I ONLY LEARNED TO DOUBT AT LAST.
THE summer came in all its glory, a splendid summer for the wide
airy corn-fields, where the lark sang high in a heaven of cloudless
blue, above the broad ripples of tawny gold--a splendid summer for
Hyde Park and the green valley through which Father Thames winds his
silvern ribbon,--a delicious summer for the rich and prosperous in
the land, for whom sunshine means pleasure; but a terrible summer for
the overcrowded manufacturing town of Bridford, where a hot season
meant fever and disease in its most malignant form. In the seething
boiling-pot of those Bridford alleys the fair July weather brought
endless sorrow and trouble; and wherever the trouble was worst and the
sorrow heaviest Cyril Culverhouse was to be found. Night after night he
was to be seen moving, quietly as a shadow, from house to house, to sit
for an hour reading the gospel to some fever-parched sufferer whose
dull eyes might never see another sunset. The days were not long enough
for his work at this woeful time. He was obliged to give at least half
his nights, and very often the whole of them, to his sad duties.
‘If you don’t take care, my dear fellow, you’ll knock yourself up,’
remonstrated the port-winey Vicar, shocked at his curate’s hollow eyes
and pale cheeks. ‘It’s no use sacrificing yourself in this way. We’ve
the same thing every summer. The thermometer and the death-rate go up
together. Sanitary reform is what we want, Culverhouse. We Churchmen
can do very little good.’
‘We can only do our duty,’ answered Cyril. ‘I am not afraid of fever.’
‘Well, as a single man you can face it with less scruple. I should go
a great deal more among these poor creatures, but Mrs. Rollings is
dreadfully nervous. She is so frightened about infection. With our
large family we are bound to be careful. Even the funerals make her
anxious. She won’t let me go near the children after I’ve buried a
fever case. It’s a deplorable state of things.’
Cyril faced these deplorable things without fear or wavering. What had
he to fear? It was such work as his soul loved. To be where he was most
wanted, where the sky was darkest and his little lamp could be of most
avail, that was his idea of a parish priest’s mission.
No heathens worshipping their wooden fetish in flowery islands of the
fair South Seas could be further away from the light than these lost
sheep of Israel; and it was to such as these he felt himself especially
sent.
And then for his life. Like Hamlet, he valued that at ‘a pin’s
fee.’ He would have asked no better gift from the gods than to die
doing his duty--a soldier of the Church militant, struck down in
hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. All things which make an earthly
lot sweet and valuable to man were lost to this man. He loved, and
had renounced the woman he loved. He loved her still, more dearly
than ever in separation; and he knew that she was to be the wife of
another. Of fortune or advancement in life he had no hope. The Church
is a profession few men would choose, desiring either fortune or
advancement. He had nothing to live for but his duty, and it would be
sweeter to him to die for that than to go on living for it.
Every thought of Beatrix Harefield was pain; most painful of all
was the thought that she would think him mean and cowardly for his
defection. If she was innocent she must scorn him for his doubt of her.
If she was guilty she must deem him a coward for refusing her remorse
the shelter of his love. He remembered those lines of Moore’s,--
‘Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,
Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here.’
He had been like the herd, and had fled from his beloved in the day of
her shadowed fame. He thought of his defection with deepest regret; yet
it seemed to him that to have done otherwise would have been to palter
with the truth.
This burden of sad thought made him more desirous than another man
would have been to lose his sense of individual pain in the sorrows
of others. Parish priests had gone among the poor of Bridford before
Cyril’s time, but none with such a ready ear for their complaints.
There was a small household which had a peculiar interest for Cyril. A
widow and her son occupied a wretched back room in one of the wretched
houses in a blind alley, a festering lane shut from the air and light
by the overshadowing bulk of a huge factory, whereof the chimney,
although under legal covenant to consume its own smoke, rained showers
of blacks upon the surrounding neighbourhood, like the spray from a
perennial soot fountain.
Nothing could be more squalid than the house in which Mrs. Joyce and
Emmanuel Joyce, her son, lived. Their neighbours were no cleaner
or tidier than the rest of the community. There was the usual
all-pervading odour of fried herrings, and decaying cabbage-leaves.
The back yard, nine feet by six, was a horror to stop the nose at. The
eye was offended by hideous sights, the ear was outraged by foulest
language, and yet in this leper-house there was one spot which the
infected air of the place had not tainted.
Mrs. Joyce and her son had contrived to impart neatness and order,
and even a certain respectability to the one small back room on the
ground-floor, which constituted their house and home. Very small were
the means by which they had achieved this result, but the result was
palpable to every eye.
‘It’s well to be them,’ said the mother of many children, peering with
longing eyes into the neatly kept parlour. ‘If I had no childer I might
make my place tidy; but where there’s childer there’s muck.’
Emmanuel Joyce was a cobbler by trade. Now of all trades perhaps
cobbling is about one of the most unpleasant with which to be
brought into immediate contact, but Emmanuel, who paid his weekly
rent punctually, and was in that respect a striking exception, had
obtained leave to erect a small shed in the angle of the yard next
his window. This shed was looked at with envious eyes by some of his
fellow-lodgers, and talked of invidiously as an encroachment; but here
Emmanuel squatted at his work in all weathers, and here he kept his
tools, and those crippled boots and shoes upon which he exercised his
healing art.
In the parlour he had contrived to build a couple of enclosed beds on
the Scotch principle, which, though wanting in airiness, were tidy
and decent. At night a curtain divided the one small room into two,
and by day this curtain drawn back and neatly looped up, made one of
the decorations of the neat parlour. A tall stand of flower-pots,
Emmanuel’s dearest care, screened the loathesomeness of the yard, and
made the one window a bank of foliage and gay colour. The shabby odds
and ends of furniture shone with the beeswax and labour which Mrs.
Joyce bestowed upon them in the intervals of her plain sewing. There
were cheap prints on the wall above the mantelpiece, and on each side
of the fireplace there were three deal shelves, containing Emmanuel’s
much-prized collection of books, all picked up at odd times from the
rubbish-box of a second-hand bookseller, and rebound and furbished by
Emmanuel’s own dexterous hands.
‘My son is a great reader,’ Mrs. Joyce said proudly, during Cyril’s
first visit. ‘He keeps the money other young men spend on beer to buy
books with.’
Cyril went over to the shelves and looked at the books. Their character
told him more about Emmanuel Joyce’s way of thinking than the mother
would have cared to tell. There was an odd volume of Shelley, another
of Keats, a Milton, and a Shakespeare. So much for the poets. Then came
Rousseau’s ‘Confessions,’ in English, Tom Payne’s ‘Age of Reason,’ and
a dozen other books all more or less infidel in their tendency.
‘Your son goes to church, I hope?’ said Cyril, after he had examined
the books.
The widow hung her head, and began to fidget with the corner of her
print apron.
‘I’m sorry to say he’s no church-goer, sir. It’s his only fault. He was
brought up very strict, a little too strict, perhaps. We were chapel
people in my husband’s lifetime, and I think he was a bit too hard on
the boy. It turned Emmanuel’s stomach against religion. And now he’s
got hold of all sorts of queer ideas, and he puts ’em into poetry. It’s
beautiful poetry to listen to, full of book learning. My son reads it
to me of an evening; but it soars too high for me sometimes, I can’t
quite follow the ideas.’
‘I should like to have a little talk with your son,’ said Cyril.
‘Ah, sir, if you could but bring him to think better of his Maker, and
his Maker’s way of managing this world, it would be a blessed thing,’
exclaimed the widow. ‘That’s all my son needs to make him as perfect
as any human creature ever was upon this earth. He’s the best of sons,
he’s the honestest, soberest, industriousest of young men. But it makes
me shudder sometimes to hear him talk; that bold, as if he’d been up
among the stars, and knew the way they’re worked. I believe it all
comes of too much learning.’
‘Or too little,’ suggested Cyril.
‘Oh, sir, you wouldn’t say that if you was to see the books he devours.
He belongs to the Mechanics’ Institute, and there isn’t a learned
book they’ve got that he hasn’t gone right through. He don’t care for
stories and such like. He calls them fiddle-faddle. But he’ll sit up
half the night over a learned book, and then he puts his ideas into
poetry.’
Cyril was warmly interested. To begin with, a cobbler who read Keats
and Shelley stood out prominently from the ruck of cobblers. It
has been said that cobblers, as men whose habits are sedentary and
meditative, have a natural leaning to infidel opinions; but Cyril
did not believe this. He did not believe that meditation must needs
engender doubt. He who wrote the divinest work ever penned by an
uninspired writer, ‘The Imitation of Christ,’ must have been of all men
the most meditative. And did not Bunyan’s twelve years of imprisonment
in Bedford gaol bear fruit in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress?’ a book that has
done more to popularize Christianity than all the writings of all the
bishops who ever wore lawn. Cyril could not see any reason why cobbling
and Christian belief should be incompatible.
‘I will call and see your son,’ he said, Emmanuel happening to be out
of the way on his first visit.
He called the following evening, a dismal rainy evening, when he
thought the cobbler, as a man not given to spend his time in tap-rooms,
likely to be at home. Nor was he disappointed. Emmanuel Joyce was
sitting at a little table, drawn close to the bank of flowers in the
window, poring over a page of Carlyle’s ‘Latter Day Pamphlets,’ his
elbow on the table, his thin hand entangled in his long hair, and with
far from a comfortable expression of countenance.
That Thomas Carlyle is a grand and noble writer, no one who has ever
read his ‘French Revolution,’ his ‘Life of John Sterling,’ and his
‘Hero Worship,’ could have the insolence to deny; but he is a writer
demanding a considerable expenditure of brain power on the part of his
readers; and for a worker who has been sitting in a cramped position
all day mending shoes, to find himself lost among the Immensities, or
vainly endeavouring to grapple with Phantasmal Captains, Ineptitudes,
and other strange creatures, is hardly the most refreshing form of
mental solace after physical labour.
Mrs. Joyce was sewing on the other side of the little table, wasting
her eyesight in order to economize her candle. Mother and son rose
at Cyril’s entrance, and the widow brought forward the best chair,
a battered old easy chair, which her son had neatly covered with
bright-looking chintz, for the visitor.
Emmanuel was tall, thin, and pale, with hollow cheeks and a projecting
forehead, under which shone darkly bright eyes, large and bulbous. His
lips were thin, his chin indicated a firmness of character verging
upon obstinacy. It was an interesting face, but not altogether a
pleasant one, save when the young man spoke to his mother, and then his
countenance was lighted by a smile which made it beautiful.
‘Mother told me you’d been to see her, sir,’ he said. ‘She took it very
kindly that you should spare time to sit down and chat a bit with her,
especially as you didn’t leave a tract behind you.’
‘You don’t like tracts,’ said Cyril, smiling at the energy with which
the last sentence was spoken.
‘I detest them.’
‘Yet I think the book you are reading is something in the form of a
tract,’ speculated Cyril, whose quick eye had caught the title of
Carlyle’s book.
‘It is not a religious tract, sir. It appeals to man’s highest
faculties--it kindles all that is best and greatest in his soul--but
it does not pelt him with Scripture texts, or tell him that he is by
nature a reprobate and castaway, judged and doomed before he was born.’
‘Do you think the Bible tells a man that?’
‘Yes, sir, it does. The Bible texts that were flung at my head in my
childhood and boyhood were all to one purpose. They told me that I was
a vessel of wrath, and that I was doomed to the burning. When I was
eighteen years of age I began to think for myself.’
‘You began to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’
‘No, sir. I had read Shelley’s “Queen Mab,” by that time, and I had my
own ideas of the justice of my Creator. If He were just He would not
create me for misery either here or hereafter. And then I looked round
me and saw a world that reeked with human misery and divine injustice.’
‘Stop!’ cried Cyril. ‘Were this world the end of our life the
differences in the fortunes of mankind might imply injustice in the
Ruler of this world; but the balance is to be struck elsewhere--the day
of reckoning is to come, when each man shall reap the reward of his
works, whether they be good or evil.’
‘Am I to take your word for all that?’ asked Emmanuel, his projecting
eyes shining with a fierce light. ‘You are like the rest of them. One
after another they have come to me--Church of England, Wesleyans,
Baptists, Ranters--all with the same dogmatic assertions. My own senses
tell me that this world teems with suffering and wrong. Am I to take
the other story on hearsay?’
‘Have you not seen something more than suffering and wrong?’ argued
Cyril ‘Have you not seen that even in this brief mortal life--which
true believers regard as but a troubled passage to eternal peace--have
you not seen that even here men reap as they have sown? To the sober
man health and tranquillity; to the drunkard disease and early death.
To the honest man the world’s respect; to the reprobate the bitter cup
of shame. This little room we sit in bears the evidence of your sober,
industrious life. Where is the injustice here? Now and then we see a
good man struggling with calamity--tried as Job was tried--chastened
as David was chastened--but his struggles are an education for heaven;
and could we but see rightly we might regard him as a chosen servant of
God.’
‘And what of your hospitals for incurables, filled with beings created
only to suffer?’
‘You have never visited one of those hospitals, or you would know
that among those sufferers there are many whom heaven has gifted with
a patience that makes life almost happy, and a faith that fills even
their hours of pain with hope.’
‘Dreamers and enthusiasts all,’ said Emmanuel.
‘Amongst them are some who have talents that make life interesting--or
even genius that lifts them up above the common earth and creates for
them a world of their own. We cannot measure our fellow-men’s misery
or happiness, any more than we can measure the goodness and justice
of God. Some of the most unhappy of men are those to whom fortune has
given all good things.’
‘What do you deduce from this?’
‘That if we could know the hearts and minds of all men as God knows
them we should not accuse our Maker of injustice. He has given us the
highest of all gifts, understanding and free will. It is for us to work
out our redemption with these.’
‘You believe in free will?’ asked Emmanuel.
‘As I believe in God’s justice.’
‘My father was a Calvinist. He believed himself one of the elect, and
his fellow-men, mostly, outside the pale.’
‘You were brought up in that gloomy faith--the faith of that hard good
man who had love and mercy neither for himself nor his fellow-men--who
put an honest woman in jail for dancing at her kinsman’s wedding--and
condemned a brother theologian to the stake for differing in opinion
with him. Well, I can hardly wonder that your mind has taken a
distorted view of Christianity, for though a Calvinist may be a very
good man, I doubt his being a pleasant man, or being able to make his
faith sweet and pleasant to others. But if you will accept Christ’s
Christianity for your guide--if you will look to Christ’s heaven as
your goal--you will find no thorns in your path.’
And then, warming with his subject, Cyril spoke strongly and earnestly
of gospel truth as he believed it--the unsophisticated teaching of
Christ. Emmanuel Joyce listened, and liked to hear, but his opinions
were not to be shaken in an evening. He had too long cherished and
cosseted the demon of infidelity, to be able to thrust the foul fiend
out of doors at a moment’s warning.
‘Come whenever you can spare an hour,’ he said, when Cyril was going
away. ‘I like to hear you talk.’
‘I will come as often as I can; but on one condition.’
‘Name it.’
‘That you come to church.’
‘I’ll come to hear you preach. I’m never above hearing a good
preacher.’
‘Come, that you may learn to pray,’ answered Cyril. ‘Life is a barren
waste without that link between earth and heaven--the Jacob’s ladder of
prayer, upon which angels are continually ascending and descending.’