PERADVENTURE
OR THE SILENCE OF GOD
BY ROBERT KEABLE
"He is a god; peradventure he sleepeth"--1 _Kings xviii._ 27
CONSTABLE & CO LTD
LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY
First published, 1922
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE MOTHER OF ALL LIVING
A CITY OF THE DAWN
SIMON CALLED PETER
PILGRIM PAPERS
STANDING BY
_ETC._
DEDICATION
_MY DEAR CHRISTOPHER,_
_Recently a very eminent Anglican divine gave us a book which he said
embodied "forty years of profound thought." In it he deals to no small
extent with the subject of this novel, a novel which, though hiddenly,
I wish to dedicate to you._
_I want to do so because, perhaps, you alone of all my friends will
know how much herein written down is true to the life we both led and
both have left. It is odd, I think, as I look back, how little we have
seen of each other, and how much: how little, because great tracts of
your life and mine have been traversed wholly apart, and we only met,
in the beginning, when we had both of us come some distance along the
way; but how much, since each time we met and walked a mile or two
together, we talked very freely and we found we understood. Now, as
like as not, I shall see increasingly less of you, seeing that you have
become a Catholic, a religious, and a priest at that. It is little one
knows of life and its surprises, but we have shaken hands at the
cross-roads anyway. A moment, then, ere you go up the steep hill ahead
of you, and a moment ere I take my own road that has I cannot see what
level or uphill or down in it,--a moment ere you put my book in your
pocket for the sake of the days gone by._
_You will appreciate the fact that I should have put my thought into a
novel and not into a book of serious theology. Man's thoughts about
God are read best in a novel. Yes, on the one hand, they are best set
in a transitory frivolous form that booksellers will expose on their
stalls labelled with one of those neatly-printed little tickets--you
know: "Just the Book for a Long Journey"--to catch the attention of a
man off for his holiday or a girl bored with having to return. Yes,
they are best set where they can be read in a few hours by the
drawing-room fire. For, after all, ten years or forty or four hundred
of man's profound thought about God is worth, maybe a little more than
the price of a pound of chocolates, maybe a little less than that of a
theatre seat. Besides the novel has a coloured wrapper, and they are
not yet brave enough or sufficiently wise to wrap up theology in that
form._
_But on the other hand, my dear Chris, there is no form of writing yet
devised quite so true or quite so profound as the novel of human
affairs may well be. For, Incarnation or no Incarnation, beyond doubt
you cannot separate man and God. We have no medium other than the
human brain by which to think of Him, however illumined or deluded that
brain may be, and no other measure of His Person than that of human
life. Your abstract theologian may decide that He is or is not a
Father: it is man's striving soul that knows; and against their
presumptive reasoning of the spiritual heaven, I would set half a dozen
pages torn from earth._
_You will be well aware as you read that these chapters are such pages
truly enough. I do not mean that it is not the stuff of fiction that
is here, but I do protest that Claxted and Keswick and Port o' Man and
Thurloe End and Fordham, yes, and Zanzibar, are true to type, though
many readers will scarcely believe me. I can see the critics mocking
though the ink is not yet dry upon the page. And if, by chance, one of
them should catch a fleeting glimpse of his own face in the glass, he
will assuredly throw it up at me that the mirror is distorted. Yet, as
Samuel Butler says: "If a bona fide writer thinks a thing wants saying
... the question whether it will do him personally good or harm, or how
it will affect this or that friend, never enters his head, or if it
does, it is instantly ordered out again."_
_Allow me then, for this reason, your name within the boards. You will
know, however much you disapprove, that there is no malice here. For
what would I gain by mockery, old friend, who have already lost friends
enough by speaking the truth? It is a pitiable dance this of ours
around the altar of Baal, over which, if God be too divine, at least
man should be human enough rather to weep than to mock. Yet I believe,
as indeed I have written, that sorrow in the human story is but the
shadow of a lovelier thing; that the grass grows green, that the flower
blows red, that in the wide sea also are things creeping innumerable
both small and great beasts, and that every one is good. And God's in
His Heaven? Peradventure. At least His Veil is fair._
_But--and it is a big "but"--for you in your high vocation and for me
in this of mine, for each of us, oddly enough, in his own way, there is
a verse from Miss V. H. Friedlaender's_ A Friendship _which I find I
cannot easily forget:_
_When we are grown
We know it is for us
To rend the flowery lies from worlds
Foul with hypocrisy;
To perish stoned and blinded in the desert--
That men unborn may see._
_And I want to set that down too, before a reader turns a page._
_Ever yours,
ROBERT KEABLE._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
DEDICATION
I. LAMBETH COURT
II. CAMBRIDGE
III. CHRISTMAS CAROLS
IV. FATHER VASSALL
V. VACATION
VI. MOUNT CARMEL
VII. THURLOE END
VIII. JUDGMENTS
IX. FORDHAM
X. "THE BLIND BEGGAR"
XI. URSULA
XII. ZANZIBAR
PERADVENTURE
CHAPTER I
LAMBETH COURT
Bring me my Bow of burning gold!
Bring me my Arrows of desire!
Bring me my Spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
BLAKE: Milton.
Thirsting for love and joy,
Eager to mould and plan,
These were the dreams of a boy....
ARTHUR C. BENSON: Peace and Other Poems.
(1)
It must be presumed that some reason underlies the nomenclature of the
ways of our more modern towns, but the game of guessing will long
remain an entertainment to the curious. True, we think to honour our
illustrious dead by calling some business street wholly given over to
modern commercialism after one of them, as also we occasionally seek
satisfaction by casting forth a name now identified with our equally
infamous enemies; but the process by which were named byways and courts
that, after all, have not been in existence a lifetime, must remain a
puzzle. Thus if, walking down the dreary monotony of Apple Orchard
Road, one might conceive that at some time or another it boasted an
apple-tree, the most nimble imagination baulks at that blind alley
leading from it into an open irregular space entirely surrounded by the
meanest houses, entitled Lambeth Court. It, at least, was surely never
associated with an Archbishop. The mere sight of his gaiters there
would have been the occasion for an hilarious five minutes. And if it
was ever part of his property, the least said about that the better.
For all this the Borough of Claxted, now within the boundaries of
Greater London, was a highly respectable town. Its citizens were
mainly composed of those who go daily to the City round and about the
decent hour of nine-thirty for frequently mysterious but none the less
remunerative occupations, and of those who supply their households with
the necessaries and pleasant superfluities of good living. A class
apart, these latter nevertheless shone, in Claxted, with some of the
lustre of their betters, and were, indeed, known, when Paul Kestern was
young, as Superior Tradespeople. For both, at Claxted, there were
miles of trim villas ascending to avenues of detached houses; churches
there were, swept and garnished, or empty with an Evangelical Christian
emptiness; Municipal buildings, dignified, sufficient, new and clean.
There was, in short, an air about the place and its citizens, in those
days, almost wholly neatly and simply Conservative. The Borough,
moreover, obtained a suffragan bishop about this time, and may thus be
said to have been sealed with a just measure of divine approval.
Yet the untroubled broad stream of Claxted's righteous prosperity had
its occasional backwater into which there drifted the rubbish which
would otherwise have defiled the comfortable colour of waters neither
muddy nor translucent. Lambeth Court was one such. Possibly it was
overlooked by the Borough Council; possibly it was allowed to remain
for some such definite purpose as that it certainly fulfilled. In any
case the Court afforded a "problem" for the church in whose parish it
lay, and the principles of the Christian Endeavour Society, which set
every young Christian immediately to work (thus preventing the leakage
which otherwise occurs after the Sunday School age in the South), were
offered in it an ample field for exercise. God knows it needed all
that the young Christian Endeavourers and their more adult directors
strove to give it. Their work was possibly a forlorn hope, but if the
Sunshine Committee could not lighten the darkness of the Court, what
else, asked Claxted, could? Nothing, it may well be conceded, except
rebuilding and replanning to admit light and air. These, however, cost
money, and besides the dwellers in Lambeth Court would only have moved
themselves elsewhere. The poor, reflected the Claxted councillors, ye
have with you always, and went home to dinner.
So far as the Christian Endeavour Society was concerned, it was Paul
Kestern who discovered Lambeth Court. He was eighteen at the time and
secretary of the Open-Air Committee--a committee, it must be explained
perhaps, which did not function in town-planning but in
gospel-preaching. One Sunday morning, returning from a children's
service in the Mission Hall at the end of Apple Orchard Road, he
entered it for the first time. A scholar had said that his elder
sister, regular in attendance at the service, was sick, and Paul,
enquiring her whereabouts, had learned that she lived "in the Court."
Its inhabitants rarely aspired to the "Lambeth" part of their
designation, but if the enquirer needed further enlightenment added
"Behind the 'South Pole.'" Paul, thus informed, remembered the dim
opening under the railway bridge behind the public-house of that name,
and said he would "call in" that morning. The urchin looked doubtfully
at his teacher's silk hat and frock coat, but ran off after service to
acquaint his mother. Paul had followed at leisure.
It is not necessary to give a detailed description of Lambeth Court,
but it may be pointed out how the place instantly struck Paul
strategically. It was not too far from the Hall, he saw at once, to
make the work of carrying the harmonium too heavy; every corner of its
area could be reached with a powerful voice; in the very centre stood a
lamp-post, and, what was more, that lamp-post stood alone in its glory
in the Court. This condition offered two great advantages: first, that
of supplying all the light required for the evangelists, and secondly,
that of creating those dark shadows beyond beloved by Nicodemus and his
like. The railway arch through which one entered and which shut off
that end of the place, would, of course, occasionally vibrate with
trains--an item on the debit side of the account; but on the other hand
the filthy tumbling hovels were enclosed on three sides by hoardings
and tall blank warehouse walls which would catch the voice, and their
strips of refuse-strewn gardens, separated from each other by broken
palings, were just such as would invite the inhabitants to sit and
gossip there on summer and early autumn evenings. Paul noted all this
in a moment so soon as he was inside the arch. He was a born
evangelist.
But to do the boy justice, he noted far more than this. He saw the
slatternly woman, with an unspeakable gaping blouse, her hair in
curl-papers and her feet in bulging unlaced boots, who came to the door
of the first cottage and shouted at a flaxen-haired little toddler of a
girl playing with a matchbox in the gutter. The burning words fell on
his ears like a scream from hell. "Maud-Hemily, yer bloody little
bitch, come in out o' that muck or I'll smack your bottom for yer." He
saw the two men by the lamp-post look at him, and he read aright their
besotted faces. Neither spoke, but one spat well and truly at the base
of the pillar, and that did for speech. He rapped on the door of No.
5, and when Jimmie opened it, he saw the remains of a meal in greasy
newspapers on the filthy table, and his nostrils caught the smell of
unwashed clothes and Sunday morning's kippers. He tried to avoid the
wall as he went up the stairs. And when he was in the little overhead
bedroom, whose window never opened and through whose grimy glass one
read an advertisement of Reckitt's Blue on the hoarding opposite, and
stood by the side of a heap of blankets and sacks on which lay and
coughed a child of thirteen in consumption, a cracked article on a
chair by her bedside over which she occasionally leaned and
expectorated, his heart moved with something of that compassion which
had been the outstanding characteristic of the greatest Evangelist the
world has ever known.
He was more silent than his wont at the midday dinner. But when
Saturday's hot joint, cold on Sundays, had been removed, he looked
across the table to the clergyman at its head, and spoke. "Dad," he
said, "do you know Lambeth Court?"
"Lambeth?" queried the clergyman. "No. Oh, let me see. Isn't it that
place behind the 'South Pole'?"
"Yes. I went in to-day to see Queenie Archer. She's awfully bad
again. Dad, it's a ghastly place. I thought I'd speak to the
Committee this afternoon and arrange an open-air there."
His mother looked up from helping the pudding and spoke with a trace of
anxiety. "Paul, she has consumption. Ought you to visit her, dear?
And it's a dreadful place; I don't think the C.E. girls ought to go
into it even for an open-air."
Paul moved restlessly. "They'd be all right with us, mother," he said.
"Do you think Jesus Christ would have stayed away because it was dirty
or because Queenie had consumption? If there's a place in the parish
where souls need saving, that place is Lambeth Court."
His mother suppressed a little sigh. The speech was typical of Paul.
As a Christian she loved him for it; as a mother she was very proud.
But this irresistible logic, which he was so prone to use, however much
it belonged to the atmosphere of religion in which she whole-heartedly
believed, affrighted her a little. It opened up infinities. She made
the rather pathetic appeal which was characteristic of her. "What do
you think, father?" she queried.
Mr. Kestern had very kindly eyes, a forehead which would have made for
intellectuality if his ever-narrowing outlook on life had given it a
chance, and a weak chin hidden by a short-beard and moustache. He
smiled at her. "The boy is quite right, dear," he said, "but, Paul,
you should not run unnecessary risks, especially now. You might have
left the visit to me. I will go to-morrow. As for the open-air, I
should think it would be a capital place, but keep the girls by you and
don't let them wander alone into the houses with tracts or leaflets.
Do you mean to go to-night?"
"No, not to-night, dad. Our pitch is in Laurence Place to-night. I
thought perhaps next Sunday."
"Next Sunday is the first in the month, dear," said his mother gently.
"Won't it be rather late? You don't usually have open-airs on the
first Sunday, do you?"
"I know, mother," said Paul, "but why not? It is better to be a bit
late when we go to Lambeth Court. Some of the men may be out of the
publics by then. And it always seems to me that Communion Sunday is
the best in the month for an open-air. Surely after we've remembered
His 'precious Death and Burial' at the Table, that is just the time for
us to preach the Cross."
"And 'His glorious Resurrection and Ascension,' Paul," quoted his
father softly. "Don't forget that. It's the living Saviour, no dead
Christ on a crucifix, that we proclaim."
"I know, dad," said the boy, his eyes shining. "How could one think
otherwise?"
"I don't know, laddie," said his father, smiling tenderly at him, "but
some appear to do so. God guard you from such errors, Paul. Don't be
over-confident; Satan can deceive the very elect."
Thus was the mission to Lambeth Court decided upon. Paul had carried
his Committee with him, as he always did. Its eldest member, a married
bank clerk of a nervous temperament, had indeed echoed something of
Mrs. Kestern's fears. He thought that the Court was no place for
ladies, and said, frankly, he would not care for his wife to go there.
Paul, at the head of the Mission vestry table, played with a pencil,
and showed his instinctive leadership again by not answering him. He
looked up instead, and caught Edith Thornton's eyes as she sat opposite
him. They were eager and indignant, and he nodded ever so slightly.
Edith, therefore, had taken up her parable, and the more forcefully
since she did not often speak on Committee. "Oh, Mr. Derrick," she
exclaimed, "I don't agree with you at all! What about our
missionaries' wives? What about the Salvation Army? Do you think any
place can be too bad for a Christian if there is one single soul to be
saved?" She flushed a little at her own vehemence.
Mr. Derrick coughed, fumbling with his watchchain. He was well aware
that the Spirit was at work in Apple Orchard Mission Hall, and he was
conscious of being one of the weaker brethren. Paul's very silence
daunted him, for he honestly loved the eager Paul. "Let us pray about
it," he suggested.
Paul pushed his chair back, and slipped to his knees. Instinctively he
always knelt to pray, though the more general custom was to sit. "A
few minutes' silent prayer first," he commanded, and, in the slow
ticking of the clock, he prayed himself, with utter simplicity and
earnestness, for Lambeth Court, for the guidance of the Holy
Spirit--and for Mr. Derrick. The result was, of course, a foregone
conclusion.
Thus, at intervals, all that golden summer, Lambeth Court heard the
Word. True, the signs following were so small that the less zealous
Endeavourers openly shook their heads, and even the more ardent of the
band would have been tempted to give in. But Paul and Edith were of
different mettle. At devotional meetings, Paul spoke of heroic souls
who had preached for half a generation in heathen lands and not seen a
convert, until, one day, the tide turned in all its power. Most
effective was the story of the Moravians who laboured among a certain
band of Esquimaux for forty years unblessing and unblessed, and then,
discovering that the channels were choked in themselves, cleared them,
and saw many mighty works. And in July, indeed, the doubters had
received a knock-out blow. Mrs. Reynolds, of No. 11, had been as truly
converted as Saul on the road to Damascus, converted by the human
instrumentality of Edith and a novel tract in the shape of a small slip
of cardboard bearing nothing but a question mark on one side and on the
other:
_HOW_ SHALL YE ESCAPE
IF YE NEGLECT
SO GREAT SALVATION?
Poor Mrs. Reynolds, one would have thought that her present woes were
big enough to discount effectively all future ones. Reynolds hawked,
when he had anything to hawk or time to spare from the "South Pole" and
regular terms of service for His Majesty. Mrs. Reynolds, herself,
drank, when, more rarely than her spouse, she had the wherewithal to
obtain drink. Reynolds, who should have accounted himself blessed in
the number of olive branches round about his table, illogically cursed
whenever he saw them, but added to the tribe as fast as Nature
permitted. It was, indeed, when his wife was expecting what turned out
to be twins, that Edith came her way. Against orders, she left the
circle and gave the woman a chair within her palings whereon she might
sit and listen. Mrs. Reynolds, gently intoxicated, was grateful, and
asked her visitor to fetch a Bible from within which had remained to
the family because it could not be pawned. On the table Edith silently
laid the tract. Mrs. Reynolds, returning later, had seen it, and had
been (as she said) knocked all of a heap. Why, particularly, by that
tract or just then, does not appear, and was not indeed questioned for
a moment by the Endeavourers. For converted Mrs. Reynolds honestly and
truly had been. Into her dwarfed and darkened life had shone the
radiance of a new hope, and from her hardened heart, so strangely
broken, had come welling out a vivid and wonderful spring. Regular at
services, humble at home, zealous in her work, undaunted by scoffing
and blows, Mrs. Reynolds had not only been constrained, nervously and
pathetically, to testify publicly in her own Court, but honestly did
testify by her life every day of the week. The very publican at the
corner, who had a soft spot for Paul by the way, admitted it. "Let the
poor devil alone," he would shout at Reynolds cursing his wife and
damning the Mission across the bar, "or get out of 'ere. Christ!
You're a bloody fool, you are! 'Ere's the Mission give you as good a
wife as any man ever 'ad, and you cursin' of 'em. Wouldn't mind if
they converted my ole woman, I wouldn't. She might 'old a
prayer-meetin' now and agin in the bar-parlour, off-hours, if she'd
keep it clean."
(2)
But this Sunday in October was to see the end of the effort for the
season. In the first place, Paul left that week for his first term at
Cambridge, and this was a bigger damper than the Committee cared to
allow. In the second, however, it was getting cold in the evenings,
and activities took a new direction in the winter. Thus, a little
late, after Communion, the band sallied out for the last time. Some
fifteen or twenty of them, they gathered round the lamp-post. A couple
of young men distributed the hymn-sheets to the loungers in the
gardens, with a cheerful smile and a word of friendly greeting, fairly
well received, as a matter of fact, by now. Paul mounted his chair
under the light. Edith took her seat beneath at the harmonium, for
Miss Madeline Ernest, daughter of the Rev. John Ernest, an elderly
assistant curate, who usually played, was unwell. The last faint
radiance of the day was dying out over the railway bridge, and the
stars shone steadily in a clear sky above the hoardings.
The Court greeted the Missioners in various moods. "They've come,
Joe," said Mrs. Reynolds to her husband who, for once and for obvious
reasons, was at home and sober; "won't yer come out and listen-like a
bit? The 'ymns will cheer yer up, and they carn't do yer no 'arm
anywise. It's yer larst charnst for the season, Joe."
"Garn," said Joe, "damn yer!"
Hilda Tillings put her hat at a becoming angle in the back kitchen of
No. 9 and sallied out into the parlour. Her mother sniffed. "Silly
fool," she said, "ter go and suck up ter 'em like that. 'E won't look
twice at yer. It'll be a case between 'im and that there Madeline
lidy, if yer asks me."
Hilda tossed her head. "Miss Ernest's not come to-night," she said.
"I saw out of the top winder. 'Sides, yer don't know wat yer talking
of, ma. I like the meeting." And she sallied out.
Two urchins, tearing at top speed under the arch, made for the
lamp-post. "'Ere, 'ook it," gasped the first to arrive, _sotto voce_,
to a diminutive imp already there. "I'll bash yer 'ead in for yer if
yer don't. This 'ere's my job." And he clutched at the lantern which
illuminated the music-book on the required occasions, and kicked his
weaker brother on the shin.
"Silence, boys," said Mr. Derrick, in his best manner; "don't fight
with that lantern now."
"Orl rite, guv'nor, but it's my job. Don't yer 'member me larst tyme?
Yer said I 'eld it steady and yer give me a copper."
"I got 'ere fust"--shrilly, from the other.
"There, there, my lad, give it up. This boy usually holds it. No
struggling, please. That's better. You can help with the harmonium
afterwards if you like."
(The smaller boy recedes into the background snuffling. Throughout the
first part of the meeting he is trying to kick the elder, jar the
lantern, or otherwise molest its holder. After the second hymn, Edith
intervenes with a penny. The smaller boy exits triumphantly.)
Paul, from his somewhat rickety chair, surveyed the little scene with a
definite sense of exultation in his heart. The last trace of
nervousness dropped from him with his first half-dozen sentences. He
had the voice of an orator, a singularly attractive, arresting voice,
that penetrated easily the furthest recesses of the Court and even
brought in a few passers-by from the street. The only son, he was, as
his parents often told him, the child of prayers, and he was named Paul
that he might be an apostle. He would have been a dreadful prig if he
had not been so tremendously convinced and in earnest. Radiant on that
mission chair beneath the garish lamp-light, he bared his head and
lifted his eyes to the heavens above him. Had they opened, with a
vision of the returning Christ escorted by the whole angelic host, he
would quite honestly not have been surprised; indeed, if anything, he
was often surprised that they did not. Christ waited there as surely
as he stood beneath to pray and preach. His young enthusiasm, his
vital faith, stirred the most commonplace of the little group about
him, and no wonder, for he added to it an unconscious and undeveloped
but undoubted power. To-night, the last night of the series, the last
night, perhaps, for ever there, he drew on all his gifts to the utmost.
It was small wonder that such as Hilda came to listen and such as Mrs.
Reynolds stayed to pray. There fell even on Theodore Derrick a sense
that the Acts of the Apostles might after all be true.
They began by singing "Tell me the old, old story." Before the hymn
was half over Paul had his audience under his influence as if they had
been little children and he a beloved master, or an orchestra and he
the efficient conductor. He laughed at them for not singing. He made
them repeat the chorus in parts, women a line, men a line, children a
line, and then the last line all together. He made them triumph it to
God, and then whisper it to their own hearts. He stayed them
altogether impressively, and would not have those sing who could not
say whole-heartedly:
Remember I'm the sinner
Whom Jesus came to save....
Then he prayed. No one there could pray as Paul prayed, and Paul
himself might have wondered how long he would be able to pray so. An
agnostic rarely interrupted Paul's meetings. There might be no sure
knowledge of God, but it was plainly useless to tell that to Paul after
you had heard him pray. Also, incidentally, there were few, however
rough, who did not feel that it would be a brutal thing to do.
A hymn again--the "Glory Song," by request--and Paul announced his
text, his farewell message, their last word to Lambeth Court for many
months. It was the kind of text which, in his mouth, took on that
irresistible logic that he loved, and which, in his own heart, glowed
and beat like the throb of an immense dynamo. "The Cross," so he
proclaimed, "is to them that are perishing foolishness, and to them
that are being saved the power of God." Telling anecdotes, however
commonplace, hammered in his points. It was not the Cross that was on
trial; it was his hearers who were then and there being judged by the
Cross. Was all this to them foolishness, or was it the power of God?
An easy question! Each one knew well enough for himself. And the
inevitable followed; indeed, in Paul's eager soul, could not be
gainsaid. His hearers to a man were being saved--the speaker's face
lit up with the honest joy of it;--or--or--_perishing_. The whispered
word reached the far corners of the Court. It even reached Reynolds.
He stirred uneasily, and wished he had more beer.
The boy on the chair announced that they would sing as a last hymn "God
be with you till we meet again." The haunting lilt, the genuine poetry
and life there is in it, overcame the crude composition, the tortured
air which was the best the old harmonium could do, the vulgar
surroundings, the banal words. At the third verse, Paul held up his
hand. A little hush fell on the whole Court, which deepened as he
spoke. Paul had not learnt the tricks that it was possible for him to
play with his oratorical power, but it was a naturally clever thing
that he did. The tone of his voice wholly changed. All hardness,
logic, conquest, argument, had gone from him, and it vibrated with
tenderness, was all but broken with honest emotion. He begged, by the
pity and gentleness of the Saviour, that they might meet at His feet.
They had, he said, all of them, to travel down the long roads of life;
none knew where such might lead; would that all their diverse ways
might at least lead home--home to the one safe shelter, home to the one
sure haven, home to Jesus' feet.
The little band moved off out of the Court, the loungers' eyes looking
curiously at Paul. He stopped again and again to shake hands, and, at
the Mission Hall, found the instrument, books, chair, and the rest of
the paraphernalia already put away. He said good-bye to one and
another. Edith held out her hand.
"Are you alone?" he asked. "May I see you home?"
"I don't like to trouble you," she said.
He smiled at her eagerly. "I believe you know I'm glad of the chance,"
he replied.
She lived some way off and scarcely in his direction, but young
Vintner, who usually escorted her home, saw the arrangement, and
surrendered her to Paul without a question. Still he wished Miss
Ernest had been there; then, of necessity, the vicar's son saw the
curate's daughter home. Under those circumstances, he usually secured
Edith, who fell to him likewise, more often than not, on school-treats
or C.E. excursions or riding back on summer evenings with the Members'
Cycling Club. But there was nothing tangible between them, and he was
devoted to Paul like all the rest of their circle. So the two leaders
went off together.
They said little at first. Their way lay down a long wide well-lit
main street with many people about, if few vehicles seeing that it was
Sunday evening. There was a sense of triumph in Paul, a sense growing
steadily now that the service was over and other less personal
influences laid for awhile aside, and he saw the commonplace street as
a vista of magic and wonder. They passed a darkened church, all locked
at this late hour, which was little thought of in their circle as
lacking in evangelical zeal. At a street corner, under a banner with a
text upon it, another open-air service from the local Wesleyan chapel
was in progress, and a speaker with a harsh voice was thundering
torrential salvation. Paul glanced at the girl by his side with a
smile. "'Peace be to all them who love our Lord Jesus Christ in
sincerity,'" he quoted quietly.
She nodded. "But the Wesleyans are so noisy," she said, "and I don't
see why they need have left the Church."
"We shall right all that," said Paul, utterly unconscious of boasting.
"The Evangelicals in all the churches must come together. I don't know
why there is any delay. They want someone to make a move. When I'm
ordained I shall go and preach in Nonconformist chapels and invite them
to my church no matter what the Bishop says. 'We must obey God rather
than man.'"
The girl looked up at him. "Why does everything you say ring so
unanswerably true?" she demanded with a little smile.
"Does it?"
"Yes. Everyone thinks so. Do you know you frighten me sometimes."
"Frighten you! Why in the world?"
"Because you're irresistible. Do you remember last week's prayer
meeting? Maud said to me afterwards: 'He'll make us all foreign
missionaries.'"
"I wish I could," said Paul, quite gravely. "Why not?"
"That's just it," she replied. "When you say 'Why not?' there doesn't
seem to be any answer. But my father would find one quickly enough."
They turned off into the first of a network of darker side-streets of
villas leading to her road. A sedate suburban air brooded there, and
except for a wandering couple and a distant policeman, no one else was
in sight or hearing. The night was clear and sweet. A little moon was
climbing into the sky. Paul and Edith slowed down instinctively.
Paul did not pursue the complication. Mr. Thornton was a photographer
in Edward Street, a highly respectable person, a member of his father's
church, but not within the circle of his father's actual friends. The
mention of him gave Paul a slight jar about Edith. He knew well enough
that if he had been seeing Madeline home, his mother would have been
highly delighted, but that she would be slightly uneasy at hearing that
he had been with Edith. But he was just discovering Edith. He liked
Madeline--she was far too pretty, with her fair hair and big eyes and
nicely-tempered lady-like admiration, not to be liked. At the last
school-treat--oh well, but he hadn't said anything really. And it was
in the return train that very day that he had, so to say, discovered
Edith. He had found himself in her carriage, having strayed from that
reserved for his father and mother to shepherd some late arrivals, and
she had been opposite him the whole way. She was quiet--he had noticed
that first; but when he did succeed in drawing her out a little, he had
found a very attractive creature. It was hard to say why, but still,
as he analysed her, she was frank, gay, and yet unexpectedly deep. And
she, too, was pretty. He had seen her home from the station, for the
first time, and discovered that his mother was just a little annoyed.
"Do you know," he said now, continuing the subject, "I can't make up my
mind what I want exactly. There seems such a lot to do in England, and
yet of course I'm pledged to be a foreign missionary."
"I see," she said.
"Well, what do you think?" he demanded. "It makes me burn to see the
deadness and disunion among Christians at home, and yet the heathen,
dying daily without Christ--how can one stay in England for a moment
longer than is necessary?"
"God will surely show you what you must do," said the girl quietly.
There was a depth of sincerity in the simple words that struck him. It
was the kind of thing Madeline would never have said, and would not
have meant if she had. He eyed her with a sudden wish to see more of
her. "Do you know I go to Cambridge on Tuesday?" he asked.
She nodded.
"It's going to cut me off from things here," he went on. "I shall have
to work in the vacs., you know. And I'm tingling to get there. I'll
have time to write a bit, and I expect editors will look at stuff that
comes from the 'Varsity."
"I read that bit of yours in _The Record_," she said.
The implied praise pleased him. "Did you?" he cried. "Did you like
it? I'm longing to be able to write as well as preach. I want God to
have my pen as well as my tongue."
"Oh you are lucky!" she exclaimed involuntarily.
"Lucky? Why?"
"You've so much to give. I've nothing."
He was extraordinarily touched by her humility. He wanted to take her
arm, but he did not like to do so. They turned another corner, and
were in her street.
"Don't say that," he said. "You've yourself--give that. No one can
give more."
"I'm not sure," she said, with a nervous catch in her voice, "that I
can give that."
"Why not?" he asked.
She did not reply directly. "I wonder what you will be like after a
term at Cambridge," she said, inconsequently.
"It won't change me at all," said Paul.
The girl made little stabs with her umbrella at the pavement. "It
will," she said. "I wonder if you'll come back the least bit the same.
Oh, I know! You'll have new friends and new interests, and you'll
think us all just a little cheap. You'll go away in the holidays,
abroad very likely, and even our country won't seem the same to you."
Paul was surprised at her vehemence, and he came to a sudden
resolution. "Do you know," he said, "I'm going to take a last bike
ride to-morrow round Hursley Woods and Allington, just to say good-bye.
I meant to go alone, but do you think you could come too? I'd love it.
We'd be able to talk, up there in the heather. Will you?"
The girl slowed down still more; they were very near her home. She was
so glad that he had asked her that she could hardly speak. "Yes," she
said; and then, with a burst of confidence: "Do you think we ought to?"
"Why not?" he queried, frowning. "Well, we'll risk it anyway. Look
here, let's meet at the bottom of Coster Lane--say at eleven. Shall
we? That will give us two hours, lots of time."
She nodded without speaking, and put her hand on the latch.
"You won't be late--Edith," he said, calling her, on the impulse, by
her Christian name.
She flushed in the kindly dark. "No," she said softly. How could she?
she asked herself as she let herself in.
It was half-past ten when Paul climbed the steps of his father's house
and rang the bell. The little family had finished supper and were
waiting prayers for him. "Where have you been, Paul?" questioned his
mother. "It's very late, dear."
"I saw Miss Thornton home, mother," said Paul.
"Oh, Paul! Was no one else going her way?"
"I did not think to ask," replied Paul frankly.
"Dear, you ought to take care. Such a lot is expected of your father's
son. Did you go in?"
"No, mother."
"Well, dear, go and take your boots off while Annie brings the cocoa
in. And don't be long, Paul. I don't want you to miss prayers on your
last Sunday."
He went out, closing the door. Mrs. Kestern looked across at her
husband, stretched out in his arm-chair, tired after a heavy day, and
gazing into the glowing coals. "Father, I think you ought to say
something to him," she said. "That girl is very attractive, and quite
clever enough not to run after him too obviously."
The clergyman stirred. "I don't know, dear," he said. "You know well
enough we have never had any trouble of that sort with him, and Paul is
not without ballast. God, Who redeemed me from all evil," he added
gently, "bless the lad."
(3)
In truth Mr. Kestern was both right and wrong. The next morning,
departing on his bicycle with a mere statement that he wanted a last
ride, Paul was very conscious of doing something he had never done
before. He had no sister, and his girl friends were mainly a family of
cousins so closely interested in each other, that, although they were
friendly enough and admitted him to the family circle on long summer
holidays together, he was not really intimate with any one of them.
Nor had he wanted any girl in his life. He and his father were great
friends, and the two shared pleasures and work with a rare
companionship. Paul, with his natural gifts, had thus been drawn into
active religious life much earlier than is common, and he was naturally
studious, fond of nature and of a literary bent. What with one thing
and another, his life was full. With his father he departed on
Saturday afternoons for the woods and the ponds, and Sunday was the
best day of the week to him despite its strict observance in that
Evangelical atmosphere. But nature is not easily defeated. He rode,
now, to meet Edith, with a virgin stirring of his pulses.
She was wearing a little fur cap that sat piquantly on her brown hair,
and was flushed and eager. Her slim figure, neatly dressed in a brown
cloth coat and skirt, pleased him, with the tan stockings and shoes
below at which he scarcely dared to glance. As they spun along the dry
road together, under the autumnal trees whose brown twisted leaves
fluttered to the ground with every breath that crossed the pale blue
sky flecked with little white clouds above, she seemed to him a fitting
part of the beauty of the world. Near the woods, the sun caught the
slim trunks of the silver birches in a spinney there, and their silver
contrasted exquisitely with the stretch of dying bracken beyond. A
lark cried the ecstasy of living in the untroubled spaces of light and
air.
The road climbed steeply to the woods, and they walked to the summit,
he pushing her machine. They hesitated at the leafy glade that invited
to the undulating heathery expanse of Hursley, but the artist in Paul
decided against the temptation. "No," he said, "don't let's go in
there. Everyone goes there. Let's coast down to Allington, and turn
to the left. I know a lovely place up there where there will be no
trace of Saturday afternoon's visitors. What do you say?"
She shot a look at him, and made a grace of submission. "Just as you
like," she said.
So they mounted on the crest and were away down the long hill together.
Oaks leant over the road at first, but beyond them the tall hedges were
lovely with scarlet October hips and haws, masses of trailing Old Man's
Beard, and sprays of purple blackberries. To the right the fields
stretched away to a far distant ridge scarred with chalk where one
might dig for fossils. Ahead clustered the old roofs of Allington, and
the little church that stood below estates linked for centuries with
Lambeth and Canterbury.
"After Lambeth Court, Allington Church," cried Paul gaily. "Let's go
in."
They left their bicycles at the lych-gate and walked into the silent
clean-swept place. She followed him in silence, and marvelled inwardly
that he seemed to know so much. "That," he said, towards the end of
the inspection, "is the coat of arms of Archbishop Whitgift. He was a
poor man's son and had no armorial bearings, so he took a cross and
inserted five little Maltese crosses for the Five Wounds of Christ,
quartering it with the arms of Canterbury. It's very lovely here,
isn't it?"
She glanced dubiously at the two candles and the cross on the altar.
"It's rather 'high,' don't you think?"
He looked judicially at the simple neat sanctuary. "There is no harm
in the things themselves," he said. "After all, they make for a sort
of beauty, don't they? It's the Spirit that matters. When I'm
ordained, I shall be willing to preach in a coloured stole if I can
preach the gospel."
The daring heresy of it secretly astonished her. But it was like Paul,
she thought. He stepped into a pew, and moved up to make room for her.
"Let us pray a little, shall we?" he said simply.
She knelt by his side, her heart beating violently. In the hush of the
place, it sounded so loud to her that she thought he must hear. She
dared not look at him, but she knew what he was doing. Kneeling erect,
his eyes would be open, seeing and yet not seeing. She felt very
humble to be allowed to be there. That in itself was enough just now.
She wished they might be there for ever and ever, just they two, and
God.
Ten minutes later, in the heart of the deserted woods, he flung himself
on the moss at her feet. "I love to lie like this and look right away
into the depths of the trees," he said. "If you come alone and lie
very still, rabbits come out and squirrels, and you begin to hear a
hundred little noises that you never heard before. And I love the tiny
insects that crawl up the blades of grass and find a world in a single
tuft. Edith, how wonderfully beautiful the world is, isn't it?"
She did not want to speak at all, but he seemed to expect it. "Not
everyone can see all that," she said. "But it is like you to feel it.
And when you talk, I feel it too. Always, when you talk, you show me
wonderful things."
"Do I?" he queried dreamily. "I don't mean to particularly. It's all
so plain to me."
"That's just it," she said.
In a thicket close at hand, a thrush broke out into song. His praise
ended, he flew down to a soft bit of ground and began busily to look
for worms. Paul moved his head ever so slightly, and the bird and the
boy looked at each other. The thrush eyed him boldly, summed him up
with a quick little pipe, and flew away.
Paul sighed. "I almost wish I were not going to Cambridge," he said.
"Why?" she asked.
He reached out for a broken stick and began to play with it. "Oh, I
don't know," he said restlessly. "Perhaps because it's so good to be
here. Cambridge is a new world. I want to do great things, of course,
but it's leaving things that I can do behind. Suppose I fail? I wish
I could be ordained to-morrow and go to the Mission Hall to work at
once. Or no, I'd like to go to Africa at once. Do you remember that
man who came and spoke for the South American Missionary Society?"
"Yes."
"Well, I carried his bag to the station. He had pleaded for
missionaries, and had said that he had been speaking at meetings for
six months up and down the country, asking for help, and had not had a
single volunteer. He was about to go back alone. So, on the station,
I offered to go. I said he should not say again that he had had no
offer of service. I was sixteen."
"What did he say?"
"Oh, the usual things. That I must be trained first. I asked what
more was necessary than that one loved Jesus, and had been saved, and
wanted to serve."
"Yes?"
"Well, I thought he half believed that I was right. But he didn't dare
say so, like all the rest of them. I must wait God's time, he said.
God's time! He meant man's time."
She said nothing. "It's so hard to wait," he added restlessly.
"I'm glad you didn't go," she ventured.
"Why?"
"Many of us are," she equivocated.
"Why?" demanded Paul again, looking boldly at her.
She disdained further subterfuge. "You have made God real to me," she
said, "and if you had gone, you would have had no opportunity to do
that."
His eyes shone. "I'm very glad," he said softly. "Will you pray for
me, Edith?"
She wanted to fling herself down beside him, to hide her flushed face
in his coat, to shed the tears that would stupidly start behind her
eyes for no reason at all, to tell him that she hardly dared to breathe
his name, but that, when she prayed, she could think of scarcely anyone
else; but she could not. Every instinct in her cried for
him--religion, sex, passionate admiration. But she only clenched one
little gloved hand tightly and said that she would. A daughter of
Claxted could hardly do otherwise.
The minutes slipped by. Paul rolled over on his back and took out his
watch. "My word," he exclaimed, "we ought to be going! We shall be
late as it is. But what a topping morning it has been. Come on." And
he jumped to his feet.
She got up slowly, and he dusted a few dry leaves from her skirt.
Straightening himself, he stood looking at her. "I've known you such a
little while," he said. "I wonder why?"
"Do you know me now?" she asked.
"Much better. When I come back, shall we have more rides like this?"
"I don't know," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"You may not want them. Your mother might not like it. And" (Eve will
out, even in an Evangelical) "nor will Miss Ernest."
He flushed. "I shall do as I please," he said. "And I know I shall
want you."
She lifted her dark eyes to his face. "Will you?" she cried. "Oh I
hope you do! I can't help it. It means so much to me. Ask me just
sometimes, Paul."
"Will you write to me at Cambridge?" he demanded.
She shook her head. "No," she said decidedly, "not yet, anyway. I
can't write good enough letters for one thing, and for another you
mustn't waste your time on me."
Paul stood considering her. He had an idea, but he was in truth rather
frightened of it. It seemed to be going too far. But his desire won
the battle with his caution. "Would you give me a photograph of
yourself to take to Cambridge?" he asked.
"I haven't a good one," she said.
"But you've something--a snapshot, anything," he pressed eagerly.
She smiled radiantly and suddenly. "I've a rubbishy old thing they
took on the river at Hampton Court last August," she said, "but my hair
was down then."
"That'll be lovely!" he cried. "Do give me that."
"How? Shall I send it you?"
Paul's letters were not many, and fairly common property at the family
breakfast table. He sought for an escape from that. "Will you be at
the prayer meeting to-night?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Well, so shall I. In fact, I'm leading it. Write me a little letter
and give it me afterwards, will you?"
She nodded. Neither of them were aware of incongruity. Possibly they
were right, and there was none.
(4)
Paul's bedroom was a big attic at the top of the Vicarage, running the
whole width of the house. It was entirely characteristic of him. In
one corner was a large home-made cage for a pair of ring-doves, with a
space in front for their perambulations, fitted with convenient
perches. Under the window was what had been an aquarium, but was now,
after many vicissitudes, temporarily doing duty as a vivarium. It was
a third full of sand and pebbles and soil, and contained plants and a
shallow pool of water, constituting, in its owner's imagination, a
section of African forest for three water-tortoises, a family of green
tree-frogs, and some half-developed tadpoles. Above a writing-desk was
a bookshelf full of cheap editions of the English classics, purchased
largely with prize money won by literary efforts in his school
magazine. The books are worth reviewing, for his father's well-stocked
shelves of Evangelical theology held none such. The great English
poets were all there, with Carlyle, Emerson, Lamb, Machiavelli, Locke,
Macaulay, and a further miscellaneous host. A smaller bookshelf held
MSS. books--three slim volumes of his own verse, one of acrostics
suitable for children's addresses, several of sermon notes, another of
special hymns, choruses and tunes, and two of essays and short stories
which had not seen the light in printer's ink. Paul would have added
"as yet." Bound volumes of his school magazine shone resplendent in
leather, and were sprinkled interiorly with his verse and prose. There
were fencing sticks in a corner, and framed shooting and cadet groups.
A cabinet contained glass jars and medicine bottles of chemicals, and a
much-prized retort stood above it. The mantelpiece was fairly full
with phials of spirit that had a home there, and in which had been
preserved an embryo dog-fish, a newt with three legs, a small
grass-snake, a treasured scorpion (the gift of an African missionary),
and the like. Lastly, over the bed was a text. That, principally of
all these treasures, was to go with its owner to Cambridge.
Paul that night sat on his little bed and looked around him. The last
minutes of the eve of the great to-morrow had really come at last. He
well remembered the hours in this room, during which the things that
were now largely accomplished had seemed to him overwhelming obstacles
in the race. The open scholarship, the school exhibitions, the Little
Go--all these were past. There stretched ahead the Tripos and the
Bishop's Examinations, but in imagination these were lesser
difficulties than those already surmounted. Linked with them were his
other ambitions, his writing, his preaching, and a vista of endless
years. Like a traveller who has reached a hill-top, he viewed the
peaks ahead.
Paul looked down on the letter in his hand. The ill-formed sprawling
handwriting addressed it to P. Kestern, Esq., with several
underlinings. He turned it over curiously, not in the least aware that
the amazing thing was that this should be the first of its kind for him
to handle. Then he broke the envelope and drew out first the
photograph.
It had been badly and amateurishly snapped on a sunny day. The shadows
were under-exposed, the lights far too strong. It showed part of a
punt moored beneath the trees of a river bank, and one girl wholly,
another in part, who lay stretched out at the far end. She in part, he
decided, was Maud. Edith lay laughing unrestrainedly, one hand above
her head gripping an overhanging branch, the other trailing in a black
shade that was undoubtedly (from the context, so to speak) water. A
plait of her hair lay across her shoulder. She did not look
particularly pretty, but she did look jolly. Paul turned the
photograph over. On the back he read: "From A. V." The inscription
jarred on him. From Albert Vintner. Mentally, he could see Albert, in
white flannels, a collar, a made tie, and brown shoes, taking it. A
thoroughly good fellow, converted, earnest, but---- Yet he loathed
himself for that "but."
He opened the half-sheet of paper that had enwrapped it. He was
distinctly curious to see what she would say. He did not guess for a
moment how long she had taken to say it.
"Here is the snap" (she had written, without introduction). "I look a
lanky thing, and did not know that ('he' erased) it was being taken
just then. Do you remember that you had gone on up the river, rowing
your father and mother and Mr. and Miss Ernest? I did so wish I had
been in your boat! And at tea you pretended I was not to have a cream
bun! But it was a jolly day, wasn't it? and if the photo helps you to
remember _that_ and think kindly at Cambridge of all of us at Claxted,
I am glad for you to have it.
"Yours sincerely,
"EDITH."
Paul smiled. Then he frowned. He re-read the letter several times and
looked again at the photograph. Then he folded the one in the other,
and placed them in the inner recess of a new pocket-book. Then he
reached for a Bible from which to read his evening Scripture Union
portion.