FORDHAM
Foot after foot ye go back and travail and make yourselves mad;
Blind feet that feel for the track where highway is none to be had.
Therefore the God that ye make you is grievous, and gives not aid,
Because it is but for your sake that the God of your making is made.
* * * * *
Cry out, for his kingdom is shaken; cry out, for the people
blaspheme;
Cry aloud till his godhead awaken; what doth he to sleep and
to dream?
Is not this the great God of your sires, that with souls and with
bodies was fed,
And the world was on flame with his fires? O fools, he was God,
and is dead.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE: _Hymn of Man_.
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.--PASCAL: _Pensées_.
And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help--for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
OMAR KHAYYÁM.
(1)
Ursula Manning stared out at the rods of rain. Chanctonbury Ring was
all but blotted out; she could just see the crown of beeches when the
mists were blown aside for a few moments, and that was all. The woods
below stood heavy and motionless, and the fields between them and the
cottage lay stretched out, drinking it in. It had been a hot dry
summer, and the whole world was rejoicing in the rain. That decided
Ursula. She turned back into the bedroom, opened a wardrobe, and took
out an old tweed skirt and jumper. Then she took off most of her
clothes and assumed these. She let down her hair, twisted it into a
long black plait, tied it firmly, and swung the heavy mass over her
shoulder with a defiant jerk. Then, bareheaded, she went downstairs
humming a little song, and selected a stick in the hall. She looked
about eighteen, dressed so.
Her mother came out of the sitting-room. "Ursula," she cried, "you're
not going out!"
"Yes, mother, I am. Why not? The rain's heavenly, and the woods have
spread out their hands to it. And I want to get soaked."
The elder lady stood irresolute, a ludicrous expression of dismay in
her face. The girl looked at her and laughed. "Oh, mother," she
cried, "say it if it's any help!"
Mrs. Manning, at that, smiled ruefully. "Ursula," she said, "it's all
very well, but you are trying. You'll probably catch your death of
cold."
Ursula opened the door and stepped into the porch. She looked up into
the leaden sky and down at the runnels of water on either side of the
little garden path to the gate. Then she glanced back at her mother,
smiled at her, waved her hand, and stepped into the downpour without a
word.
Her mother gave a little scream. "Ursula! Where's your mac.?" The
muffled click of the latch at the gate answered her.
It opened into a little lane that ran down on the left to a main road
and up on the right towards the woods below Chanctonbury. Up this
then, she went, swinging her stick, swinging out. The rain fell
steadily around and upon her, and ever and again she lifted her face to
it and smiled slowly to herself at the kiss and sting of it. In a
little the winding track became a mere footpath and debouched into an
old chalk-quarry, cut from the side of the hill, fringed with immense
beech-trees and an occasional oak. The girl ran a few steps up a
sodden low bank and stood for a moment looking down into the great
bowl. A continual patter and sough of rain came up to her, though
here, under the giant trees, less of the actual downpour reached her.
The white chalk shone through the misty air. A miniature torrent
poured as a little waterfall over the far brink and splashed below on
to bushes and brambles. A warm, rich, wet fragrance rose all about
her, and every living green thing seemed stretched out and motionless
in an utter ecstasy of enjoyment.
The girl drew a deep breath. Unconsciously, she was registering it
all. All the grey monotones, all the myriad little drips and
splashings, all the washed leaves and grasses around and underfoot, and
all the tall upreaching brown trunks that rose against the teeming sky,
were impressing themselves upon her mind. She knew it as an instinct
and stood there to miss nothing. And one day Ursula Manning would
paint just such a picture, and people would wonder how she did it, and
the critics talk of her unique gift.
But at the quarry she turned to the left. The high soaked grasses
reached to her knees; last year's litter of leaves clung to her feet;
sprays of bramble clutched at her short skirt; but she moved slowly and
persistently on. Her eyes, that looked at you always without a tremor,
glanced quietly right and left as she went. By field-path and coppice,
and now in a sunken lane that skirted an old wall behind which rose
Fordham Manor, she made her way. She was drenched through and through,
but it was warm rain, and besides the exercise kept her warm. The
pores of her skin, like those of the woods and the plants, opened to
the joyous quickening benison of it. Rain dripped from her plaited
hair and shone on her face. And still she moved steadily through it,
with the erect carriage and proud swing of her, and those resolute
eager eyes.
Just past the old wall, where it turns to run up to the coach-house and
stables and barns against which fruitful ancient fig-trees grow, she
crossed a field diagonally to her left. Its boundary hedge was thick
and she moved along to the right seeking an opening. Not until she was
all but at the corner did she find it, and there, pushing back a tangle
of old man's beard and bryony, she leapt through and out on to the
carriage-drive running by the park up to the house. And just then a
car turned the corner and swept past her.
There were three men in it besides the driver. One sat next him, his
hat pulled down, muffled in an overcoat, but she knew him. Of the
others, one turned and waved cheerfully over the back as the car went
on. She knew him, too, just as she knew that he was arriving that day
to stay with Mr. Tressor. The third man she did not know. She smiled
suddenly to herself. It was plain they had been caught in the open car
by the sudden storm, driving up from Brighton probably. What fun! Her
cousin hated rain.
Manning turned back to Paul. "My cousin Ursula," he said. "She lives
just here, when she's not in town. Possibly you know the name. She
paints, and has rather a growing reputation."
"Oh," said Paul. "What in the world was she doing out in this then?
She looked drowned."
"I know. She loves that sort of thing. I wonder what you'll think of
her, Paul."
"Why?"
"I don't know. She's rather unusual. Not your sort at all I should
imagine. But--well, I don't know. It will be rather amusing to see."
(2)
Ursula went on down the drive, her thoughts idle, her appreciation
vivid. Arrived in the macadamised road of civilisation, she followed
it without giving a thought to the fact that girls, soaked to the skin,
hatless but happy, are rareties along even country roads. The surface
had been rapidly softening under the downpour, but little she cared for
that either. Blackberries gleamed scarlet, purple, black in every
hedge; thrushes, in the now gentle rain, were already out on the
war-path for worms; and the sweep of the South Downs on her right was
visible through the dripping trees. Ursula began to sing to herself as
she went, breaking off to nod friendlily to a carter who knew her, and
picking up her song again without troubling whether or not he was out
of earshot. That was her way. She had always seen clearly and scorned
muddle-headed conventionalities; at first, while her father lived and
she was still in her teens, with a certain submission to authority, but
since, after her twenty-first birthday, quite openly and frankly. Her
mother, who never had had much of a will of her own, gave in to her
daughter as she had to her husband. Thus, at Ursula's suggestion, they
had taken the old cottage under Chanctonbury on the edge, but actually
part of, Mr. Tressor's estate, and Mrs. Manning had been forced to
admit the advantage of the change from the big establishment which Mr.
Manning had maintained as befitted a banking magnate. Then, a rather
lonely aunt coming to live with them, the girl had announced her
intention of having a flat and studio in town, and since she had her
own money and moreover made more, nothing in the world was able to
prevent her. She came and went now between the two, with intervals of
wandering abroad. She had a big circle of her own acquaintances of
whom her mother knew little, chiefly however, it must be confessed,
because she did not understand more than about a third of what they
said and did when they came down to Sussex with her daughter; but she
had only a few friends. These her mother knew less than the rest,
retaining enough spirit to avow definitely that she did not want to
know them. They professed views and took part in movements which were,
frankly, beyond toleration. There was Muriel Lister, for example, who
preached in churches and actually led a campaign for the admission of
women to the priesthood.
Yet Ursula herself took active part in no movements or campaigns. On
account of this it was perhaps odd that the leaders of them should be
her friends. But then a subtle reason underlay that. For Ursula was
rather a good person to talk to, and a very good person to have coffee
with by night in her studio after the fatigue of committees, inclined,
as is the way of committees, to be a little heavy in hand. She was
sympathetic, understanding, entirely capable of giving an opinion, but
she did not say much. Also she was clean-handed, so to speak. It was
a little irritating, possibly, at times, that she was so resolutely
unimpassioned when a reactionary bishop insulted women or ministers
took back by some Civil Service Regulation what the Removal of Sex
Disabilities Act had given. But one knew it was Ursula. And one knew,
moreover, that at a crisis neither bishop nor ministers mattered to her
a toss of her present rain-soaked plait.
For Ursula, with her quiet, good-humoured resolution and her
unquestioned art, not only saw life from an enviable angle, but quietly
acted as if that were the only one from which it should be seen by
reasonable people. Her cousin had once said of her that she "pressed
towards the goal" with apostolic conviction. Not that it was a wholly
good definition because, unlike the apostle, she tried to make no
proselytes, seeing the world about her as a very lovely satisfying
thing with which she was content to be satisfied. Constitutionally,
and from environment, no lost cause had as yet come vividly her way.
Two days later she was introduced to Paul. Manning and he were doing
the round of the park, Manning with a gun under his arm, Paul,
metaphorically, with a pencil in his hand. In other words, he was
realising what a lovely place it was. The wide sweeps of grass, the
clumps of trees, the views of the Downs, and the utter quiet of this
little Sussex backwater were already exercising their magic upon him.
The two of them had come along the northern boundary of the estate and
were now skirting the lake. It was a wild overgrown place, with
nothing formal about it, a big irregular sheet of water with a tangle
of weeds and lilies at one end and a regiment of great elms closing it
in. An avenue of limes led from it to the house, an odd avenue that
only appeared as an avenue when you came upon its entrance, suddenly,
in the middle of grassy park-land. Thus it started nowhere in
particular, and, from a distance, had no particular object, since the
water itself lay low at the far end of it behind a raised bank. Paul
already loved that. You wandered down from the garden and saw,
suddenly, the green guarded road of it running away into the park.
Intrigued, you entered, and sauntered carelessly up it. Then, at quite
a long last, you climbed the slope of the bank and suddenly saw before
you this still enchanted refuge where the fish leaped in the gathering
dusk and white swans sailed friendlily up in the heat of the sun. Here
and there a fallen trunk lay half in and half out of the water. In
places there was no coming at the brink for forests of reeds. But, at
its deepest corner, a promontory of hazels that was almost an island,
thrust out into its serenity.
The friends leaped from stone to tussock and tussock to log and landed.
A suggestion of a path led them through the few yards of undergrowth.
And there, hidden by a screen of green, with the water at her feet, sat
Ursula on the flat prow of a punt. She was making a little
water-colour, palette in one hand, brush in the other, a little
impressionist study of a pine that stood by himself on the bank
opposite, his brown roots reaching down into the lake.
"Hullo, Ursula," said Manning, "we didn't see you. Let me introduce
Paul Kestern. He's going to be a near neighbour, so you've got to know
him."
The girl looked up but did not move. Paul found himself staring across
a tiny strip of water into clear brown eyes, a pale oval face, and a
frame of black hair, all set on a tall pillar of white throat and neck.
She was wearing a brilliant yellow jumper, without adornment, and a
short blue skirt. She was long-limbed, and he realised vaguely that
her white bare arms and black stockinged legs were shapely and lissom
and good to see. "How do you do," he said properly.
"I've seen you before somewhere," she replied.
Paul was puzzled. He shot a glance at Manning, but he was fiddling
unconcernedly with his gun. Left to his own resources, he continued to
be polite.
"It's awfully rude of me," he said, "but I'm afraid I don't remember."
"Neither do I," she said.
He smiled. So did she. "Let's call it quits," he suggested.
"I'm afraid I must, but I shall hope to remember yet," she retorted
whimsically.
"Possibly it was at Cambridge," suggested Paul.
"Rather not," put in Manning, restoring his piece to his arm, "Ursula
never comes to see me."
"Of course not," she returned equably, "why should I?"
Manning laughed. They were good friends, these two. "Why, indeed," he
said, "but you needn't rub it in. And you might be so nice as to come
and have dinner in the immediate future and make up a four at bridge."
"You must first," she said, "extract a nice note of invitation from Mr.
Tressor, and it must include mother and auntie. In addition you must
call upon us. Call this afternoon, and bring Mr. Kestern. Meantime
you're just a little bit of a nuisance at the moment. I want to paint."
"Kestern's a poet," remarked Manning gravely.
The girl nodded. "'_Leaves in Autumn_,'" she said.
Paul flushed. "You've read it?" he cried excitedly.
She smiled slowly. "I've even painted it," she said.
"What?"
"Painted it. That is, there was one poem especially I couldn't forget.
I saw it rather vividly."
"Oh," said Paul, with a deep breath. Somehow the fact that she knew of
his work and had appreciated it to that extent, seemed to him the
biggest praise that he had had yet. He could not take his eyes off
her. "Which one?" he asked at last.
She considered him a moment Then: "I'll show you the sketch," she said,
"and you shall guess which it is meant to illustrate." She got up as
she spoke and turned round for a case that lay behind her in the punt.
"Oh, do," cried Paul, starting forward.
Manning laughed. "She's not got it there," he said.
Something in his tone--a faint trace of mockery, it seemed to
Paul--struck them both. Paul looked guilty of foolishness and the girl
stood arrested. They both of them looked at Manning. That instant
pose remained with Paul long afterwards as the key-note of their
meeting. It was symbolic, somehow, as if Manning would always be
faintly contemptuous of them. But why, the boy had no idea.
"Well," said Ursula, and she spoke so soon that it was as if there had
been no pause, "I have not, it is true. I was only going to pack up
because I can paint no more just now, thanks to you, Arnold, you old
rotter. But I will do more now. Mr. Kestern, will you walk back with
me, and see your picture?"
"May I?" asked Paul eagerly.
Manning thrust his hand into his arm. "What about the Mill cottage?"
he asked banteringly.
"Oh, I clean forgot," said Paul, and hesitated.
His friend laughed. "Good Lord, Paul," he said, "a pretty sort of an
agent you'll make! I was taking him to see his first job," he
explained. "Old Morley wants a new roof, or something of that sort.
But, of course, it doesn't matter. I was only rotting. We'll walk up
with you, Ursula. That'll be the call, and on my own responsibility
I'll invite you and my dear aunt in to bridge after dinner this very
day."
"So he's going to be Mr. Tressor's agent," said Ursula, busy over her
painting materials.
"Well," said Paul honestly and a little awkwardly, "it's only an
excuse, I fear."
"Paul's to prove himself a poet," said Manning, "and incidentally to
settle the theory and content of revelation. Perhaps you'll help him."
"Perhaps," said the girl serenely. "I hope so."
They strolled back together, Manning in the middle, and it was Manning
who did most of the talking. He chatted on, occasionally asking a
question, but for the most part taking it for granted, apparently from
experience, that Ursula would listen rather than speak. Paul, too, was
not much included in the conversation, which concerned the Manning
family and their friends and the girl's work. Thus he gathered from
the bantering talk a good deal concerning her life here and in London,
her art and her friends. It interested him profoundly. She was a new
type altogether in his experience, one of which he had heard rumours,
so to speak, at Claxted (where such strange goings-on were occasionally
mentioned with scandalised horror), but which one would equally fail to
find at Thurloe End or St. Mary's. Glancing past his friend from time
to time, he watched her face. She turned her head but little, walking
steadily and silently forward. But he noticed how she kept her eyes
up, and how she had a trick of staring at a tree or a cloud or a beast
in the lush pasture with a kind of untroubled wonder. It was easy to
understand that here was an artist.
They came then to the cottage and Paul was introduced to the mother and
aunt. Ursula stood by while the usual things were said, and then
turned to him. "Now, Mr. Kestern," she said, "will you come this way?"
Her mother glanced up, but said nothing, and Paul, since no one else
moved, followed her alone.
She led the way upstairs and into a room over the porch, the room from
which she had watched the rain. It was big and airy and light, half
studio and half bedroom. The bed itself stood in an alcove, curtained
with a vivid cretonne, blue in the main, on which rioted a bold design
of orange and yellow and scarlet fruit, with apple-blossom and leaves.
The curtain was half drawn, and the still Puritan Paul felt a little
that he ought not to look that way. Ursula, quite obviously had no
such views at all, for she crossed the room to the alcove, pulled the
curtain yet further back, and sought for a portfolio that lay in a
little recess near the head of the bed.
Paul stood hesitatingly. He did not quite know what to do. The girl
called to him over her shoulder. "Sit down, will you," she said,
"anywhere."
He walked over to a couch by the window and sat down, looking out over
the gay garden to the Downs. Hollyhocks marched as an army with
banners in a bed beneath the window. Chanctonbury's crown, clear and
bright in the sunlight to-day, rose into the pale blue sky above.
"What a glorious window-seat," he said, with a little note of content
in his voice. She threw him a glance, but did not speak. She was
searching through the portfolio.
"I think," observed Paul meditatively, "I'm the luckiest man alive to
get a chance of a year here."
"Yes?"
"I can't make up my mind what to do, you see," he said.
"I should have thought there was absolutely no doubt."
"No?" queried Paul in genuine astonishment.
"Of course not. You've got to write great poetry."
"I've also got to live," said Paul, with a flicker of a smile.
"Naturally. What about it?"
"Well, I've got to earn money."
Ursula found what she was looking for. "Here it is," she said, coming
over to him.
And then, carrying on the conversation: "I think those of us who can
see and express things, ought to think first of that," she said.
"After all, one lives somehow."
But Paul hardly heard. He was staring at the little picture, and was
very silent.
She broke the silence. "Well, can you guess the poem?" she demanded.
"'Spent,'" he whispered, half to himself.
Her silence told him he was correct. It was the short thing, since
then slightly renamed and improved, that Tressor had, of all he had
written, praised superlatively. Of all he had written, but, as he
looked at this, astonishment welled up in him. "But this is not what I
wrote," he said.
It was a picture of dull-red angry sunset tones over a bare stony plain
and a dimly-outlined ragged track. A solitary figure of a man lay
there, just as he had stumbled forward and fallen at the last step.
The light glowed on his sunburnt nude back, his face in shadow; and on
one other object, for, some short way beyond him, was a dimly-seen
ruined shrine, with the statue of a god, half overthrown. The stone
effigy reeled insecurely against a broken pillar, and the glow of the
dying sun caught on its upcast face. The girl had copied some Greek
masterpiece, and there, in that lone waste, as if to mock the beaten
human figure, a regular, perfect, immobile brow and eyes and nose and
lips turned upwards to the sky. In the fallen man was life, beaten and
despairing, but life; in the fallen god was death, serene and lovely,
but death.
"This is not what I wrote," repeated Paul again.
"But you instantly named it."
"It alone, of the pieces in the book, fitted at all," he said.
"I suspect that was not all. I should not be in the least surprised if
you had more in your mind than you knew. Anyway, your spent day struck
me so."
Paul started, and looked at her almost with awe. He saw it all so
plainly. He had sat down to write one evening after a dull heavy day
when all the growing doubt and despair in his soul had been surging
around him. He had written of a dying sun, a barren waste, a wearied
walk, a lost hope; yet he had not seen this--no, no, not this.
"It was an ordinary day," said Paul.
"To you perhaps. To me it meant a life."
"But it's wrong of life," he said.
She hesitated. "Speaking generally, I agree," she answered, "but why
do you say so?"
"That fallen god, that empty temple," he urged, suddenly, almost
passionately moved, he could hardly say why.
"I see." She was quite deliberate. "I remember what Arnold said. You
have still an idol in the shrine."
"God," said Paul reverently, "only He is no idol."
"There is no god," said Ursula.
If she had lashed him with a whip, he could not have been more
startled, more outraged. There, in that sunny window, looking out over
that gay garden, this attractive, striking, interesting girl, for whose
work and thought he had already a youthful generous impulse, had
suddenly blasphemed. And she had done it so coolly, so unemotionally.
"There is no god," she had said, exactly as if she had passed a
detached criticism on art or verse.
And yet no ringing affirmation, no dogmatic assertion to equal hers,
sprang to his lips. Conflict and pain had done more in his heart than
he had guessed. "Oh, there must be, there must be!" was all that he
could cry, as if he hoped against hope.
Ursula took the picture from his hand and their eyes met. Even in his
distress, he saw the miracle. Hers were utterly serene. He knew his
own to be inchoate, baffled, grieved. And yet in her serenity, too,
was a touch of kindliness, and a kind of deep wonder of understanding
as if, despite her empty heaven, she looked on mystery.
Something deep down in him stirred before those eyes of hers. He
forgot that he had only known her half a morning. He forgot that he
was a man and a Christian, and she was a girl and a heathen. And he
forgot entirely that it was the fool who said in his heart there is no
god. "Oh," he cried, "you've no idea how down and out I am!"
She smiled and put out her hand. "I'll help," she said, "and I put it
badly, too, just now. Peradventure there is a god, but, you know, we
don't know even his Name and--and--he seems asleep."
They were odd words, he thought vaguely, but somehow there was
tenderness and strength hidden in them. Paul Kestern knew suddenly how
much he wanted both. And so he reached out, too, and put his hand into
hers.
(3)
The impression of Ursula's personality was indeed strong enough to veil
the full significance of what she had said for several days. In part,
moreover, the influence of Tressor and Manning, and still more, the
business of adjustment to his new environment made for this. Paul
always sensed the atmosphere of houses and places in rather a cat-like
way, wandering about a little, twisting, as it were, in the new bed,
until it was familiar and friendly. And Fordham Manor was so different
from any other house in which he had ever stayed, let alone lived, that
the process took time.
It was a very beautiful place, of more than one date, but the front had
been wholly rebuilt in the early Georgian period, while the back had
been left Jacobean. The result was singularly arresting. Strong,
severe, plain, dignified, yet not pompous and over heavy, a circular
drive ran up to the entrance hall. On either side equally matched
buildings--the servants' quarters and the like--pushed out, each with a
little cupola and gables. Wide open high iron gates led to a gravelled
drive with a balustrade, a slope, and below a big herbaceous border.
Below that again there was a further walk, a low railing, and a full
wide sweep of park-land where, away to the right and but trees from
here, ran the avenue. But when one skirted or passed right through the
house, one came out on a herb garden and box-trimmed walks; and from
the beds of rosemary, lavender and thyme one looked back to the sweet
smiling red brickwork and wide windows of the earlier building, with an
irregular roof and high dormer windows.
Within, the house had in fact many faults. The rooms were much too
small for its size for one thing. But while this would have mattered
to a family in residence, if anything it added to its suitability for
Tressor, a bachelor and only an occasional visitor. Besides there was
at least one feature which admirably fitted now. There was a large
partially divided hall into which descended a wide dignified staircase.
This hall particularly pleased Paul. It was rather a stately obvious
hall as one entered from the front, but one skirted the stairs, and
behold its aspect changed. The big fireplace behind was Jacobean.
There was a bookcase full of new books meant to be read. There were
long low chairs and a plenty of rugs and footstools. And the portraits
in the front portion gave way to a picture or two which he was
beginning to love. One was a Dutch landscape, sombre, mysterious, and
the other ploughlands and three strong horses that climbed a ridge in a
gale of driving wind.
The men were already settling down. They met at breakfast, and
thereafter Tressor departed to his study and was no more seen till
lunch. Manning and Paul, however, gaily wasted half a morning. They
smoked a pipe in the gardens, and picked up the newspapers in the
lounge hall on their way to work afterwards, Paul usually reading or
glancing through anything he had done the day before. In the
afternoon, they rode or motored or walked, found tea waiting them on
their return, and separated for a couple of hours' more serious going
before the dressing bell. In the evening things seemed to fall out
with easy content, though Tressor would withdraw to his study again as
often as not. It was all rather leisured and easy. Expressed in
colour, Paul thought of Claxted as having none; of Thurloe End as black
and white and scarlet; of Fordham as blue and old gold within and brown
and green without.
As for duties, as yet he had none worth the mention. Old Mrs. Bird,
the housekeeper, and he, already loved each other. It was obvious that
she proposed to take charge of him. Rider, who combined the functions
of valet and butler and chauffeur, had instructions to take Paul over
when Tressor was away, and seemed gravely imperturbed. Timothy, the
head gardener and an institution, appeared actually prepared to teach
him a little; and as for the gamekeeper, who lived at the lodge, he
talked dogs and horses with Manning by the hour, and accepted Paul
because he could listen with grave attention. In a word, the
establishment was plainly ready to accept him, and he was, as he should
have been, profoundly grateful.
It was thus, then, after a morning stroll, while Manning was
perfunctorily looking through _The Times_, that Paul broached the
agnosticism of Ursula. The ladies had dined at the Manor the previous
evening, and she had sung. Paul had had no conversation out of the
ordinary with her, and yet once again the strength of her personality
had impressed him. So now, as he stood by the carved and decorated
mantelpiece and looked out through the open window to the sunny garden,
sniffing the fragrant scent of herbs and box that wafted in, the girl
was vividly in his mind. "Arnold," he said.
"Yes? What's up now?"
"I say, I like your cousin."
Manning folded the paper carelessly and tossed it aside, feeling for
his tobacco pouch. "I'm sure I'm very pleased," he said.
"Don't rag. She worries me."
"I thought you said you liked her."
"So I do, but it is exactly that that worries me. She's an atheist."
"True. It runs in the family in this generation. A reaction perhaps.
Her father was a churchwarden, and her mother likes the vicar to call
once a month."
Paul shifted uneasily. "It isn't a subject for joking to me," he said.
"You know that, very well you know it. I may be in difficulties, but I
believe in God with all my heart."
Manning leaned back easily in his chair and lit his pipe. "You think
you do," he said, between the puffs.
Paul rounded on him eagerly. "But I do," he insisted. "To be honest,
it is an utter mystery to me how you do not. I can't conceive of it at
all. I know we've never discussed the point before--it hasn't seemed
to me worth discussion, the existence of God, I mean--but I want to
now."
"Ahl And why now?"
"Because, impossible as it seems to me in your or anybody's case, that
your cousin should say 'There is no god' utterly staggers me."
"When did she say that?"
Paul told him.
He smoked thoughtfully. "Humph," he said at last, dubiously, "but I
doubt if Ursula is as much an atheist as an agnostic. She probably put
it that way because her god, whatever she thinks, has nothing worth
mentioning in common with any idea of God in your mind."
Paul regarded him for a moment in troubled silence, weighing his words.
Then he sighed. "It is utterly beyond me," he said. "How, in the face
of things as they are, you or anyone can fail to believe in a Creator,
an Inspirer, a Supporter, I do not see. It may be old-fashioned, but
even _Paley's Evidences_ seem good enough to me. Allow evolution if
you like, allow anything, you've got to get back to _something_. There
must have been a beginning, even if it was all the most tenuous of
spiral nebulæ. Well, who made that?"
"I haven't the remotest notion," said Manning.
"Well, but...."
"Yes?"
"Well, if God didn't create it, how did it come? What other hypothesis
is possible? It's not conceivable, thinkable even at all, that matter
is eternal. Why, eternity, backwards or forwards, is unthinkable."
"Exactly. Yet you ascribe this unthinkable attribute to God."
Paul knit his brows. "One must," he objected.
"No," said Manning, sitting up sharply, "that's exactly where you're
wrong. One most emphatically must not."
Complete bewilderment settled down on Paul. He made a characteristic
little gesture at last. "I suppose I haven't the intelligence
necessary to follow you," he said almost bitterly.
"Paul," said Manning, "you have, that's the rub. More, I shouldn't be
in the least surprised if you did. You've been God-ridden all your
life, obsessed, bound, but you've broken steadily away from the chains.
It seems inevitable to me that sooner or later you will break with this
also. If I've said nothing much so far, it's because, in a way, I'm
not interested. I like you too much to want to see you rot up your
life with Roman Catholicism or any arrant nonsense of that sort, but
I've always thought you had better keep your God till--till----" He
hesitated. Then: "Possibly till the right person came along to deliver
you."
"You mean your cousin, I suppose," Paul said slowly.
"Indeed I do not," replied Manning quickly. "I had no idea you two
would seriously broach the subject. But it is interesting that it has
come that way. You're in good hands, though Ursula keeps more of the
cargo than I can carry."
"Precious little, I should think," retorted Paul.
"Well, you can discuss that with her. As for myself----"
"Yes, then, as for yourself."
"You honestly want to know?"
"I do."
"Sit down then. Don't prowl about. I've got to be steadily serious
and profound for at least ten minutes, and I need help."
Paul perceived a hassock at his feet and dropped on to it. "Carry on,"
he said, smiling a little as the other had meant him to do.
But Manning was in no hurry to begin. Before he began to speak,
Timothy came past the window, saw the two sitting silently, and went on
again, shaking his head and muttering to himself. And when Manning did
begin to speak, he was abrupt, and there was a hard note in his voice.
"Look here, Paul," he said, "the root of the matter is just this: God
is a guess in the dark. You are driven back and back and back, as you
say, till you can't go further, but then you begin to invent
meaningless words to cover your inadequacy. You talk about infinite
and eternal and almighty, words which are no more than scraps of
mathematical logic. The mind knows that it's beaten, that for some odd
reason it cannot travel back beyond certain bounds. It's like space:
you cannot conceive of something that ends, without your demanding what
comes next. Something, you say, must come next, and next, and next.
And there can't be a last; and yet there must be a last, an end..."
He stopped, as if he was trying once more himself to beat back against
the reeling thought. Paul remained immovable.
"Well, now, the mind hates a vacuum. It must round off things. Thus,
then, at that extreme limit of comprehension, when no further logical
sequence is possible, it gets out of the difficulty by creating a
conception upon which it can rest. Thought demands a beginning, an
end, a supreme power, a reason, and the imagination of man, when his
mind can no more, simply jumps in the dark. 'All right,' it says,
'there is One Who is Eternal, Almighty, Infinite--God.' A guess in the
dark, you see."
Paul stared into that shifting black abyss. The horror of it rose into
his eyes. Waves and seas, inexorable, heartless, rolled in upon him,
and he felt himself sinking, sinking. The sensation was almost
physical, and he had literally to moisten his lips to speak. "We have
Christ," he said. "He was not in the dark. He knew."
Manning shrugged his shoulders at that, and said nothing.
"Arnold," cried Paul again, "He knew!"
Manning got up. "Look here, Paul," he said, "we've worked over that
ground. Christianity is a matter of evidence. God Almighty, you know
something of it! 'By what authority?'" He relit his pipe and tossed
the match through the window.
Paul turned the question over in his mind. Of course, that was the
question. He saw it, like a flaming note of interrogation, burning in
upon him. That unanswerable question: "By what authority?" Father
Vassall----
His friend interrupted him.
"And," Arnold burst out, "ultimately, that is evidence we can test for
ourselves. What did Christ say of God? Take one thing: that He was a
Father, who heard and answered and cared for His creatures, for the
least of them. Well, does He--I ask you, does He? Come, now, be
honest. You know He doesn't. There is not a flicker of evidence in
the whole vast universe that God hears or answers or cares. There are
laws, great driving laws, that's all. Shove your finger in and you'll
get hurt; jump right in and you'll be killed. Inevitably. Always.
Screaming to God won't save you. Some bloody war's on, and a woman
implores God to save her lover. Well, does He? If He turn a single
bullet aside, He must disarrange the whole cosmic law. _Does He_? I
ask you--does He?"
Paul hid his face. He saw the past three years white as an open road
before him.... "Does He?"
But Manning did not seem to notice. "There's no _fatherly_ control,
that's the point. Even religion squirms before the obviousness of
that, and invents excuses. God maketh His rain to fall on the just and
on the unjust. Pish, He does no such thing. He has nothing to do with
the fall of rain, or He abdicated His power before the dawn of history."
"But Somebody _must_," cried Paul.
Manning dropped back into his chair. "Stop," he cried. "If we are to
go on talking you must not say that. You surrender to the savage when
you say that. He, poor devil, sees the lightning hit his hut:
'Somebody must be angry,' he says. Experience comes along and shows
even unscientific minds the irrefragable laws of thunderstorms, and
your poor fellow bleats: 'Then somebody must have caused them.'
Science comes along and demonstrates without a doubt the unity of
matter and the existence of the electron, and the dear Christian folds
his hands: 'But God is the First Cause, the Creator.' Guesses, all of
them. Guess if you want to, Kestern, but not to me. I won't. That's
flat."
Paul could stand it no more. He jumped up and paced restlessly about.
"I see what you mean," he cried.... "Oh, and I see what she meant,
too.... It was beautiful, beautiful, but a marble statue after all;
and it's the end of the day; and it's fallen--fallen.... Well, the
traveller has fallen too.... No wonder.... Oh, no wonder...."
Manning smoked steadily. He had been unusually vehement, and was a
trifle ashamed of himself. "I say, Paul," he said at last, "pull
yourself together. You're not a fool."
Paul stopped in his walk and stood regarding him. But he did not make
an answer to that. "If you don't guess, what happens then?"
Manning smiled languidly. "Well, you don't guess, that's all. It's
quite simple. Perhaps there is a god; perhaps He is all that is said
about Him. Perhaps.... Only we are reasonable men and we have to go
upon facts, and the facts are that there is no trace of Him."
"Unless very existence is a sign--the fact that things are," said Paul,
catching at a straw.
"Oh, very well, have it if you will. But of what or of whom is
existence a sign? I know it's sentimental twaddle to talk of the
cruelty and so on of Nature, and I won't. But you know and I know
there are laws, and what sort of laws? To what sort of mind can you
argue from Nature's laws? Think."
Paul thought. He thought of the regularity and beauty of ice-crystals
which no one can see without a microscope. Why always regular? Why
beautiful? He thought of the evolution and the extinction of the
dinosaur, the pterodactyl and the rest. Why? Necessary? Useful?
"Did the hand, then, of the Potter shake?" He thought of the laws that
calmly allow men and women to bring forth congenital idiots or children
loathsomely diseased in body or in soul. Laws! He flamed suddenly
with rage. "The mind of a devil!" he cried.
"Rubbish," retorted Manning. "Good heavens, Paul, pull yourself
together! But there, I suppose it takes time."
"An idiot, then."
"Oh, chuck it. I've some work to do. Go and read Tennyson."
"Well, what other sort of personality could it be?"
"You dear old ass, there's NO personality in it at all. That's the
whole argument. You will _guess_. Talk about the high hills! You go
skipping on from point to point--in imagination. Existence exists so
far as we can tell. Relatively to us it exists, anyway. But that is
the end of the argument. You can go no further. Nothing imaginable
can have created it--nothing--nothing." And forgetting Tennyson, he
pushed his arm through Paul's and led him out into the garden.
The sweet warm sun was releasing a thousand scents. Paul drew trailing
fingers through a spiky host of lavender. Butterflies fluttered their
apparently aimless dance over the beds, and bees, more obviously
purposeful, dived into flowerets. Even the ancient flags on which they
stood were cracked and broken by the impetuous thrust of tiny tendrils
one could destroy with a pinch.
Arnold Manning took up his parable. "'Consider the lilies,'" he
quoted. "Christ took a far step forward, anyway, Paul. The savage
only saw horror, and made his grinning abomination as an image of God.
The Jew saw, for some reason, the beauty of law and unity, and Elijah
mocked the poor leaping priests of Baal and cried out on Jehovah.
Christ saw beauty and tenderness, and invested His God with a still
higher personality. 'Ye know not the Father,' He said. And we, we
poor moderns, we see it all, Paul, and we see that all--all--those
conceptions were just shadows of ourselves."
Paul was gazing up towards the Downs with a far-away look in his eyes.
Little fleecy floating clouds were racing shadows of themselves across
the rich green turf. "I see," he said sadly.
They strolled up and down. "Go and write a poem about this," said
Manning with unusual gentleness. "That will buck you up."
Paul slowly shook his head.
(4)
It would be foolish to pretend that a couple of conversations shattered
the faith of years, and yet, in life, it often seems so. Under the
surface, the insidious work goes on, and perhaps there is never a
crisis for which there has not been preparation. So it was with Paul.
The ground had been steadily slipping from beneath his feet. Upon a
proffered rock, for good or ill, he had not climbed. Now, with all the
thunder and confusion of a cataclysm, the elaborate structure fell.
Manning's cool challenge, as much or more than his logic, had brought
about the ruin. Does God hear? he had asked, and deliberately awaited
the answer. Once Paul would have been as swift and as assured in his
reply. In Lambeth Court, on Parker's Piece, even at Port o' Man, he
would instantly have answered yes. But those days had gone. He fought
the conclusion, wrestled with it, even still prayed earnestly against
it, but could not escape the only possible deduction, as it seemed to
him. There had been no answer at all, absolutely and literally none;
or else, as Father Vassall would have it, he had been heard and led,
led deliberately and as he could bear it, to the threshold of the
Catholic Church. But his father, than whom none prayed more earnestly,
said that that was the devil, and the Bishop of Mozambique that there
the angels of God had been set about him for deliverance. Which was
right? He had been tossed like a shuttlecock among them.
Out of that dilemma, Tressor's quiet reasoned judgment had opened up a
way of escape. Fordham Manor had seemed so plainly the best and wisest
refuge. His father, again, had approved. Besides, if he could write
verse, that was a gift of God given him for improvement. And it was
not that he did not pray even now, and read the Bible, too, as he had
been taught. Only the Bible pointed, if anywhere, where they who
advised him most to read it would not admit there was any conceivable
possibility of going.
No, the arches of the years had led Paul irresistibly on. One by one,
soaring unseen before him, they had closed down at the end of each span
an appreciable march nearer to the brink of the precipice. He stood
there now, peering into its depths, discerning no path at all,
suspecting that the plunge into the abyss was only a matter of weeks,
or days. Does God hear? demanded Manning, and Paul had no answer but
the echo of Job's old cry: "Oh that I knew where I might find Him!"
Small wonder that he could not write poetry. Poetry! There was no
meaning in life if God were not--no reasonable end, no conceivable
beginning, nothing worth while. Arnold might grub about with his
science; Paul sought the spirit of things. And when he turned to
Tressor, the don utterly failed him.
It was odd, Paul thought, how entirely he failed him. Paul was coming
daily to love more and more this kindly pleasant man, but he was
beginning to see joints in his harness. The three of them would talk
of an evening, for Paul could not do otherwise, and he would drag a
somewhat unwilling Manning into it; but Tressor answered the younger
man not at all. He clung to a refuge that was not yet, at any rate,
storm-proof for Paul. Logic, said Tressor, failed at a point. The
heart of man universally had need of God, and it would not crave if
there was nothing to crave for. Tressor relied on intuition and
instinct. Instinct and intuition, said Manning, were the result of
training and environment. Psychology could dissect and label both,
almost as easily as physiology the bones and muscles of a man. There
was mystery before and behind, said Tressor, but God was fatherly, and
in the end the weary soul would fall back upon His heart and rest.
"Sir," Manning cried one evening, goaded for once out of his habitual
calm, "if your principles had been applied in science, man would be
still in the Stone Age!"
Tressor had flicked an eyelid and looked hurt. He had shortly gone off
to his study, and Manning had as shortly gone after him to apologise.
He had returned a little flushed. "He's a jolly good chap," he said to
Paul. "It's beastly of me to hurt his feelings."
Feelings! As if, Paul thought, feelings mattered. He walked
bareheaded in the avenue and stood on the edge of the sleeping lake,
and he cried out of the depths of his tortured soul to God. One
syllable of an answer, one solitary sign out of the still night, one
resolute conviction even, if God preferred that secret way, among the
changing shifting doubts that racked his soul, and he would be ready to
drink any kind of cup and be baptized with any baptism.
(5)
Tacked on to the very house, was a peculiar feature of the place. The
parish church was also the private chapel. The parish had dwindled all
but to the inhabitants of the park and grounds, and one clergyman
served Fordham and held as well the living of the considerable village
that lay beyond; but, occasionally, once a month for each service,
Communion was celebrated, Evensong sung, so near to them that it was
difficult even for unsympathetic guests not to go. Besides, Tressor
liked one to go, and that was enough for Manning and Paul.
The last Sunday in the month, then, Paul went to Evensong. All the
servants were there: dear old Mrs. Bird in a bonnet that tinkled with
jet, with service-books the treasured gifts of her master; Timothy, for
the most part crouched in his pew, expressionless; Rider, precise and
understanding; the maids, strange in Sunday outdoor garments. The
three friends occupied a pew discreetly not in the front, flatteringly
not too far behind. And Mr. Prideaux took the service and preached.
There had, it appeared, but lately been a serious controversy in the
Church. A dean had preached at Westminster on the earlier chapters of
Genesis, had depreciated their historic value, and had welcomed the
teachings of Professor Darwin. A bishop had retorted in the
_Guardian_, and Catholic-minded clergy taken the matter up in the
_Church Times_. The _Record_ had said that it had long told the public
that this would be the result of ... And so on.
Mr. Prideaux, an able, energetic, zealous man, preached upon the
subject. He believed in dealing with subjects of current interest,
besides (though he did not say so), unless you are very High Church,
the month of August is singularly desert in regard to festivals. He
may also have thought that here his small select congregation did at
any rate contain a proportion of listeners who would be more interested
in such matters than the average villager. And he was quite right in a
sense.
Only the Vicar could not know that there was a veritable gulf fixed
between his comfortable reasoned theology and the devastating vivid
modernism of either Manning or Paul. The priest said that, "of
course," Darwinism was not proved; an increasing host of scientists
disagreed with it. Besides, Darwin had never taught Darwinism. Again,
if he had, there was nothing inherently hostile to the true teachings
of the Church in the theory of evolution. There was nothing of
revelation as to the precise point at which the ape-man became the
man-ape with a soul. And it was only those who had forgotten the true
relation of Church and Bible who found any difficulty in Genesis. The
devout churchman only saw in these inspired fragments of ancient legend
illustrations of the eternal groping of the soul of man after truth,
and, he might say, an unique witness to the guiding hand of God....
Mr. Prideaux came to supper afterwards, and played a couple of rubbers
of bridge. He was genial, and hoped, when he learned of Paul's taking
up of residence at Fordham, that Paul would come to see him. He was a
bachelor, and it would be delightful if they could see a good deal of
each other.
Paul went up slowly to his room at last. He opened the window and
looked out towards the avenue and the lake. The trees stretched grey
and ghostly in a dim misty starlight, but they were not friendly or
inviting to-night. Something had gone from the face of earth and sky.
Darwin, evolution, science, ape-men, the interpretations of texts--what
jargon! Where was God now, and why would He not speak? What else
mattered? He was silent; He had been eternally silent it seemed; it
was but the promptings of their own imagination which men had taken for
His voice.
No, he could not go and write poetry any more.