URSULA
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him,
unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority
of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the authoritative
voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a
man. It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard the babble and
chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk
straight before us by what light we have. They may be right; but so,
before heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that
knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a
man's better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how
am I to look for loyalty to others? ...
Although all the world ranged themselves in one line to tell "This is
wrong," be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador of
God--throw down the glove and answer "This is right." Do you think you
are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in some dim way, like a child who
delivers a message not fully understood, you are opening wider the
straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for some truer and more
spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your own
judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your body;
perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the guilt of false
witness against humanity and the little ones unborn. It is good, I
believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect oneself and
utter the voice of God.--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
You see deeper? Thus saw he,
And by the light he saw, must walk: how else
Was he to do his part?
ROBERT BROWNING: _Saviour of Society_.
(1)
The day had come at last, and had all but ended. The busy writing,
that had been but an interlude, as it seemed afterwards, to the work of
curtailing, altering, lengthening and finally staging the play; the
alternating moods of despair and hope; the weeks of rehearsals; the
immediate days before the performance, spent in town, half lived at the
theatre, spent in a new bewildering atmosphere of critical interested
faces, critical indifferent faces, toadying sycophant faces, stupid
careless faces; all these were over. Arnold and Ursula had stood by
him all the time, Arnold giving him sanctuary in his rooms, Ursula
ready for his moods, the clearing-house of his thoughts and emotions.
Paul had grown ever more clearly aware what good friends these were,
and now, for the first night, they two and Tressor had been with him in
the box.
He was very tired; that seemed to stand out more clearly than anything
else. He was utterly tired of his own work, and utterly tired of the
whole dreary business of staging. He had seen the curtain go up
chiefly with a kind of dull wonder that anyone should be there to watch
the fantastically familiar and now boring thing. He had looked down
with the rest, across the footlights, into that Eastern street where
passers by came and went, and mules and asses, where a radiant sun
shone blindingly, where tall white houses and the gaudy booths of
merchants filled the scene; but he had a sudden odd sense of
Chanctonbury and dark pines and the cool mellow wind, and a feeling
that the beggar-man had no place there. Yet the beggar-man was duly at
his corner crouching in the dust, whining, shrinking from the
Pharisee's robe, the merchant's stick. Paul found himself staring with
aroused interest--his blind beggar-man! And then there had been that
confused murmur off the stage; the sudden emptying of the street; that
cry of the Son of David, startlingly clear, that had fetched the
beggar-man to his feet and drawn him groping off, leaving the deserted
stalls, the glaring dust and a tethered beast or two for the audience
to study the while the noise without died down, and leaped again into a
sudden shout as the miracle was accomplished. That had been his idea,
his only, and his the new striding in of that alert figure, thronged,
jostled, questioned, who made his resolute revolutionary way back to
his old seat for his bowl and his stool ere he marched off home--seeing.
With the fall of the curtain, an eager manager had pushed his way in.
"Capital, capital, Mr. Kestern. It's going like a bell. Thoroughwood
is here, and he's very impressed, very impressed indeed. I was not
sure of him, you know, but if he says the right thing, the play's made.
I congratulate you, Mr. Kestern, I do indeed."
Paul had stared at him. Then he bowed and murmured a conventional
reply, and sat down heavily by Ursula. She had put her hand on his arm
and smiled. "That's all right," she said. "Don't mind him. People
will see the right thing, if he doesn't."
"Will they?" he had questioned.
"Boy," she said, "I've never had a doubt. There's no denying sight."
And so it had been. The thing was sight. Even a first-night London
theatre audience, attracted by the advertisement of an unusual thing,
had seen that. The play as a play was good, but the play as a parable
was something more. The clay had touched more eyes than those of the
blind beggar that night. When the last curtain fell, it had fallen on
a silent house. The weaving of the spell had been complete. Art,
poetry, drama and successful staging, all had been there, but the
spirit of something more had stolen into the place. Several thousand
men and women had looked on truth in its beauty, stripped of the shams
and conventionalities of orthodox religion, and the utter loveliness of
it had gone straight to their hearts.
Of course, the applause had come, had grown, had begun as a breath of
relief and had risen to a crescendo of tumult. People had invaded the
box. The manager had gestured towards a sea of upturned faces, looking
their way. Paul had gone behind, shaken hands with a sudden grateful
eagerness with the men and women who had played in his success, and
appeared for a moment before the curtain. He had said something, and
bowed, and felt suddenly utterly carried away, so that he had waved his
hand boyishly and had, apparently, done just the right thing, whatever
that was. At present he had no recollection. But even Ursula had been
smiling when he rejoined them.
"Come on," cried Arnold, "the taxi's waiting and we'll get out of this."
"Right," said Paul. "Which way? ... What is it? Lend me a pencil,
will you? There, will that do?"
Arnold thrust his arm into his. "Look here," he said, "for heaven's
sake don't start signing programmes now. On you go, Ursula. We'll
follow."
The porter in his little box smiled at him. The manager appeared again
and smiled at him. ("Oh, I say, don't go. Do stay for supper...."
"Thanks awfully, but I've got a show fixed up, I fear. Another
night....") A little crowd at the door smiled at him and thrust
forward. A policeman even smiled at him, and thrust back. Ursula got
in; Paul was vividly aware of the dark night, a muddy street, a yellow
flare of light over the way, the tail of a poster: "----AR-MAN," and
the gleam of the girl's white opera-cloak. Then he too was in, in the
dark confined little space, sitting down by her, fumbling to move her
wraps a little, stowing his legs away to make room for Arnold. And
then Arnold, lingering momentarily to bid the driver make all speed,
was in too, and the door banged, and the first performance was over.
"Thank God," said Arnold. "Give me a cigarette, somebody."
"Did you see Muriel?" asked Ursula. "She was in front. She waved to
me. I took it to mean that she'd go on."
"Where's Tressor?" demanded Paul.
Arnold laughed. "Hear that, Ursula? Still, I suppose it's excusable.
Personally I should have been drunk before this. You're really a
marvel, Paul."
"What in the world are you talking about? Ursula, do explain."
Her eyes danced at him. "Oh, it's nothing," she said. "We're all of
us too excited to talk sense. Paul, isn't it absolutely priceless?"
"I can't tell you what I feel," said Paul.
"Tressor shook hands with you, and said good-night and that he'd clear
off, and you were to let him know when you were going down to Fordham,"
explained Arnold belatedly.
"Oh, yes, so he did. I say, Mortimer did 'Herod' well, didn't he? And
d'you know, that finish is good, isn't it? It was wonderful to-night.
In the end, it seemed to me that I hadn't written it, hadn't even seen
it before."
"Magic of an excited house," commented Arnold. "Well, you ought to be
a happy man. You're a lucky one, anyway."
"I know. I am. I am both. And I'm awfully grateful to you two."
Arnold put his head out of the window. "Here we are," he cried, half
in and half out of the taxi. "We've done nothing."
Paul turned suddenly to the girl. "You did everything," he said, with
vivid realisation.
It had been Ursula's wish to give Paul a triumphant supper at her flat
the night of his success. It was not to be a big affair, the three of
them and Muriel Lister only, and Paul had eagerly assented, realising a
little how intolerable any other programme would be. So now Ursula
went ahead upstairs, and when Paul and his friend came in, was drawing
her gloves off before the fire and chatting with her friend. "Here he
is," she cried. "Now Muriel."
Muriel Lister took an eager pace forward and held out her hand. "Mr.
Kestern," she said, "I don't know how to congratulate you. You've done
far more than devise a successful play, far more than write some
wonderful poetry. You've preached a new religion, do you know that?
You're rightly called Paul; you're an apostle."
Paul laughed. "That's the one role I've sought all my days," he said,
"but I thought I should never play it."
"Well, you have. All London will know it to-morrow. You've said the
thing the churches are afraid to say. You've said what we've been
trying to preach for years. And what's more, you've said it in such a
way that people will listen and see. Oh, I do congratulate you!"
"My dear Muriel," said Arnold, "you're intolerable. A parson is bad
enough, but a woman parson is worse. Whatever you girls may feel, I'm
dying for eats and drinks, and I bet the successful author is too,
only, probably, he's too shy to say so. Let's eat first and talk it
over afterwards."
Muriel chuckled and turned to Ursula. "What a pig he is," she cried,
"but perhaps he's right. We're all four too exalted for life at
present. Let's eat, and we shall grow sane. It's a parable. Come on,
my dear; shall I dole out chicken?"
They gathered round the table in a corner of the big studio and fell
to, talking reminiscently and mostly all at once the while. Finally
Paul pushed his chair back a little and laughed aloud.
"What is it now?" mumbled Arnold, still busy.
"Oh," cried Paul, "I can't believe it, you know, I can't believe it!
We four, here, and I the author of a play that--that (I know it's
conceited, but I can't help it) that perhaps half London will be
talking about in a week!"
His little gesture took them all in: Arnold opposite, consuming trifle;
Ursula on his left, tall, dark, leaning back in her chair, playing with
a spoon, smiling; Muriel on his right, keen-faced, upright, fair; the
bare table littered with pleasant things of glass and silver;
dishes--the white débris of chicken, the shattered orange of a jelly;
the shadowed spaces of the studio about them; the blue curtains; the
faded Persian rug; easel; worn, easy chairs; model's throne; a shelf in
the corner gleaming with the hammered copper of Ursula's collection of
antique Arab coffee-pots and bowls; a standard lamp shaded with blue
and old gold; a bookcase with its owner's carefully selected volumes,
among which were a couple now bearing his name. And the three looked
at him and read his face for a second or two in silence. They all knew
what he meant. It was rather wonderful when one considered the Paul
Kestern of Lambeth Court.
Muriel Lister broke the little silence. "It's like you not to believe
it yet," she said.
Paul studied her and grew puzzled. "Why do you say that?" he asked.
She threw a glance at Ursula. The two were great friends and confided
in each other. Then she laughed. "You're still a bit blind, you
know," she retorted.
"Why?" queried Paul. "I don't see."
"Exactly," nodded the other. "But come on, let's talk."
Paul chose the big footstool, which, in the studio, had come to be
regarded as his special right. Arnold sprawled on a couch. Muriel
Lister sat on a chair by Paul. Ursula had a pile of cushions in the
corner between Arnold and the fire, and said little as was her wont.
"You've got to preach that new religion of yours," went on Muriel when
they were settled. "I hope you realise that."
Paul frowned. He liked Miss Lister, but not especially her rather
parsonic manner. "I don't know that I can," he said.
"You must. Why shouldn't you?"
"I'm not sure that I see it like that myself yet."
"Surely you do. Don't you see it's just what the world is waiting for?
Men and women have outgrown that old pious talk of a god that is no
more than a glorified human being, and especially they've outgrown all
those grave-clothes the Greek philosophers and Eastern gnostics wound
about the figure of the prophet of Nazareth in order to present to the
world a conception, a Jesus of the Nicene Creed. But somehow there was
no way out. We all speculated as to the personality of God, except a
few, who were agnostics, but you get nowhere with negations."
"I know," said Paul gravely. "That God of theirs is asleep. The
oracle is silent. I know."
"Yes, and now by some stroke of genius you've put your finger on the
thing that matters. Sight. The beauty of the world. 'He's good,
omnipotent, a father'--that's what the theologians have said. 'It's
beautiful,' say you, and that's enough."
"The gospel of sheer slothful material sentimentalism," put in Manning
lazily.
She flashed on him. "Rubbish," she cried. "That's not the gospel of
the Beggar-Man, is it, Mr. Kestern?"
"No," said Paul, "no, no, no; it's not that."
"No, the glory of this is that it is positive. It strides forward. It
builds; it----"
"It builds what? Let's be practical. That sort of talk, up to the
present anyway, has mostly built Agapemones."
Muriel Lister frowned. "No," she said. "The Temple of Common Things."
Arnold sucked his pipe. "I fear I can't follow so quickly," he
retorted cynically.
"You wouldn't. But, don't you see? This creed doesn't seek an
æsthetic hybrid sensual beauty. When the beggar-man had his eyes
opened, what was it seemed beautiful to him? Eh, what?"
Paul smiled. "His three-legged stool," he said, "and his little hovel."
"Exactly. Clay. The beauty of gold-brown earth." And Miss Lister
relapsed into silence.
"I still don't see the gospel," said Arnold.
"You're born blind, then," retorted the girl.
"Well," returned Arnold, "be a little more explicit. Get on with it."
"A gospel that origins and ends don't matter and that we ought to be
influenced by them not at all; that God is veiled, but the veil is
good; that we are kin to all that is; that barriers are of our own
making; that the urge of life within us is our guide; and that
moralities and revelations and false spiritualities have themselves
made sin. And," she added slowly, "that the true spiritual life
consists in the pursuit of learning, experience and beauty, according
to vocation, without fear and for themselves alone."
"Fear?" queried Arnold.
"Yes, without fear. The gospel of the Beggar-Man banishes fear. He
knows right values. He knows he cannot be robbed of anything that
matters. He fears no man; all men are brothers; all are blind beggars
with potential sight; he has nothing but pity for your aristocrat, your
millionaire."
"'News from Nowhere'," chuckled Arnold.
"True--with the path blazoned to it," she exclaimed.
"It appears to be you and not Paul who is preaching anyway," put in
Ursula, staring into the fire.
"He will live it, and he will sing it--and you will paint it," cried
Muriel.
"Which reminds me," said Paul gravely, "that I've to go down to Claxted
to-morrow."
"Claxted?"
"Yes, to my people. I've utterly neglected them lately. They don't
even know I've written a play."
"They will to-morrow," said Arnold, "if they read the newspapers."
"Yes," Paul replied slowly, "I think they will." And was suddenly
silent, with a silence that the little company knew to be significant.
The firelight danced on his face. Ursula turned her head slowly and
studied him.
(2)
Paul went back with Arnold, and next morning the two friends packed up
and parted, Arnold going to Cambridge, Paul to Claxted. The latter was
to spend some weeks with his people and was restless over the prospect.
He did not say much, however; Arnold was almost incapable of
understanding just what Claxted meant. He knew that the Kesterns were
"old-fashioned" and "strait-laced"; what he could not know was the
sincerity, the earnestness on the one hand, and the fierce fanaticism
on the other, of their faith. But Paul knew, or thought so. Perhaps
he should have realised even more than he did, but the years of partial
separation and the mellow influence of Fordham had dulled his memory to
some extent.
He had hardly left Claxted station, however, before he got an inkling
of what was to be. In Edward Street he ran into Miss Bishop. Now Miss
Bishop was Miss Bishop, a unique product of divine providence, but
beneath all her angularity and sectarianism ran a kindly current which
had hitherto embraced Paul. He therefore smiled at seeing her, shifted
a suitcase to his left hand and held out his right. "Why, Miss
Bishop," he said, "how do you do?"
The woman's lips compressed and her eyes flashed. "You can be as
cheerful as that, can you?" she said. "Do you realise the evil you
have done? But I suppose you don't. May God open your eyes in time,
that is all I have to say. Good-day." And she passed on, without
taking his hand.
Paul's astonishment and dismay were almost ludicrous. A passing small
boy with a street urchin's keen perception, perceived vaguely that he
had hit on a lucky incident. His arrested whistle and wide grin
recalled Paul to his senses.
"Fair cop, mister?" queried the small boy, hopefully.
Paul ignored him, caught a glimmer of the humour of the situation,
changed his grip on his suitcase again, and passed on. But as he went,
he turned her words over in his mind. Increasingly he could see no
sense in them.
Taking the cinder-path that skirts the railway, the kindly touch of
familiar things which have ceased to have power to perplex or terrify
came to his aid. It was along this path that he had gone to the
Mission Hall Sunday by Sunday, the waters of his soul troubled with the
frenzy of apostleship, but it was along this path that he had returned
often and again arm in arm with a tender kindly Mr. Kestern who had
shared all his son's enthusiasms and sympathised in his distresses.
Here, as a schoolboy, he had counted trains or trudged eagerly home
from school for a Saturday afternoon excursion. Here, more adult, he
had been first conscious of sex stimulus (though then and now he did
not so label it) in the company of Madeline and Edith. Edith! Yes, it
was of Edith that he thought mostly as he walked home. She had been
reserved and sorrowful on his going to Fordham, had replied more and
more tardily to letters, had finally ceased to write at all. But he
too had ceased. Anyone as sensitive as Paul to surroundings would have
felt an incongruity between Edith Thornton and Fordham Manor, and then,
too, he had been going through an emotional stress big enough to
dominate his mind. But now, back here in the home atmosphere, he
thought very warmly of her. He longed for her simplicity, her naïve
faith. It did not seem to him a barrier between them. After all, with
the sight of the Beggar-Man, it was easy to enfold her in tenderness
and understanding.
Thus, then, he came at last to his father's door, waited impatiently
for the maid to open it, dropped his bag in the little hall, and turned
impulsively to the figure of Mr. Kestern irresolute in the study door.
"Dad," he cried, "it is good to see you again! How are you? How's
mother?"
"Oh, Paul!"
The love, the sorrow, the yearning of Mrs. Kestern's cry stabbed him
suddenly and unexpectedly to the heart. She had rushed past her
husband and flung her arms about his neck. Emotion welling up in him,
he bent his head to kiss her, and felt the hot tears on her cheek.
"Oh, my boy, my boy.... You've come at last, Paul. Oh, my son, you'll
never doubt your mother's love for you, will you? Kiss your father,
Paul. I cannot lose either of my men."
Paul was already bewildered. The pathos of her grip on his arm, and
the significance of her eagerness to see the greeting between him and
his father, were not lost upon him. His mother clinging to him, he
turned to his father, who had not stirred.
"Of course I've come, mother darling," he said. "But I've been
terribly busy, you know. And it's awfully jolly seeing you and daddy
again. (He used the childish word unconsciously.) How are you,
father?"
The man moved a little and brushed his son's lips. Paul perceived in a
moment that he had aged. Fear slipped suddenly into his mind. He
peered a little to see his father's eyes, and then, with something like
a catch in his heart, and with a deliberate blindness, pushed them
before him into the study. "Oh, it is jolly to be back," he cried
again, but with simulated enthusiasm now, refusing to admit what he had
seen, stifling his growing apprehension.
Mr. Kestern seated himself in his revolving chair in front of the
bureau. His Bible lay open upon it. Paul caught a glimpse of the
underlinings, the "railway-lines," the added red and black of the
almost microscopic notes in the neat handwriting he knew so well. He
looked swiftly round. The case of stuffed birds, the books, the framed
portraits, a print of John G. Paton, missionary in the New
Hebrides--nothing had changed. His eye fell on a text, the letters of
which had been cut out separately with a fretsaw, hung on an invisible
thread, and draped on the wall above the bureau. "Jesus Himself drew
near and went with them." That was new; and yet, yet, how old! The
old Claxted; the old faith; the old obstinate unchanging evangelicalism
that was already a lifetime old to him.
"How are all your new friends?" asked his father.
The hidden note of bitterness stung Paul for the first time to
something like anger. He choked it down, however. "Very well indeed,
thanks," he said evenly. "I had supper with them last night, and saw
Manning off to Cambridge this morning."
"The very newspaper told us that much," said Mr. Kestern, with a
gesture towards the _Morning Post_ that lay folded on a side-table.
"After the theatre, I understand."
The harshness of the man's voice was too obvious to allow of any
further equivocation. Paul moved over to the fireplace, and his
mother, seated in an arm-chair, held out a hand appealingly to him.
"Paul, dear," she entreated, "don't anger your father. You know what
he feels about the theatre."
"But I've said nothing, mother," cried Paul miserably.
"Nothing!" exclaimed Mr. Kestern, wheeling round on him, no longer able
to restrain himself, "nothing! Do you think it is nothing that my boy
should write a play? My son, photographed with a stage-manager,
appearing--what is your word?--'called' before the curtain! Oh, God,
what have I done that my son should come to this!"
"Father, father, don't!" cried Mrs. Kestern. "Of course Paul must take
his own place----"
"Mother, you don't know what you say. His own place! But that is the
son we gave to God, that is the son of our hopes and prayers, that is
the boy for whom we contrived and saved that he might go to college,
and now--now, he writes plays! The bitterness is more than I can bear.
I have lost my son."
The grim comedy of it was lost on the three of them. Mrs. Kestern
burst into tears. "Father, dear," she sobbed, "don't say such terrible
things. Oh, I can't bear it!"
Something awoke and flared up in Paul. The thing had come so quickly,
with such an appearance of inevitability that he had been taken wholly
unawares. He had hoped for a reasonable talk about the theatre, and at
least a comfortable agreement to differ. But he had been conscious
during the last few minutes of utter helplessness before this
incredible attitude, and now the cruel absurdity of it all flamed
before him.
"Father," he burst out, "you've no right to speak so. You've no right
to judge the theatre as you do. You know nothing about it. You've not
seen my play."
"I haven't, thank God, I haven't. But I've read about it. I've read
about it with utter shame and dismay. Yet I can't, I won't at least,
believe all that the paper hints at. Is it true that you have parodied
the Gospel?"
"Parodied?" Paul was utterly bewildered again.
"Yes, parodied. I gather you have taken a story that you learned as a
boy at your mother's knee, upon which I have even heard you preach, and
have reset it, rewritten it, pushing the Master into the background,
denying, so far as I can see, the Son of God."
"Father----" sobbed Mrs. Kestern.
"Mother, that will do. Paul and I must thrash this thing out. Tell
me, Paul, once and for all, what is Jesus Christ now to you?"
Paul stared at him. Mr. Kestern, flushed, vehement, terrible, was the
father of the old Catholic controversial days, the father from whom he
was divided by an impassable gulf. What could he say? How could he
explain? He made an involuntary hopeless gesture that was immediately
misunderstood, and turned back to the fireplace.
"Ah," cried Mr. Kestern, "you will not answer. This is what your
Catholic friends have done for you! I told you so, but you would never
believe me. Rome was so reasonable and fair, wasn't it?--an angel of
light. Father Vassall believed in Christ as earnestly as I did--did
you not say that? But this is the end! You deny the Master who bought
you with His own blood!"
The utter injustice of that charge broke down Paul's last reserve. He
turned swiftly back, as vehement as the other, the true son of his
father if the elder could only have seen it. "You don't know what you
say," he cried. "This is utter madness, utter childish folly. Father
Vassall has nothing whatever to do with all this. How could he? Do
you think he wanted me to go to Fordham, though you did. Why, if he
had had his way, I should be a Catholic priest by now, or well on the
way to it."
"Just so," stormed his father, "a Catholic priest indeed! Then he
would have trapped you finely. As it is, baulked in that, he will send
your soul to hell by another road!"
"Oh, I can't bear it, I can't bear it," cried Mrs. Kestern, rocking
herself to and fro.
Paul clenched his fists. "You've no right to speak so," he retorted
passionately. "How dare you insult Father Vassall in that way? Is it
like Christ to talk so? If that is all your evangelicalism can do for
you, I am well quit of it."
"So you admit you are quit of it? You turn your back on your father's
and mother's faith? You have no use for the Scripture of Truth?"
The boy might, in a saner moment, have caught the tone of invincible
bigotry that had crept into his father's words. "Of course I've use
for it," retorted Paul again, contemptuously. "Haven't I written a
play under its inspiration? But I must make my own judgment on
religion."
Mr. Kestern sobered suddenly and terribly. He spoke biting words with
slow deliberation. "You must, sir," he said, "only it is blasphemy to
speak so of inspiration. And you will be good enough to tell me what
is your judgment on the Master Who alone is served in this house."
Paul gazed at him a minute. Phrases rose to his lips. Then he
realised how useless they would be. His anger died as quickly as it
had arisen. "You would not understand," he said hopelessly.
"I know I have not the new learning of my son," retorted Mr. Kestern
bitterly, "but I think I can understand that much. Will you answer a
plain question? Are you still on the Lord's side, or not?"
"Of course he is," wept Mrs. Kestern. "Father, how can you ask?
Speak, Paul, and tell him you still love and serve the Lord Jesus?"
Mr. Kestern studied his son's face. "Speak, then," he said slowly.
Paul hesitated. Then he drew himself up. "I love and respect and
admire Jesus of Nazareth with all my heart," he said. "His teaching it
is that has opened my eyes, and his gospel of compassion and
brotherliness is as noble as any that the world has yet heard. But I
cannot call him God as you do, and as Catholics do."
The anger died in Mr. Kestern's face. The look of an old and broken
man crept into it. He turned back to his desk and picked up his Bible.
"Do you perhaps remember what this says?" he demanded. "Listen." (He
fumbled with the leaves.) "'He that confesseth not that Jesus Christ
is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is the spirit of
antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now
already is it in the world.'"
The words lingered in the little room. The three of them, each in his
or her own way, quailed before the stark decisiveness of them. Mrs.
Kestern it was who first could bear it no longer. "Father, he is your
son," she cried. "Nothing can alter that!"
Mr. Kestern was on his feet, two thousand years of Christianity
stripped from him, the spirit of the Old Testament glowing in his face.
"What saith the Scripture?" he cried. "'Cursed be he that setteth
light by his father or his mother.' 'Cursed be he that maketh the
blind to wander out of the way.' Or our Master Himself: 'He that
loveth child more than me is not worthy of me.' And you, Paul, have
done both these things. My grey hairs you would bring down in sorrow
to the grave, but that is not enough. Here, into this very parish of
which I am pastor, you have brought your devil's doctrine and broken up
one family of Christ's flock already. Shall I spare my son any more
than our brother spared his daughter? You will leave this house, and I
do not want to see your face till you come as a penitent again."
Mrs. Kestern buried her face in her hands and cowered in her chair with
an inarticulate cry of woe so bitter that both father and son shrank
before it. The clergyman stepped quickly over to her. "Mother,
mother," he cried, "the dear Lord knows. He will save the boy yet.
But how can we have such in this house?"
"My son, my son," she wailed. Then, breaking free from her husband,
"Oh, Paul, say you don't mean it! Paul, Paul, would you break your
mother's heart? Say you don't mean it, Paul, say you don't mean it!"
She flung her arms round his neck, but the boy put her away. He was
piecing this and that together, and was no more only the boy. "What do
you mean," he demanded, "when you say I have broken up a family in this
parish? What charge is that? Tell me, if you have any justice left in
you."
"You know," said his father sternly; "don't pretend you do not."
"I do not know," cried Paul passionately. "I begin to think you are
mad, all mad. My God, if this is the religion of Christ, Christ would
not know it!"
His father started, and for a moment it was almost as if the old man
would strike his son. Then, with a gesture, he strode to the door.
"Go," he said, "go. Only last month I had to comfort Mr. Thornton when
his child, Edith, left his house to become a Papist through you.
Papist or atheist, it is all one to me. I will not have such within my
house."
"Edith!" cried Paul, utterly dumbfounded.
His tone, and the use of the girl's name, braced Mrs. Kestern. "Oh,
Paul," she cried, "you knew of it, don't pretend you didn't! How you
could have acted so behind our backs I can't think. Poor, poor girl!
Oh, you had better go now. It would be better for us all. May our
Father have mercy on us, and may you be spared the agony that your
parents know."
His mother's action brought Paul to his senses. He looked from one to
the other of them in consternation. "You don't mean it," he cried,
"surely you don't mean it!"
"Don't go like that, Paul," sobbed Mrs. Kestern, breaking down again,
"I can't bear it."
Paul pulled himself together. "But, mother, father," he said, "this is
sheer madness. We are not living in the Middle Ages. This isn't
melodrama. I--I differ from you in religion, I know; I can't help it;
I must do what seems right to me. But surely, because of that----"
His father opened the study door. Broken and old, there was a certain
dignity now in his face. "Paul," he said, "we talk different tongues,
but nothing alters the fact that you have turned utterly from the
religion of your parents to serve another. 'As for me and my house, we
will serve the Lord.' You have no place here. Go now, lest we say in
our anger what ought not to be said."
Paul looked again heavily round the room. "You have said it already,"
he replied, and left the house.
(3)
Paul walked down the street like a man in a dream. Once he stopped,
turned, and walked a few paces back, telling himself that it could not
be true, that it was too theatrical to be true. But his father's face
rose before him as he went, and still more the terror of his mother's
tears. He recalled the history of a friend of his in training for the
Baptist ministry, who had decided he could not accept the doctrine of
the deity of Christ and had been cursed by his widowed mother and
turned into the street with eighteenpence in his pocket. Somehow it
had never seemed possible that it could happen to him. Yet, in the
throes of the Catholic stage of his soul's pilgrimage, it had been
plain enough that something of that sort would happen if he made his
submission to the Church. Once more, the horror of his parents' grief
as he had seen it when he knelt in Father Vassall's chapel gripped his
heart. And now, and now, suddenly, so ironically, so futilely, so
childishly, this thing had swept down upon him. He, Paul Kestern, had
been turned from his father's house. The thing was true.
Then, into the stream of his thoughts, drifted the memory of what had
been said of Edith Thornton. Of all the incredible happenings of an
incredible morning, that, perhaps, was ultimately one of the most
incredible. Edith a Catholic! He thought of her face under the
lamplight in Lambeth Court--oh, incredible! But one moment: he thought
of her prayer under the pines at Keswick, of her answer to his dilemma
after his return from Thurloe End. Gradually he began to piece
together the mosaic of her simple reasoning, her resolute faith, her
ardent love; it was exactly of such souls that Catholic saints are
made. That, then, had been the inner meaning of her sorrow over his
going to Fordham and of her silence thereafter. This resolution, this
terrible domestic retribution, had come crashing down on her head, and
she, too, had been driven out alone.
Once more the flame of anger flickered in his heart. As he thought it
over, his indignation grew. He pictured her, as he loved best to do,
in the quiet neat simplicity of that brown dress of hers, with her
clear, trustful eyes. And they had turned her out, had they, to what,
he should like to know? Good God, and this was in England to-day! He
saw Mr. Thornton, rotund, bald, very respectable, and realised that if,
at bottom, he was as bigoted a Protestant as any of them, business was
mixed up with religion. The man had never really loved his daughter,
Paul thought, he, with his commercial soul, his respectable tradesman's
boot-licking servility, his front pew in the side aisle never empty on
a Sunday. And as he thought of it all, he came to a resolution. He
gripped his stick more firmly and turned off to Edward Street.
A girl assistant came forward. Paul did not know her. Could he see
Mr. Thornton? She would enquire. What name?
"Mr. Kestern," said Paul, a little grimly.
A flutter of surprise and then of understanding crossed the girl's
face. Would he sit down. She would tell Mr. Thornton.
She disappeared behind a screen and opened a door. Paul, looking round
the suburbanly-fashionable shop, knew that she stood in front of a
solid, highly polished desk in that little inner sanctum, and wondered
if she would say more than his name. If not, it would be his father
who would be expected. The immediate appearance of Mr. Thornton round
the screen, bowing, smiling, rubbing his hands, showed him that she had
not. He walked forward. As the photographer started in surprise, he
spoke.
"How do you do, Mr. Thornton? I've come to ask if I may see Edith."
(Better to put it that way: the man would not know how much he had been
told.)
Edith's father stood and looked at him in amazement. Paul, out of the
corner of his eye, saw the interested friendly smile of the girl
behind. Possibly Mr. Thornton saw it reflected in the young man's
face, for his own flushed angrily. He stumbled for words. "You,
you----" he spluttered. "How dare you, sir?"
Paul surveyed him coolly. He was sure of his ground now. "Really, Mr.
Thornton..." he said. "Your daughter and I were very good friends in
the Mission, and I have not seen her for some time."
"Look here," burst out the man, "you may be a clergyman's son, and you
may think to come it over me, but I tell you you were responsible--I
know you were responsible. Broke her mother's 'eart, she has, and
you----"
He realised suddenly that he was in the shop. Anyone might come in.
The girl was there. He took a grip of himself and prepared for a more
cold-blooded battle. "Ah," he said conventionally, "I'm very glad
you've called. Will you please to come inside a moment."
Paul entered the lion's den.
The little man was still more reassured by the weight and prosperity of
his office furniture. He sank into his chair, and motioned Paul to a
seat. One glance to see that the door was shut behind him, and then:
"I'm _very_ glad you've called. If there was a just law in this land,
I ought to be able to prosecute you, I ought. You made my girl a
Catholic, you did,--a Papist, _my_ girl! You go to college to learn to
be a minister, and you come sneaking back pervertin' a girl like my
Edith. And where is she now, I ask you, where is she now? In a
convent, _that's_ where she is. Fair broke her mother's 'eart it has.
A convent! Going to be a nun! And what tricks they'll play on her
there, what dirty tricks them Jesuits will be up to----"
Paul cut in decisively. "Mr. Thornton," he said, "that will do. That
is utter rubbish, you know. What is more, it is beastly. I won't hear
it."
Mr. Thornton knew education and the manner of gentlemen. He had all
the Claxted respect for them. So now this peremptory young man
momentarily shut him up. "Er--er--I----" he stuttered.
Paul leaned coolly back and waited. He was desperately angry, and he
was beginning to be aware of a sense of bitter loss, but both, here,
only made him cool. And his coolness enraged the photographer even as
he stammered under his set-back. His sense of outrage, of personal
injury, came rapidly to the fore again. It grew every second, and at
last:
"Well, I've lost my girl, anyway, I have, and through you. What had
you got to do with her, anyway, that's what I want to know? Walkin'
out with her--as good as--I hear now----"
Paul flushed. There it was, the naked truth, as Alf Vintner and Maud
and half the parish probably saw it. He bit his lip. "Mr. Thornton,"
he said, "I wanted to marry your daughter."
Marry! The man gaped on him. Somehow he had not thought that. He had
never thought that Mr. Kestern's son, at Cambridge too, doing so well,
going to be a minister, had thought seriously of marrying his daughter.
Heavens, what they had missed! And this young man apparently thought
he had missed something, too. After all, then, he couldn't have
persuaded her to seek a convent. This was a new development.
"You don't say so, now, Mr. Kestern, sir," he said. "Well, Edith was a
dear good girl, the best of the lot I always said. Whatever made her
take up with that Catholikism, I can't tell. She never heard it in
this house, I know. And seeing that you were going High Church, mother
and I, we thought..."
"What happened, Mr. Thornton, can you tell me that?"
"Well, sir, she outs with it one evening, six months or so ago it was.
Says she's going to be received into the Church--those were her very
words. Going to be received into the Church! It made me very hot, Mr.
Kestern, it did. No member of our family has ever been a Catholic,
thank God, and I said as I wouldn't have a child of mine a Catholic in
a good church-going evangelical house like this. Said it out plain and
straight, I did. And she ups and walks out of the door that very
night."
"You mean you turned her out, I suppose."
"Well, sir, I was hot, I admit. She provoked me, too, knowing better'n
her father. 'If you can't go to my church, out you go,' I said. 'You
mean that, father?' she asks. 'Yes,' I said, standing on my dignity,
and she just walks off. Her mother in tears, too. 'You go to
communion with me, or you're no daughter of mine,' that was what I
said, Mr. Kestern, and your father, he supported me in it afterwards."
"And you turned her out that night, as she was?"
"As she was, she walked out, Mr. Kestern. Went straight to the
Catholic Convent, I believe. Her mother saw her there once. And where
she is now, _I_ don't know. No, I don't _know_. She was going to be a
nun, she said, and it seems, she being over-age, nobody can't stop her.
If there was a law in this so-called Christian land, Mr. Kestern----"
Paul got up. The look on his face checked the photographer. "I
understand, Mr. Thornton," he said, "despite your words. Your
Christianity was such that you drove your daughter from your house for
the sake of her new faith. I should hardly have thought it possible,
but I fear I understand only too well. And I will tell you what I
think of it, Mr. Thornton. It was a cowardly, mean, base, unchristian
thing of you to do, and that Jesus, in whose name you did it, would
never have lent his authority to any such thing. It is utterly foreign
to his gospel. As for Edith, I hope to God she knows her own mind,
that is all, and in my own sorrow, I can only find heart to be glad
that at least she is not here. Good-day." And Paul, not waiting for
the other to recover, walked out of the shop.
At the corner of Edward Street and Wellington Road, scarcely reasoning
as to what he was about to do, he hailed a cab and drove to the
convent. He had bearded the nun who opened the door and was in the
parlour waiting to see the Reverend Mother before he realised the
futility of his action. Still, he was there now, and he looked
curiously about him. It was while he waited in that parlour that he
came to a realisation of how far from the religion it represented he
had moved. Plainly furnished with a table, a few stiff chairs, a
foreign-looking so-called couch with an antimacassar, and a cheap
bookshelf with old-fashioned books in it, an oleograph of Pius IX. hung
over the mantelpiece, beaming blandly, half a crucifix behind him. A
Madonna in coloured plaster stood on a shelf, and on the mantel-piece
at one end a cast of Christ pointing to his bleeding dripping heart,
and at the other another of St. Theresa gazing seraphically upwards. A
crucifix stood between them, the Christ meeting St. Theresa's gaze with
agonised eyes, white girt about the waist with a heavy plaster
loin-cloth. The table was covered with a faded red cloth. It held an
inkstand and a blotter. In the corner a _prie-Dieu_ was tucked out of
the way.
The Reverend Mother was kind and polite. Did he come from the family?
No, and Paul hardly cared to explain. Well, of course, he could not,
in any case, see Sister Edith. Nor was she there in fact. She had
been admitted to the novitiate, and, during training, the rules were
strict. She could not promise that a letter would be given; it
depended on the letter. Paul understood that it would be read. The
sister was very happy, however, much happier than she had been on the
night she arrived alone and in tears, turned out from her father's
house....
That was all, of course. He might have known it. But one thing after
another.... Paul Kestern suddenly took stock of his own heart.
Where, indeed, was he even to sleep that night? In the street, he
turned the question over. And afterwards, what was he to do? Manning
was at Cambridge; well, Fordham.... But suddenly he hated Fordham. He
saw it, proud, aloof, and utterly failing to understand such troubles
as were his. Tressor, too, would be there, and Paul shrank from
Tressor's dignified quiet kindliness. He suddenly knew himself to be
alone. He knew himself to be beaten, bruised, lonely; yes, he, with
the morning's paper full of his triumph. Apples of Sodom.... For this
he had made the great exchange. This was what it all came to: he was
down and out and alone. Ursula?
(4)
He took train to town, engaged a room for the night at the Grosvenor as
being the nearest hotel, and took a taxi to her flat. Two at a time he
mounted the stairs; damn the lift. He knocked. "Come in," she called.
It was eight o'clock and the lights were on, of course. She was
sitting alone in an easy-chair by the fire, clad in a loose simple
dress of a rich deep orange that became her well. She was reading, and
looked up almost expectantly from her book at his knock. A little fire
leaped in the grate, and the room was still, familiar, kind. She
smiled enquiringly as she saw him. "Why, Paul," she said.
Paul moved slowly over to her, closing the door behind him. On the rug
before the fire, he came to a standstill, looking down into her
upturned face with its clear unafraid open eyes, set in its ring of
black hair, taking in her regular definite features, her white throat.
She smiled at him again as he stood there, tenderly.
"Ursula, Ursula!" he cried, took a hasty step forward, dropped on his
knees before her, and buried his face in the kindly flame of her dress.
She reached a hand out and laid it on his head, stroking his hair. For
a little neither moved. Then: "I understand, Paul," she said without
more words; "I thought it might be so. Your face told me last night."
He looked up. "You're very wonderful," he said slowly. "How could you
guess? But it's not only my people, Ursula. That, of course, was just
too terrible. Father simply drove me out. Not a word of explanation
would he allow. It happened so quickly, too; at first I hardly
understood.... But I think it was worse afterwards when I did. Edith
has gone to be a nun."
"Edith?"
"Yes." (Words came quicker now.) "Of course you don't know about her
though. I was in love with her. Ursula, she was such a dear. Somehow
or another I see now what I've lost, desolatingly. Do you know--of
course, it sounds absurd--but in my mind she is, as it were, in the
balance against the theatre. She was so different. She was so
unspoilt, so simple, so loving. Oh, she was a dear, Ursula. And she's
gone to be a nun, and it was I who made her."
"You who made her?"
"Well, I set her thinking about the Catholic Church, I suppose. Of
course I don't know in the least what brought her to it in the end, but
still I can see, somehow. She was made to be a nun."
"Then she could hardly have been made for you."
"Oh, I don't know. She was such a dear. You don't know," he cried
bitterly.
Ursula smiled. "You odd, impetuous, eager creature," she said.
"But, Ursula, I'm utterly sick and miserable to-night. I can't put it
into words properly. I see what I've lost. My people--of course,
they're ignorant, almost mad, but they've got something that I've lost.
Their faith is wonderful. Christ is so real to them. They live in an
odd world, but it isn't shallow, it isn't a sham, and our world is such
a sham, Ursula. I feel that at the theatre so much. You never know
what people really think and mean. And afterwards, in the morning
light, so to speak, it's all made-up and painted and false."
She said nothing, only shifted her eyes to the fire.
"And then there's Edith. You can't see Edith, Ursula, as I do. She
was like a flower. She was so utterly simple and childish and true.
She was just the opposite to all this. She saw through things. That's
why she's become a nun, of course; just walked straight forward into
it. And our world _never_ walks straight forward."
"Our world?"
The tone of her voice held him. She had shaded her face with her hand
now and did not look at him. "Our world, Paul?" she queried again.
"What do you mean?"
She did not at once reply. Then, suddenly, she turned and looked at
him. "What are you going to do now?" she asked.
"I don't know. There seems nothing to do."
"I thought the blind beggar saw beauty so wonderfully. Didn't it fill
his life?"
He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. The room hung very still.
"Then you don't know what you're going to do?" she asked again at last.
"No."
"Come with Muriel and me to Africa."
"_What?_"
"I thought that would startle you. We only fixed it definitely this
morning. Muriel's brother is an assistant commissioner or something of
that sort in Basutoland, and he's given her an open invitation to visit
him. Yesterday, too, she was asked to go out and address some series
of meetings in the Cape and Natal. I should like to see the country
and paint. So we settled this morning to go together--about June.
Come too."
"Could I?"
"Of course."
"But what about Muriel?"
"She'd love it. And one more in a South African house doesn't matter."
Paul turned it swiftly over. With his books and his successful play he
knew he could raise enough money. He drew a deep breath. "Oh," he
said, "I'd love it."
"Good," she said, "that's settled. We're travelling East Coast. And
now, why not go down and stay with mother for a little?"