t quite agree with that,” I said, clearing my throat. “If the
men didn’t strike for the union now, if they let that be broken up,
where would they be when the pinch of reductions did come?”
To which he replied that they couldn’t expect to get top-price wages
when the masters were selling bottom-price coal. I replied, “That isn’t
it. The masters don’t treat them fairly. They have to protect
themselves.”
To which Mr. Gabbitas answered, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve been in the
Four Towns some time, and I must say I don’t think the balance of
injustice falls on the masters’ side.”
“It falls on the men,” I agreed, wilfully misunderstanding him.
And so we worked our way toward an argument. “Confound this argument!”
I thought; but I had no skill in self-extraction, and my irritation
crept into my voice. Three little spots of color came into the cheeks
and nose of Mr. Gabbitas, but his voice showed nothing of his ruffled
temper.
“You see,” I said, “I’m a socialist. I don’t think this world was made
for a small minority to dance on the faces of every one else.”
“My dear fellow,” said the Rev. Gabbitas, “_I’m_ a socialist too. Who
isn’t. But that doesn’t lead me to class hatred.”
“You haven’t felt the heel of this confounded system. _I_ have.”
“Ah!” said he; and catching him on that note came a rap at the front
door, and, as he hung suspended, the sound of my mother letting some
one in and a timid rap.
“_Now_,” thought I, and stood up, resolutely, but he would not let me.
“No, no, no!” said he. “It’s only for the Dorcas money.”
He put his hand against my chest with an effect of physical compulsion,
and cried, “Come in!”
“Our talk’s just getting interesting,” he protested; and there entered
Miss Ramell, an elderly little young lady who was mighty in Church help
in Clayton.
He greeted her—she took no notice of me—and went to his bureau, and I
remained standing by my chair but unable to get out of the room. “I’m
not interrupting?” asked Miss Ramell.
“Not in the least,” he said; drew out the carriers and opened his desk.
I could not help seeing what he did.
I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment it did
not connect at all with the research of the morning that he was taking
out money. I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss Ramell, and saw
only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my eyes, the small flat
drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number of sovereigns scattered over
its floor. “They’re so unreasonable,” complained Miss Ramell. Who could
be otherwise in a social organization that bordered on insanity?
I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow on
the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs, pipes, and
ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think out before I went
to the station?
Of course! My mind made a queer little reluctant leap—it felt like
being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm—and alighted upon the
sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut his
drawer.
“I won’t interrupt your talk further,” said Miss Ramell, receding
doorward.
Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her and
conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had the
fullest sense of proximity to those—it seemed to me there must be ten
or twelve—sovereigns. . . .
The front door closed and he returned. My chance of escape had gone.
§ 4
“_I must_ be going,” I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to get
away out of that room.
“My dear chap!” he insisted, “I can’t think of it. Surely—there’s
nothing to call you away.” Then with an evident desire to shift the
venue of our talk, he asked, “You never told me what you thought of
Burble’s little book.”
I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry with
him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer and qualify my
opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling of intellectual and
social inferiority toward him. He asked what I thought of Burble. I
resolved to tell him—if necessary with arrogance. Then perhaps he would
release me. I did not sit down again, but stood by the corner of the
fireplace.
“That was the little book you lent me last summer?” I said.
“He reasons closely, eh?” he said, and indicated the armchair with a
flat hand, and beamed persuasively.
I remained standing. “I didn’t think much of his reasoning powers,” I
said.
“He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had.”
“That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,” said I.
“You mean?”
“That he’s wrong. I don’t think he proves his case. I don’t think
Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is. His
reasoning’s—Rot.”
Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and
propitiation vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round,
his face seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.
“I’m sorry you think that,” he said at last, with a catch in his
breath.
He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step or
two toward the window and turned. “I suppose you will admit—” he began,
with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension. . . . .
I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if you care
to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the
shriveled cheap publications—the publications of the Rationalist Press
Association, for example—on which my arguments were based. Lying in
that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable,
are the endless “Replies” of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some
hard-fought trench. All those disputes of our fathers, and they were
sometimes furious disputes, have gone now beyond the range of
comprehension. You younger people, I know, read them with impatient
perplexity. You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they
had joined issue at all in most of these controversies. All the old
methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the
Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers,
and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the
unthinkable. You can no more understand our theological passions than
you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of
their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die
because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back
from a day’s expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who
have been through it all, recall our controversies now with something
near incredulity.
Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the old
time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced, incredible
Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I am inclined to say that
neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as we understand it—they
had insufficient intellectual power. They could not trust unless they
had something to see and touch and say, like their barbarous ancestors
who could not make a bargain without exchange of tokens. If they no
longer worshipped stocks and stones, or eked out their needs with
pilgrimages and images, they still held fiercely to audible images, to
printed words and formulae.
But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?
Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and
Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side. And on the
whole—from the impartial perspective of my three and seventy years—I
adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of the Rev. Gabbitas was
altogether worse.
Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his
voice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented
facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced; and,
finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans, I used
the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no little
effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!—you must imagine our
talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome note—my mother no
doubt hovering on the staircase and listening in alarm as who should
say, “My dear, don’t offend it! Oh, don’t offend it! Mr. Gabbitas
enjoys its friendship. Try to think whatever Mr. Gabbitas says”—though
we still kept in touch with a pretence of mutual deference. The ethical
superiority of Christianity to all other religions came to the fore—I
know not how. We dealt with the matter in bold, imaginative
generalizations, because of the insufficiency of our historical
knowledge. I was moved to denounce Christianity as the ethic of slaves,
and declare myself a disciple of a German writer of no little vogue in
those days, named Nietzsche.
For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted with
the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come to me
through a two-column article in _The Clarion_ for the previous week. .
. . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read _The Clarion_.
I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you that
I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely ignorant
even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented a
separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was in the
reverend gentleman’s keeping.
“I’m a disciple of Nietzsche,” said I, with an air of extensive
explanation.
He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.
“But do you know what Nietzsche says?” I pressed him viciously.
“He has certainly been adequately answered,” said he, still trying to
carry it off.
“Who by?” I rapped out hotly. “Tell me that!” and became mercilessly
expectant.
§ 5
A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment of that
challenge, and carried me another step along my course of personal
disaster.
It came on the heels of my question in the form of a clatter of horses
without, and the gride and cessation of wheels. I glimpsed a
straw-hatted coachman and a pair of grays. It seemed an incredibly
magnificent carriage for Clayton.
“Eh!” said the Rev. Gabbitas, going to the window. “Why, it’s old Mrs.
Verrall! It’s old Mrs. Verrall. Really! What _can_ she want with me?”
He turned to me, and the flush of controversy had passed and his face
shone like the sun. It was not every day, I perceived, that Mrs.
Verrall came to see him.
“I get so many interruptions,” he said, almost grinning. “You must
excuse me a minute! Then—then I’ll tell you about that fellow. But
don’t go. I pray you don’t go. I can assure you. . . . _most_
interesting.”
He went out of the room waving vague prohibitory gestures.
“I _must_ go,” I cried after him.
“No, no, no!” in the passage. “I’ve got your answer,” I think it was he
added, and “quite mistaken;” and I saw him running down the steps to
talk to the old lady.
I swore. I made three steps to the window, and this brought me within a
yard of that accursed drawer.
I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely
powerful, and instantly her son and Nettie’s face were flaming in my
brain. The Stuarts had, no doubt, already accepted accomplished facts.
And I too—
What was I doing here?
What was I doing here while judgment escaped me?
I woke up. I was injected with energy. I took one reassuring look at
the curate’s obsequious back, at the old lady’s projected nose and
quivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the little
drawer open, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer shut again.
Then again at the window—they were still talking.
That was all right. He might not look in that drawer for hours. I
glanced at his clock. Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham train.
Time to buy a pair of boots and get away. But how I was to get to the
station?
I went out boldly into the passage, and took my hat and stick. . . .
Walk past him?
Yes. That was all right! He could not argue with me while so important
a person engaged him. . . . I came boldly down the steps.
“I want a list made, Mr. Gabbitas, of all the really _deserving_
cases,” old Mrs. Verrall was saying.
It is curious, but it did not occur to me that here was a mother whose
son I was going to kill. I did not see her in that aspect at all.
Instead, I was possessed by a realization of the blazing imbecility of
a social system that gave this palsied old woman the power to give or
withhold the urgent necessities of life from hundreds of her
fellow-creatures just according to her poor, foolish old fancies of
desert.
“We could make a _provisional_ list of that sort,” he was saying, and
glanced round with a preoccupied expression at me.
“I _must_ go,” I said at his flash of inquiry, and added, “I’ll be back
in twenty minutes,” and went on my way. He turned again to his
patroness as though he forgot me on the instant. Perhaps after all he
was not sorry.
I felt extraordinarily cool and capable, exhilarated, if anything, by
this prompt, effectual theft. After all, my great determination would
achieve itself. I was no longer oppressed by a sense of obstacles, I
felt I could grasp accidents and turn them to my advantage. I would go
now down Hacker Street to the little shoemaker’s—get a sound, good pair
of boots—ten minutes—and then to the railway-station—five minutes
more—and off! I felt as efficient and non-moral as if I was Nietzsche’s
Over-man already come. It did not occur to me that the curate’s clock
might have a considerable margin of error.
§ 6