_The Procession of a Flea_
Mr. Trimblerigg stopped to breathe; and while he did so I made a
psychological examination of that poor work of art which was yet, in
its way, so perfect a masterpiece. Had Mr. Trimblerigg been more of
an expert in old wash-drawings and brushwork, had he been gifted with
a more sceptical turn of mind than that which had fitted his views
to such differing situations, he might have examined those initials,
and that spot of mildew defacing the supposititious features, more
minutely, analytically and chemically than he actually did. That the
wash-drawing as a whole was well over a hundred years old any expert
would probably have agreed; whether he would have given the same date
to the initials, and a few other salient touches I had my doubt, and
the doubt remains unresolved; no expert has ever been called in to
decide the matter. If Miss Sparling herself limed that snare, she
certainly did it well; the obliteration of the face, with just the
suggestion of a likeness left, was finely controlled; and yet the
control may have only been Father Time’s; and whether it was luck, or
whether Susannah Walcot was in truth a prophetess of penetrating power,
who is now to say? The lengths to which the human faculties can go
have often filled me with astonishment; Mr. Trimblerigg was only one
instance among many. On this occasion, however, he did not astonish me
in the least; he did what I expected him to do.
Before that culminating piece of evidence--that silent but resounding
call--he sank upon his knees, and remained on them for a long time.
I watched the motions of his mind; they were very interesting; but
they had not really to go far. That he was called to be a shining light
to the whole civilized world did not at this stage of things surprise
him. As a probability he had thought so ever since he could remember;
recently he had been made sure of it. It was only the strange manner
of this final call, and its clearly miraculous accompaniments that did
a little stagger him. It also caused a definite shift--a shift to the
right--in his always adjustable theology. It drew him definitely from
modernism back toward True Belief. For this was something with which
modernism could not be reconciled; it was primitive, apocalyptic,
ultra-evangelical, it made, amongst other things, for the literal
interpretation of Scripture: if this was true, the other was not.
And so it became clear that in accepting the call from such a source,
his own cast of faith must be simplified once and for all,--that he
must revert to the earlier faith of his Uncle Phineas.
Uncle Phineas was right. It might still be true that the sun did not
actually go round the earth, that the earth was not literally fixed,
or flat, as Uncle Phineas had wished him to believe; but there was
nevertheless a principle of fixture in eternal truth, fixture rather
than evolution or motion, going much deeper into the nature of things
than he had supposed. He became, all at once, curiously doubtful of his
doctrine of Relative Truth, for he saw that to his exposition of this
more divine and direct dispensation it might prove a hindrance.
It was for his followers he was now troubled. As regards himself he
had no difficulty in getting rid of it. For the recovery of that purer
faith his early training now stood him in good stead, and Uncle Phineas
became a rock in whose shadow he could hide. What he had trained
himself to believe in his ’teens, what he had broken away from in his
early twenties, what he had exploitively used for opportunist purposes
in the propaganda of war and of Mosaic reprisals on savages who could
not otherwise be taught better, was still in his blood--waiting to give
him the upward push. In his new childlikeness he thanked whatever gods
there be that he had always treated with tender allowance and regard
the primitive views of Caroline, both as wife and mother; and that he
had never allowed the scepticism of Davidina--Davidina, who had now
found a new sphere for her dispensing powers in the exploration and
humane taming of savage tribes--to discolour the rainbow gradients of
his mind. The theological problems she had maliciously presented to
him in old days, he had happily ignored: they had at least done him no
permanent harm. Reversion to type, in his case at all events, was not
difficult. In a certain sense Relative Truth helped him; for even if
the simpler faith were not as absolutely true as it now seemed to him,
it was true relatively to the immediate purpose in hand. And so still,
as one might say, upon two legs--one numbed and quiescent but the other
lithe and active--he entered confidently and with singleness of purpose
into the Kingdom that had been prepared for him.
Going up to bed in the small hours he was very tired, and did not stop
to look in the glass, did not stop to do anything. He switched out the
light and got into bed. Only then did the great recovery he had made
dawn on him.
Turning his head sideways in comfortable adjustment for slumber, he
saw upon the pillow a patch of yellow light, faint, but for small
immediate use efficient. In the centre of its radiance marched a flea.
Mr. Trimblerigg did not like fleas; he made an instinctive pounce, and
the flea died the death. Then the wonder of it occurred to him. He sat
up, he got out of bed, he went to the glass. In the darkness he could
see himself: Crocean dawn was round him once more. His surreptitious
action of the last few hours, Heaven had now justified. He had no
longer any doubts, any fears; he did not even see difficulties, for now
the world was running to meet him, and millions of his fellow-creatures
were prepared to take without question anything he offered them.
Faint with bliss, he tottered back to bed, laid his crowned head upon
the pillow, and slept.