_A Night’s Repose_
Mr. Trimblerigg, lying on his well-earned bed, was looking out through
the dark canes of the chick at the large-eyed tropical night, when
an opaque and curiously crested form entered his square of vision.
The chick lifted, to the flash of a torchlight the crest detached
itself, and a small scarlet-coated monkey leapt down on to the bed.
This incongruous combination scared his calculating wits out of him;
snatching his revolver he fired without aim.
The monkey, chattering in alarm, skipped back to the shoulder it had
sprung from. ‘Missed again!’ said a familiar voice. ‘How do you do,
Jonathan? May I come in?’
She clambered in as she spoke, and sat upon the bed, while Mr.
Trimblerigg, exclamatory with anger and apology, lighted the lamp
and stared at the unwelcome apparition. Met under such nightmare
conditions, they did not stop to embrace.
‘So that was your object-lesson, was it?’ said Davidina. ‘Bad shot.
What made you do it?’
‘_You_ made me do it!’ retorted Mr. Trimblerigg sharply. ‘A fool’s
trick, coming like that! How could I tell it was you?’
‘You couldn’t. But what are your sentries for? Haven’t you enough of
them to feel safe?’
Mr. Trimblerigg, defending himself, gave away more of the situation
than he intended. ‘Why, it might have been a sentry himself!’ he
exclaimed. ‘You can’t trust one of them.’
‘Not even your converted Christians?’
‘Not as things are now. Christians?--scratch the surface, and you find
they go pagan again.’
‘So you’ve been scratching them?’
‘No need. They scratch themselves; it’s reversion to type; the
commonest disease missions have to contend with.’
‘And catching to civilization,’ remarked Davidina; ‘A scratch lot, all
of you.’ Then, as Mr. Trimblerigg looked at her with furtive suspicion,
‘I’ve been interviewing a specimen,’ she said; ‘one of yours.’
She named her man. ‘He seemed honest enough,’ she went on, ‘but he’s
been scratched badly, acting (_he_ says) under your orders.’
Mr. Trimblerigg bristled to the implied criticism. ‘He has only done
what was absolutely necessary.’
‘Necessary, of course,’ she returned. ‘You can always make a thing
necessary if you want to. If a man sets fire to the tail of his shirt,
he has got to get out of it. But that doesn’t make him look less of a
fool, Jonathan. Necessary? It’s necessary, I suppose, that you should
shoot people at sight before you know who they are. But if you mean
that for an object-lesson, I don’t find it attractive.’
‘Object-lesson of what?’ demanded Mr. Trimblerigg.
‘Yes, of what?’ she retorted. ‘It’s not Free Evangelicalism, it’s not
common sense, and I don’t suppose _you_ think it comic either.’
Her accent on the word enraged him, as she had expected. ‘I was only
asking,’ she said. ‘You’ve your sense of humour, and I’ve mine,
and they don’t always agree. A man who can never see a joke is a
poor creature; but when he makes a joke of himself and can’t see
_that_--he’s past praying for. Did you say your prayers to-night,
Jonathan? You did? Then better say ’em again backwards, and see if you
can’t get more sense out of them.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg. ‘You mean well; but I don’t need to
be told how to pray: I pray as I feel.’
‘You do,’ she said comfortingly. ‘D’you ever look at your tongue first
to see your symptoms? No? Well, you should then. There’s nothing in
this world so dangerous as prayer if you’ve fixed up the answer before
you begin. Forty years ago, Jonathan, you set that trap for yourself,
now it’s a habit you can’t get rid of. Let’s look at your tongue. It’s
my belief you’ve got an attack of it now, worse than usual. Either pray
backwards from the way you’ve been doing--which means don’t begin by
giving yourself the answer--or leave off.’
Mr. Trimblerigg, who during the past six months had been through deep
waters and in his own eyes had done valiantly, sat up quivering with
indignation.
‘If I hadn’t prayed,’ he cried, ‘prayed all I knew, prayed without
ceasing--and if I had not depended every instant on my prayer being
answered in ways beyond human power to devise, before this I should
have been dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Davidina, ‘and if you had aimed your last prayer a little
straighter, so should I. It missed--like some of the others, I’m
thinking. Two days ago I met six of your prayers, as you call ’em,
striped like a barber’s pole, dead as door-nails, standing on their
heads in native earth. They weren’t exactly addressed to me; but I’ve
come in answer to them; and if you don’t think it’s the word of the
Lord I’m telling you now, Jonathan, put up another and have done with
me!’
Mr. Trimblerigg’s sense of lifelong grievances came to a head, and he
spoke plainly: ‘I shall never have done with you, Davidina, never,
never! All my life you’ve hated me, persecuted me, wished me ill. Yes;
you’ve been sorry whenever I succeeded, glad when I’ve failed; and if I
were to fail now, you’d only say--“Serve him right! Serve him right!”’
‘That’s true,’ said Davidina; ‘the rest isn’t. Hated you? Don’t flatter
yourself! You wouldn’t so much mind me hating you; it’s my seeing
through you that you don’t like. “O Lord, so look upon me from on high
that You don’t see me clear as Davidina sees me!” That has been your
life-prayer, Jonathan, though you never put it into words. Yes, to
you it may sound like blasphemy, but if you’d prayed a little less to
yourself, and a little more to me, maybe, you might not have cut so
famous a figure in the world--been such a firework, setting a spark to
your own tail and running round after it (which is what you are doing
here) but there’d have been more meat on you for one to cut and come
again than there is now. It’s my belief, Jonathan, you don’t truly know
where you begin and where you leave off. You’ve been standing in your
own light so long, and walking in it, that you see yourself a child
of light every time you look in the glass. I’ve only to switch this
torch on’--she played it upon him as she spoke--‘and you look like a
saint in a halo, waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven to come. Yes, that’s
what you are always giving yourself--a halo; you’ve only to pray and
it comes--like hiccoughs, or housemaid’s knee. You touch a button, you
switch on the light, and you see yourself in a glory. Some day you’ll
get one in real earnest; and when you do, I wonder what you’ll make of
it, and what people will say? I think they’ll laugh.’
Mr. Trimblerigg looked at her with that same sort of uneasy awe which
weak saints have for the Devil. Under her penetrating gaze he sealed
himself to secrecy. This, that she was saying--so nearly true, yet
treating it as a joke--was not a thing about which even relatively the
truth could be told. Davidina had no sense of the mysterious, and very
little of the divine; she lacked reverence; but her uncanny way of
touching the spot did rather scare him. He changed the subject hastily.
‘Where have you been all this time?’ he inquired. ‘You’ve come a long
way. How did you get on?’
Davidina, accepting the diversion, gave him a sketch of her travels. He
heard of the toy air-balloons, the bird-warblers, and the soap-bubbles;
the singing, and the playing, and the worshipping deputations of
natives. Nor did Davidina disguise from him the fact that she had
allowed godlike honours to be paid to her.
Mr. Trimblerigg, though he had used Relative Truth for his own ends,
could not, as a Free Evangelical, think that was right.
‘I dare say it isn’t,’ said Davidina, ‘not as we think it. But if you
start applying your own sense of what’s right to natives, they don’t
think you a god, they think you a devil. That’s what you’ve been doing,
Jonathan; and devil’s the result. And for my part, I don’t see that
it’s any more against true religion to let yourself be worshipped as
a god than to make yourself feared as a devil. Devil or god, it’s one
or the other--you can’t get out of it; and to be thought a god and to
act accordingly does less harm, comes cheaper, and makes things easier
for all concerned.
‘Anyway here’s your object-lesson and there’s mine. I could have soon
enough made them think me a devil if I’d taken your line, Jonathan.
So now, unless it’s against your religion, you’d better try mine for
a change. Be a god, Jonathan, be a god! It won’t be true; but believe
me--sing, glory hallelujah! it’s the better hole to fall into. And now
I’m going.’ So saying, she started to climb out the way she had come.
‘Where to?’ inquired Mr. Trimblerigg, astounded at so abrupt a
leave-taking.
‘Anywhere, so long as it’s away from civilization--and you!’ she
declared. ‘I’ll send my specimens down to the coast, then go back the
way I’ve come. And, Jonathan, if you get beautifully burnt out by a
bush-fire in the next day or two, don’t think it’s them; it’ll be me.’
‘What for?’
‘For fun, or for a moral object-lesson, just as you like to take it:
Davidina’s dose--or jumps for Jonathan. Good-bye!’
She had escaped--had already gone a few paces, when Mr. Trimblerigg
bethought him and called after her.
‘Daffy!’ It was the old abbreviated usage from days of childhood. She
returned, and stood outside the chick without lifting it.
‘Well, what?’ she queried.
And Mr. Trimblerigg’s voice came cooingly from within: ‘You haven’t
kissed me, Daffy.’
‘I have not,’ she replied starkly.
‘But we haven’t quarrelled, have we?’
‘Quarrelled? Have I ever quarrelled with you yet, Jonathan? No fear!
I’ve been saying your prayers for you--right way up. Now you say
“Amen”; kiss yourself your own way, and go to sleep!’
She heard him chuckle; then in a whinnying tone, as he stretched
himself: ‘Oh, you _are_ a comfortable person to talk to!’
‘You’ve said that before.’
‘It’s true. I’m glad you came, Davidina. You’ve given me a new idea.’
‘I generally do,’ she replied.
‘But this is my own,’ he insisted.
‘So is the stuffing of a goose, once it’s inside him,’ was her retort.
And with that she was gone.
And Mr. Trimblerigg, with the feeling that something now remained to
his credit, turned over and went blissfully to sleep. For having let
Davidina know that she was ‘comfortable to talk to,’ he had turned the
sharp points of her arrows, and so robbed them of venom that not a word
she had said troubled him any more.
So he gave his beloved sleep; and into his dreams came hovering the
crocean dawn or that new idea, so entirely his own, prompted by
Davidina.