_The Early Worm_
Though Mr. Trimblerigg had not at the time taken the advice of his
Uncle Jonah in very good part, he did eventually accept a large part of
it--good or otherwise--in the shaping of his career. His wish to become
a great functionary of State gradually faded away, giving place to
others. But his intention to be President of the Free Church Conference
remained and grew strong. And to that end--spirituality being
required--he accepted faithfully Uncle Jonah’s last bit of advice, and
seeking a master behind whose back he could hide and be clever in ways
that didn’t show--have responsibility taken for his mistakes, and get
adequate recognition for the many things which he did right--seeking
for such a master, he found him to his own satisfaction in the oldest
of old ways; and never from that day on did the suspicion enter his
head, that the master whom he chose under so devout an _alias_ was
himself.
If, in the process, he received a call, so did I; and it was at this
stage of his career that I began to watch him with real interest. His
calls became frequent; and though there was not always an apparent
answer there was always an attentive ear.
It may well be that when human nature appears, to those whose business
is to understand it, most unexpected and incalculable, is the very time
when it is or ought to be most instructive to eyes which are open.
And certainly at this preliminary period--before I got accustomed to
him--Mr. Trimblerigg did make me open my eyes wider and wider, till he
got me to the point when nothing that he did surprised me. But that
was not because I became able to anticipate his reactions to any
given circumstance or tight hole in which he might find himself: but
merely that experience of him caused me to give up all rules based on
the law of averages: he was a law by himself. What at first baffled me
was the passionate sincerity with which he was always able to deceive
himself--doing it mainly, I admit, by invoking my assistance: that is
to say, by prayer.
To see him fall upon his knees and start busily lighting his own little
lamp for guidance through the perils immediately surrounding him--while
firmly convinced all the time that the lamp was not his lighting but
mine--gave me what I can only describe as an extraordinary sense of
helplessness. The passionate fervour of his prayer to whatever end
he desired, put him more utterly beyond reach of instruction than
a conscious plunge into sin. Against that there might have been a
natural reaction; but against the spiritual avidity with which he set
to work saving his own skin day by day, no reaction was possible. The
day-spring from on high visited him with a light-heeled nimbleness
which cleared not only all obstacles of a material kind but all qualms
of conscience as well. In the holy of holies of his inmost being
self-interest sat rapturously enshrined; there lay its ark of the
covenant, and over it the twin cherubim of faith and hope stretched
their protecting wings. Mr. Trimblerigg might bow himself in single
spirit when first his prayer began; but always, before it ended, his
spirits had got the better of him, and he would rise from his knees as
beautifully unrepentant as a puppy that has dodged a whipping, his face
radiant with happiness, having found an answer to his prayer awaiting
him in the direction to which from the first it had been set, much as
your Arctic explorer finds the North Pole by a faithful following of
his nose after having first pointed it to the north.
I date my completed understanding of Mr. Trimblerigg, and of the use
he had made of me, to the day when--faced with an exposure which would
have gone far to reduce his ministerial career to a nullity--he put
up a prayer which (had I been a mere mortal) would have made me jump
out of my skin. I will not skin him retributively by quoting him in
full, but the gist of it all was that, much to his perplexity he found
himself suffering from a strange temptation, out of keeping with his
whole character, and threatening destruction to that life of energetic
usefulness in the service of others which he was striving to lead.
And so he prayed to be kept (‘kept’ was the very word)--‘humble, and
honest, and honourable.’ It was no change that he desired; but only
a continuance in that narrow and straight path of acquired virtue
down which (since the truth must be told) he had hitherto danced his
way more like a cat on hot bricks, than the happily-banded pilgrim
he believed himself to be. ‘Kept’ was the word; and as I heard him I
thought of it in all its meanings--and wondered which. I thought of
how dead game ‘keeps’ up to a point, and is better in flavour for the
keeping; but how, after that point is reached, the keeping defeats
itself, and the game is game no longer, but mere offal. Was it in that
sense that he wished to be ‘kept’? For certainly I had found him good
game, quick in the uptake, and brisk on the wing.
It is difficult in this record to remain consecutive. Those who would
follow with accuracy the career of Mr. Trimblerigg, must jump to and
fro with the original--one of whom it has to be said that though he
denied himself many times (even in the face of the clearest evidence)
he denied himself nothing that held out any prospect of keeping his
fortunes on the move; and the stitch in time with which he so often
and so nimbly saved himself ran in no straight line of machine-made
regularity, but rather in a series of diversions this way and that,
stepping sideways and back preparatory to the next forward leap; and
in this feather-stitching along life’s road he covered more ground,
and far more ornamentally, than do those who go merely upon their
convictions, holding to one opinion and doing only one thing at a time.
Yet it would be wrong to say that he was ever false to his convictions,
for these he seldom knew. Enough that so long as they lasted his
intuitions were sacred to him; and as it is the very essence of
intuitions that at any moment they may change, his changeableness had
about it a sort of truth, of consistency, to which slower minds cannot
attain.
But why call it ‘intuition’; why not ‘vision’? Well, if a camera of
powerful lens and stocked with highly sensitive films may be said to
have vision, vision he had in abundance. Adjusting his focus to the
chosen point of view, he clicked the switch of his receptivity, snapt
a picture, wound it off upon its wheel, and was ready for another. In
the space of a few minutes he had as many pictures stored as he had a
mind for. ‘Vision’? You may grant it him, if you will, so long as you
remember that that was the process. I would rather be inclined to call
it ‘optics’; and I see his career now rather as a series of optical
delusions, through every one of which he remained quite convinced that
he was right, and that the truth had come to him by way of revelation.
An early example will serve.
The small hill-side village in which Mr. Trimblerigg first learned
to escape the limitations of ordinary life was a place where things
seldom happened; and there were times in his early upbringing when
he found himself at a loose end, a rose wasting its sweetness to the
desert air; there was nothing doing in the neighbourhood on which he
could decisively set his mark. This was to live in vain; and often he
searched through his small world of ideas to find inspiration. Should
he run away from home, and be found wandering with his memory a blank?
Should he be kidnapped by gipsies and escape in nothing but his shirt?
Should a sheep fall into the stone quarry so that he might rescue it,
or a lamb get lost in the snow during the lambing-season, that he might
go out, and find, and return bearing it in his bosom? Or should he go
forth and become famous as a boy-missionary, preaching to the heathen
in an unknown tongue? These were all possibilities, only the last
suggested any difficulty.
Whenever in doubt, adopting the method of old Uncle Trimblerigg, he
turned to the Scriptures: he did not search them, for that would have
been self-willed and presumptuous; he merely opened them, putting a
blind finger to the spot where divine guidance awaited him. It was in
this way that Uncle Trimblerigg had become rich; forty years ago he had
invested his savings in house property all through having set thumb to
the text, ‘I have builded an house to Thy name.’ And without searching
the Scriptures further he had built twenty of them. At a later date,
slate-quarrying having started in the district, their value was doubled.
So one day, in a like faith, our own Mr. Trimblerigg committed himself
to the same experiment. His first point on opening drew a startling
reply, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not the things
which be of God, but the things which be of men.’ Very right and
proper, of course: Satan thus safely disposed of, he tried again.
‘Remember Lot’s wife,’ failed for the moment to convey any meaning;
he knew that it could not refer to him: it seemed rather to indicate
that his Bible had not yet given him its thorough attention. To warm
it to its task he lifted it as a heave-offering, administered to it
the oath, as he had seen done in a police court, kissed it, and set
it down again. This time it answered sharply, but still not to the
point: ‘Ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the
wrath to come?’ Evidently the Lord was trying him. He turned from the
New Testament to the old: perhaps it was only the old he should have
consulted, for he had an idea that this was an Old Testament method.
That would account for the delay.
The Old Testament made a better response to his appeal. ‘The zeal of
Thy House hath eaten me up,’ suggested something at any rate, but did
not make the way quite clear; ‘Down with it, down with it, even unto
the ground!’ was practical in its bearing upon the Lord’s House, but
puzzling; ‘Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth’ gave him
the light he sought.
For at that time Bethesda, the chapel of the Free Evangelicals, had
fallen lamentably into disrepair, and since Uncle Trimblerigg, the
only man of substance in the district, had retired from the innovation
of hymn-singing to a stricter Bethel of his own, there seemed little
chance of raising the necessary funds for demolition and restoration.
And so decay went on, while still, from old habit, the chapel continued
to be insured.
Now whether we call it ‘vision’ or ‘optical illusion,’ there can be no
doubt that, thus aided by Scripture, Mr. Trimblerigg visualized rapidly
and clearly the means to an end which so many desired. And so it came
about one Saturday night, while frost held the village water-supply
firmly in its grip, and the road running up from the valley slipped
with ice, that Bethesda, through a supposed leakage in her heating
apparatus, caught fire; and only the fact that Mr. Trimblerigg fetched
the fire-engine from the town four miles away, saved it from utter
destruction. He had been sent into the town by his mother to do
errands, when at the foot of the hill he suddenly remembered Lot’s
wife, and looking back saw the chapel windows gustily ablaze, and
interpreting the peradventure aright had sped on with the news. The
miraculous arrival of the fire-engine with him on it, only half an hour
after the villagers’ discovery of an already well-established insurance
claim in swift operation, had caused an immense sensation and some
inquiry.
But Mr. Trimblerigg had a case on which no suspicion could rest; that
the fire was fought expeditiously, though under difficulties, was
largely owing to him, and the subsequent inquiries of the insurance
office agent who came to inspect the damage were only of a formal kind.
Every effort had been made, and a half-saved chapel was the result; but
its previous dilapidation made it easier to rebuild than to restore,
and when a new Bethesda rose from the ruins of the old, the insurance
company paid for it.
It was two days after the happy catastrophe, that Davidina remarked
(when, to be sure, he was taking them to light the lamp in another
room), ‘I wish you wouldn’t always go taking away the matches!’
‘I’m bringing them back,’ said Jonathan correctively.
‘You didn’t the last time,’ Davidina retorted. And at the word and the
tone of her voice, Jonathan trepidated and fled.
Was it ‘vision’ that made him do so, or only optical illusion on the
mental plane? For as far as I have been able to probe into Davidina’s
mind, which is not always clear to me, she knew nothing. It was merely
her way: the hunting instinct was strong in her, and he her spiritual
quarry: never in all their born days together was she to let him go.
Of course Mr. Trimblerigg did not go on doing things like that. It was
an act of crude callow youth, done at a time when the romantic instinct
takes unbalanced forms; yet in a way it was representative of him, and
helped me to a larger insight into his character and motives. For here
was Mr. Trimblerigg, thus early, genuinely anxious to have guidance
from above for the exploitation of his superabundant energies; and
when, at first showing, the guidance seemed rather to head him off from
being energetic at all, he persisted till his faith in himself found
ratification, and thereafter went his way with the assurance that what
he decided to do must almost necessarily be right.
Mr. Trimblerigg did not in after days actually set fire to anything
in order that he might come running to the rescue when rescue was
too late; but he did inflame many a situation seven times more than
it was wont to be inflamed, setting people by the ears, and causing
many an uprooting in places where no replanting could avail. And when
he had got matters thus thoroughly involved, he would apply thereto
his marvellous powers of accommodation and persuasion, and, if some
sort of peace and order did thereafter emerge, regard himself quite
genuinely as the deliverer.
At a later date his zeal for the Lord’s House broke up the Free United
Evangelicals into separate groups of an unimportant size, which when
they seemed about to disappear wholly from view, he reunited again;
and having for the moment redoubled what was left, regarded his work
as good, though in the religious world the Free Evangelicals had
forfeited thenceforth their old priority of place, a circumstance
from which (when convinced of its permanence) he made his personal
escape by embracing second Adventism. And though doubtless he carried
his Free Evangelism with him into the field of modern prophecy, the
Free Evangelicals within their own four walls knew him no more. Very
effectively he had burnt them out, and in their case no insurance
policy provided for the rebuilding: in that seat of the mighty, probed
by the beams of a new day, only the elderly grey ashes remained of men
whose word once gave light.