Lady Coomber joined them in the spring. Jim’s regiment had been
detained at Malta longer than had been anticipated. Her presence passed
hardly noticed in the house. Anthony had seen to it that her little
pensioners, the birds, had been well cared for, they began to gather
round her the first moment that they saw her, as if they had been
waiting for her, hoping for her return. She herself could not explain
her secret. She had only to stretch out her hand for them to come to
her. She took more interest in the child than Eleanor had expected. She
stole him away one morning, and was laughing when she brought him back.
She had shown him to her birds and they had welcomed him with much
chirruping and fluttering; and after that, whenever he saw her with her
basket on her arm, he would stretch out his arms to her for her to take
him with her.
Another child was born to them in the winter. They called him after
Eleanor’s brother Jim; and later came a girl. They called her Norah.
And then Eleanor fell ill. Anthony was terror-stricken. He had never
been able to accept the popular idea of God as a sort of kindly
magician to whom appeal might be made for miraculous benefits in
exchange for praise and adulation--who would turn aside sickness,
stay death’s hand in response for importunity. His common sense had
revolted against it. But suddenly his reasoning faculties seemed to
have deserted him. Had he been living in the Middle Ages he would
have offered God a pilgrimage or a church. As it was, he undertook to
start without further delay his various schemes to benefit the poor of
Millsborough. He would set to work at once upon those model-dwellings.
It was always easy for him now to find financial backing for his plans.
He remembered Betty’s argument: “I wouldn’t have anything started that
couldn’t be made to pay its own way in the long run. If it can’t do
that it isn’t real. It isn’t going to last.” She was right. As a sound
business proposition, the thing would live and grow. It was justice not
charity that the world stood most in need of. He worked it out. For
the rent these slum landlords were exacting for insanitary hovels the
workers could be housed in decent flats. Eleanor’s illness had been
pronounced dangerous. No time was to be lost. The ground was bought and
cleared. Landripp, the architect, threw himself into his labours with
enthusiasm.
Landripp belonged to the new school of materialists. His religion
was the happiness of humanity. Man to him was a mere chance product
of the earth’s crust, evolved in common with all other living
things by chemical process. With the cooling of the earth--or may
be its over-heating, it really did not matter which--the race would
disappear--be buried, together with the history of its transient
passing, beneath the eternal silences. Its grave might still roll
on--to shape itself anew, to form out of its changed gases another race
that in some future æon might be interested in examining the excavated
evidences of a former zoological period.
Meanwhile the thing to do was to make man as happy as possible for so
long as he lasted. This could best be accomplished by developing his
sense of brotherhood out of which would be born justice and good will.
Man was a gregarious animal. For his happiness he depended as much
upon his fellows as upon his own exertions. The misery and suffering
of any always, sooner or later, resulted in evil to the whole body. In
society, as it had come to be constituted, the happiness of all was
as much a practical necessity as was the health of all. For its own
sake, a civilized community could no more disregard equity than it dare
tolerate an imperfect drainage system. If the city was to be healthy
and happy it must be seen to that each individual citizen was healthy
and happy. The pursuit of happiness for ourselves depended upon our
making others happy. It was for this purpose that the moral law had
developed itself within us. So soon as the moral law within us came
to be acknowledged as the only safe guide to all our actions, so soon
would Man’s road to happiness lie clear before him.
That something not material, that something impossible to be defined
in material terms had somehow entered into the scheme, Mr. Landripp
was forced to admit. In discussion, he dismissed it--this unknown
quantity--as “superfluous energy.” But to himself the answer was
not satisfactory. By this reasoning the superfluous became the
indispensible, which was absurd. There was his own favourite phrase:
The preservation of the species; the moral law within, compelling
all creatures to sacrifice themselves for the good of their progeny.
To Mr. Arnold S. Landripp, aware of his indebtedness for his own
existence to the uninterrupted working of this law; aware that his own
paternal affections had for their object the decoying of Mr. Arnold S.
Landripp into guarding and cherishing and providing for the future of
Miss Emily Landripp; who in her turn would rejoice in labour for her
children, and so ad infinitum, the phrase might have significance. His
reason, perceiving the necessity of the law, justified its obligations.
But those others? Unpleasant-looking insects--myriads of them--who
wear themselves out for no other purpose than to leave behind them
an egg, the hatching of which they will not live to see. Why toil in
darkness? Why not spend their few brief hours of existence basking in
their beloved sunshine? What to them the future of the Hymenoptera? The
mother bird with outstretched wings above the burning nest, content to
die herself if only she may hope to save her young. Natural affection,
necessary for the preservation of the species. Whence comes it? Whence
the origin of this blind love--this blind embracing of pain that an
unknown cause may triumph.
Or take the case of Mr. Arnold S. Landripp’s own particular family.
That hairy ancestor, fear-haunted, hunger-driven, fighting against
monstrous odds to win a scanty living for himself. Why burden himself
still further with a squalling brood that Mr. Arnold S. Landripp may
eventually evolve? Why not knock them all on the head and eat the pig
himself? Who whispered to him of the men of thought and knowledge who
should one day come, among whom Mr. Arnold S. Landripp, flesh of his
flesh and bone of his bone, should mingle and have his being?
Why does the present Mr. Landripp impair his digestion by working
long into the night that Millsborough slums may be the sooner swept
away and room be made in Millsborough town for the building of decent
dwellings for Mr. Landripp’s poorer brethren? The benefiting of future
generations! The preservation and improvement of the species? To what
end? What sensible man can wax enthusiastic concerning the progress of
a race whose final goal is a forgotten grave beneath the debris of a
derelict planet.
To Mr. Landripp came also the reflection that a happiness that is not
and cannot by its nature be confined to the individual, but is a part
of the happiness of all; that can be marred by a withered flower and
deepened by contemplation of the stars must, of necessity, have kinship
with the Universal. That a happiness, the seeds of which must have been
coeval with creation, that is not bounded by death must, of necessity,
be linked with the Eternal.
Working together of an evening upon the plans for the new dwellings,
Anthony and he would often break off to pursue the argument. Landripp
would admit that his own religion failed to answer all his questions.
But Anthony’s religion contented him still less. Why should a just
God, to whom all things were possible, have made man a creature of
“low intelligence and evil instincts,” leaving him to welter through
the ages amid cruelty, blood and lust, instead of fashioning him from
the beginning a fit and proper heir for the kingdom of eternity? That
he might work out his own salvation! That a few scattered fortunates,
less predisposed to evil than their fellows or possessed of greater
powers of resistance, might struggle out of the mire--enter into their
inheritance: the great bulk cursed from their birth, be left to sink
into destruction. The Christ legend he found himself unable to accept.
If true, then God was fallible, His omniscience a myth--a God who made
mistakes and sought to rectify them. Even so, He had not succeeded.
The number of true Christians--the number of those who sought to live
according to Christ’s teaching were fewer today than under the reign
of the Cæsars. During the Middle Ages the dying embers of Christianity
had burnt up anew. Saint Francis had insisted upon the necessity of
poverty, of love--had preached the brotherhood of all things living.
Men and women in increasing numbers had for a brief period accepted
Christ not as their scapegoat but as their leader. There had been men
like Millsborough’s own Saint Aldys--a successful business man, as
business was understood in his day--who on his conversion had offered
to the service of God not ten per cent. of his booty but his whole
life. Any successful business man of today who attempted to follow his
example would be certified by the family doctor as fit candidate for
the lunatic asylum. Two thousand years after Christ’s death one man,
so far as knowledge went, the Russian writer Tolstoy, had made serious
attempt to live the life commanded by Christ. And all Christendom stood
staring at him in stupefied amazement. If Christ had been God’s scheme
for the reformation of a race that He Himself had created prone to
evil then it had tragically failed. Christianity, a feeble flame from
the beginning, had died out, leaving the world darker, its last hope
extinguished.
They had been working long into the short June night. Landripp had
drawn back the curtains and thrown open the window. There came from the
east a faint pale dawn.
“There is a God I could believe in, worship and work for,” he said.
“Not the builder of the heaven and of the earth, who made the stars
also. Such there may be. The watch presupposes the watchmaker. I grant
all that. But such is outside my conception--a force, a law, whatever
it may be, existing before the beginning of Time, having its abiding
place beyond Space. The thing is too unhuman ever to be understood by
man. The God I could love and serve is something lesser and yet perhaps
greater than such.”
He turned from the window and leaning against the mantelpiece continued:
“There is a story by Jean Paul Richter, I think. I read the book when I
was a student in Germany. There was rather a fine idea in it: at least
so it seemed to me. The man in the story dies and beyond the grave he
meets Christ. And the Christ is still sad and troubled. The man asks
why, and Christ confesses to him. He has been looking for God and
cannot find Him. And the man comforts Him. Together they will seek God,
and will yet find Him. I think it was a dream, I am not sure. It is the
dream of the world, I suppose. Personally I have given up the search,
thinking it hopeless. But I am not sure. Christ’s God I could believe
in, could accept. He is the God--the genius, if you prefer the word,
of the human race. He is seeking--still seeking to make man in His own
image. He has given man thought, consciousness, a soul. It has been
slow work and He is still only at the beginning of His labours. He is
the spirit of love. It is by love, working for its kind, working for
its species, that man has evolved. It is only by love of his kind, of
his species, that man can hope to raise himself still further. He is no
God of lightnings and of thunders. The moral law within us, the voice
of pity, of justice is His only means of helping us. The Manichæans
believed that Mankind was devil created. The evidence is certainly in
their favour. The God that I am seeking is not the Omnipotent Master of
the universe who could in the twinkling of an eye reshape man to His
will. But a spirit, fighting against powerful foes, whom I can help or
hinder--the spirit of love, knocking softly without ceasing at the door
of a deaf world. The wonder of Christ is that He was the first man to
perceive the nature of God. The gods that the world had worshipped up
till then--that the world still worships--are the gods man has made in
his own image: gods glorying in their strength and power, clamouring
for worship, insisting on their ‘rights’; gods armed with punishments
and rewards. Christ was the first man who conceived of God as the
spirit of love, of service, a fellow labourer with man for the saving
of the world.”
Anthony was still seated at the long table, facing the light.
“May it not be that you have found Him?” he said. “May He not be the
God we are all seeking?”
Landripp gave a short laugh.
“He wouldn’t be popular,” he answered. “Not from Him would Job have
obtained those fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and
a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she asses as a reward for his
patience. ‘The God from whom all blessings flow,’ that is the God man
will praise and worship. The God I am seeking asks, not gives.”
The plans were finished; the builders got to work. On the very day
of the laying of the foundation-stone the doctors pronounced Eleanor
out of danger. Anthony forgot his talks with Landripp. God had heard
his prayer and had accepted his offering. He would continue to love
and serve Him, and surely goodness and mercy would follow him all
the days of his life. One of the minor steel foundries happened to
be on the market. He obtained control and re-established it on a new
profit-sharing principle that he had carefully worked out. His system
would win through by reason of its practicability; the long warfare
between capital and labour end in peace. His business genius should
not be only for himself. God also should be benefited. He got together
a small company for the opening of co-operative shops, where the poor
should be able to purchase at fair prices. There should be no end of
his activities for God.
Eleanor came back to him more beautiful, it seemed to him, than she had
ever been. They walked together, hand in hand, on the moor. She wanted
to show him how strong she was. And coming to the old white thorn at
the parting of the ways, she had raised her face to his; and he had
drawn her to him and their lips had met, as if it had been for the
first time.
She would be unable to bear more children, but that did not trouble
them. Little Jim and Norah grew and waxed strong and healthy. Norah
promised to be the living image of her mother. She had her mother’s
faults and failings that Anthony so loved: her mother’s wilfulness with
just that look of regal displeasure when any one offended or opposed
her. But also with suggestion of her mother’s graciousness and kindness.
Jim, likewise, took after the Coomber family. He had his uncle’s
laughing eyes and all his obstinacy, so Eleanor declared. He was full
of mischief, but had coaxing ways and was the idol of the servants’
hall.
John was more of the dreamer. Lady Coomber had taught him to read. She
had grown strangely fond of the child. In summertime they would take
their books into the garden. They had green hiding-places known only to
themselves. And in winter they had their “cave” behind the great carved
screen in the library.
As time went by, Eleanor inclined more towards the two younger
children. They were full of life and frolic, and were always wanting
to do things. But Anthony’s heart yearned more towards John, his
first-born.