THE BRITISH CHURCH
David had read hard all through Hilary term with Mr. Stansfield of
the Inner Temple; he had passed examinations brilliantly; he had
solved knotty problems in the legal line for _Fraser and Warren_,
and as already related he had begun to go out into Society. Indeed,
starting from the Rossiters' Thursdays and Praed's studio suppers,
he was being taken up by persons of influence who were pleased to
find him witty, possessed of a charming voice, of quiet but
unassailable manners. Opinions differed as to his good looks. Some
women proclaimed him as adorable, rather Sphynx-like, you know, but
quite fascinating with his well-marked eye-brows, his dark and curly
lashes, the rich warm tints of his complexion, the unfathomable grey
eyes and short upper lip with the down of adolescence upon it. Other
women without assigning any reason admitted he did not produce any
effect on their sensibility--they disliked law students, they said,
even if they were of a literary turn; they also disliked curates and
shopwalkers and sidesmen ... and Sunday-school teachers. Give them
_manly_ men; avowed soldiers and sailors, riders to hounds,
sportsmen, big game hunters, game-keepers, chauffeurs--the
chauffeur was becoming a new factor in Society, Bernard Shaw's
"superman"--prize-fighters, meat-salesmen--then you knew where you
were.
Similarly men were divided in their judgment of him. Some liked him
very much, they couldn't quite say why. Others spoke of him
contemptuously, like Major Armstrong had done. This was due partly
to certain women being inclined to run after him--and therefore to
jealousy on behalf of the professional lady-killer of the
military species--and partly to a vague feeling that he was
enigmatic--Sphynx-like, as some women said. He was too silent
sometimes, especially if the conversation amongst men tended towards
racy stories; he was sarcastic and nimble-witted when he did speak.
And he was not easily bullied. If he encountered an insolent person,
he gave full effect to his five feet eight inches, the look from his
grey eyes was unwavering as though he tacitly accepted the
challenge, there was an invisible rapier hanging from his left hip,
a poise of the body which expressed dauntless courage.
Honoria's stories of his skill in fencing, riding, swimming,
ball-games, helped him here. They were perfectly true or
sufficiently true--_mutatis mutandis_--and when put to the test
stood the test. David indeed found it well during this first season
in Town to hire a hack and ride a little in the Park--it only added
one way and another about fifty pounds to his outlay and impressed
certain of the Benchers who were beginning to turn an eye on him.
One elderly judge--also a Park rider--developed an almost
inconvenient interest in him; asked him to dinner, introduced him to
his daughters, and wanted to know a deal too much as to his position
and prospects.
On the whole, it was a distinct relief from a public position, from
this increasing number of town acquaintances, this broader and
broader track strewn with cunning pitfalls, to lock up his rooms and
go off to Wales for the Easter holidays. Easter was late that
year--or it has to be for the purpose of my story--and David was
fortunate in the weather and the temperature. If West Glamorganshire
had looked richly, grandiosely beautiful in full summer, it had an
exquisite, if quite different charm in early spring, in April. The
great trees were spangled with emerald leaf-buds; the cherries, tame
and wild, the black-thorn, the plums and pears in orchards and on
old, old, grey walls, were in full blossom of virgin white. The
apple trees in course of time showed pink buds. The gardens
were full of wall-flowers--the inhabited country smelt of
wall-flowers--purple flags, narcissi, hyacinths. The woodland was
exquisitely strewn with primroses. In the glades rose innumerable
spears of purple half-opened bluebells; the eye ranged over an
anemone-dotted sward in this direction; over clusters of smalt-blue
dog violets in another. Ladies'-smocks and cowslips made every
meadow delicious; and the banks of the lowland streams were
gorgeously gilded with king-cups. The mountains on fine days were
blue and purple in the far distance; pale green and grey in the
foreground. Under the April showers and sun-shafts they became
tragic, enchanted, horrific, paradisiac. Even the mining towns were
bearable--in the spring sunshine. If man had left no effort untried
to pile hideosity on hideosity, flat ugliness on nauseous squalor,
he had not been able to affect the arch of the heavens in its lucid
blue, all smokes and vapours driven away by the spring winds; he had
not been able to neutralize the vast views visible from the miners'
sordid, one-storeyed dwellings, the panorama of hill and plain, of
glistening water, towering peaks, and larch forests of emerald green
amid the blue-Scotch pines and the black-green yews.
David in previous letters, looking into his father's budget, had
shown him he could afford to keep a pony and a pony cart. This
therefore was waiting for him at the little station with the
gardener to drive. But in a week, David, already a good horseman,
had learnt to drive under the gardener's teaching, and then was able
to take his delighted father out for whole-day trips to revel in the
beauties of the scenery.
They would have with them a wicker basket containing an ample lunch
prepared by the generous hands of Bridget. They would stop at
some spot on a mountain pass; tether the pony, sit on a plaid
shawl thrown over a boulder, and feast their eyes on green
mountain-shoulders reared against the pale blue sky; or gaze across
ravines not unworthy of Switzerland. Or they would put up pony and
cart at some village inn, explore old battlemented churches and
churchyards with seventeenth and eighteenth century headstones, so
far more tasteful and seemly than the hideous death memorials of the
nineteenth century. And ever and again the old father, looking more
and more like a Druid, would recite that charming Spring song, the
104th Psalm; or fragments of Welsh poetry sounding very good in
Welsh--as no doubt Greek poetry does in properly pronounced Greek,
but being singularly bald and vague in its references to earth, sea,
sky and flora when translated into plain English.
David expressed some such opinions which rather scandalized his
father who had grown up in the conventional school of unbounded,
unreasoning reverence for the Hebrew, Greek and Keltic classics.
From that they passed to the great problems, the undeterminable
problems of the Universe; the awful littleness of men--mere lice,
perhaps, on the scurfy body of a shrinking, dying planet of a
fifth-rate sun, one of a billion other suns. The Revd. Howel like
most of the Christian clergy of all times of course never looked at
the midnight sky or gave any thought to the terrors and mysteries of
astronomy, a science so modern, in fact, that it only came into real
existence two or three hundred years ago; and is even now only taken
seriously by about ten thousand people in Europe and America. Where,
in this measureless universe--which indeed might only be one of
several universes--was God to be found? A God that had been upset by
the dietary of a small desert tribe, who fussed over burnt
sacrifices and the fat of rams at one time; at another objected to
censuses; at another and a later date wanted a human sacrifice to
placate his wrath; or who had washed out the world's fauna and flora
in a flood which had left no geological evidence to attest its
having taken place. "Did you ever think about the Dinosaurs,
father?" said David at the end of some such tirade--an outburst of
free-thinking which in earlier years might have upset that father to
wrath and angry protest, but which now for some reason only left him
dazed and absent-minded. (It was the Colonies that had done it, he
thought, and the studio talk of that dilettante architect. By and
bye, David would distinguish himself at the Bar, marry and settle
down, and resume the orthodox outlook of the English--or as he liked
to call it--the British Church.)
"The Dinosaurs, my boy? No. What were they?"
_David_: "The real Dragons, the Dragons of the prime, that swarmed
over England and Wales and Scotland, and Europe, Asia, and North
America--and I dare say Africa too. One of the most stupendous facts
of what you call 'creation,' though perhaps only one amongst many
skin diseases that have afflicted the planet--Well the Dinosaurs
went on developing and evolving and perfecting--so Rossiter
says--for three million years or so--Then they were scrap-heaped.
What a waste of creative energy!..."
_Father_: "Ah it's Rossiter who puts all these ideas into your head,
is it?"
_David_ (flushing); "Oh dear no! I used to think about them at (is
about to say 'Newnham,' but substitutes 'Malvern')--at Malvern--"
_Father_ (drily): "I'm glad to hear you thought about
something--serious--at any rate--then, in the midst of your scrapes
and truancies--but go on, dear boy. It's a delight to me to hear you
speak. It reminds me--I mean your voice does--of your poor mother.
You know I loved her very tenderly, David, and though it is all past
and done with I believe I should forgive her _now_, if she only came
back to me. I'm sometimes _so_ lonely, boy. I wish you'd marry and
settle down here--there's lots of room for you--some nice girl--and
give me grandchildren before I die. But I suppose I must be patient
and wait first for your call to the Bar. What a dreary long time it
all takes! Why can't they, with one so clever, shorten the term of
probation? Or why wait for that to marry? I could give you an
allowance. As soon as you were called you could then follow the
South Wales circuit--well, go on about your Dinosaurs. I seem to
remember Professor Owen invented them--but _he_ never wavered in his
faith and was the great opponent of that rash man, Darwin. Oh, _I_
remember now the old controversies--what a stalwart was the Bishop
of Winchester! They couldn't bear him at their Scientific
meetings--there was one at Bath, if I recollect right, and he put
them all to the right-about. What about your Dinosaurs? I'm not
denying their existence; it's only the estimates of time that are so
ridiculous. God made them and destroyed them in the great Flood, of
which their fossil remains are the evidence--"
David however would desist from pursuing such futile arguments; feel
surprised, indeed, at his own outbreaks, except that he hated
insincerity. However new and disturbing to his father were these
flashes of the New Learning, in his outward conduct he was orthodox
and extremely well-behaved. The spiritual exercises of the Revd.
Howel had become jejune, and limited very much by his failing sight.
The recovery after the operation had come too late in life to bring
about any expansion of public or private devotions. Family prayers
were reduced to the recital from memory of an exhortation, a
confession, and an absolution, followed by the Lord's Prayer and a
benediction. Services in the church were limited to Morning and
Evening prayers, with Communion on the first Sunday in the month,
and a sermon following Morning prayer. There was no one to play the
organ if the schoolmistress failed to turn up--as she often did.
David however scrupulously turned the normal congregation of
five--Bridget, the maid of the time-being, the gardener-groom, the
sexton, and a baker-church-warden--into six by his unvarying
attendance. In the course of half his stay the rumour of his being
present and of his good looks and great spiritual improvement
attracted quite a considerable congregation, chiefly of young women
and a few sheepish youths; so that his father was at one and the
same time exhilarated and embarrassed. Was this to be a Church
revival? If so, he readily pardoned David his theories on the
Dinosaurs and his doubts as to the unvarying evidence of Divine
Wisdom in the story of Creation.
If any other consideration than a deep affection for this dear old
man and repentance for his unwise ebullitions of Free Thought had
guided David in the matter it was an utter detestation of the
services and the influence of the Calvinist Chapel in the village,
the Little Bethel, presided over by Pastor Prytherch, a fanatical
blacksmith, who alternated spells of secret drunkenness and episodes
of animalism by orgies of self-abasement, during which he--in
half-confessing his own lapses--attributed freely and unrebukedly
the same vices to the male half of his overflowing congregation.
These out-pourings--"Pechadur truenus wyf i! Arglwydd madden i
mi!"--extempore prayers, psalms chanted with a swaying of the body,
hymns sung uproariously, scripture read with an accompaniment of
groans, hysteric laughter, and interjections of assent, and a
rambling discourse--lasting fully an hour, were in the Welsh
language; and David on his three or four visits--and it can be
imagined what a sensation _they_ caused! The Vicar's son--himself
perhaps about to confess his sins!--understood very little of the
subject matter, save from the extravagant gestures of the
participants. But he soon made up his mind that religion for
religion, that expressed by the English--"Well, father, you are
right--the 'British'"--Church in Wales was many hundred times
superior in reasonableness and stability to the negroid ebullitions
of the Calvinists. As a matter of fact they were scarcely more
followers of the reformer Calvin than they were of Ignatius Loyola;
it was just a symptomatic outbreak of some prehistoric Iberian,
Silurian form of worship, something deeply planted in the soil of
Wales, something far older than Druidism, something contemporary
with the beliefs of Neolithic days.
Eighteen years ago, much of Wales was as enslaved by whiskey as are
still Keltic Scotland, Keltiberian Ireland, Lancashire, London and
wicked little Kent. It was only saved from going under completely by
decennial religious revivals, which for three months or so were
followed by total abstinence and a fierce-eyed continence.
Just about this time--during David's extended spring holiday in
Wales (he had brought many law books down with him to read)--there
had begun one of the newspaper-made-famous Revivals. It was led by a
young prophet--a football half-back or whatever they are called,
though I, who prefer thoroughness, would, if I played football,
offer up the whole of my back to bear the brunt--who saw visions of
Teutonically-conceived angels with wings, who heard "voices," was in
constant communication with the Redeemer of Mankind and on familiar
terms with God, had a lovely tenor voice and moved emotional men and
hysterical, love-sick women to tears, even to bellowings by his
prayers and songs. He had for some weeks been confined in publicity
to half-contemptuous paragraphs in the South Wales Press. Then the
_Daily Chronicle_ took him up. Their well-known, emotional-article
writer, Mr. Sigsbee, saw "copy" in him, and--to do him justice (for
there I agreed with him)--a chance to pierce the armour of the
hand-in-glove-with-Government distillers, so went down to Wales to
write him up. For three weeks he became more interesting than a
Cabinet Minister. Indeed Cabinet Ministers or those who aspired to
become such at the next turn of the wheel truckled to him. Some were
afraid he might become a small Messiah and lead Wales into open
revolt; others that he might smash the whiskey trade and impair the
revenue. Mr. Lloyd George going to address a pro-Boer meeting at
Aberystwith (was it?) encountered him at a railway junction,
attended by a court of ex-footballers and reformed roysterers, and
said in the hearing of a reporter "I must fight with the Sword of
the Flesh; but you fight with the Sword of the Spirit"--whatever
that may have meant--and I do not pretend to complete accuracy of
remembrance--I only know I felt very angry with the whole movement
at the time, because it delayed indefinitely the _Daily Chronicle's_
review of my new book. Well this Evan--in all such movements an Evan
is inevitable--Evan Gwyllim Jones--with the black eyes, abundant
black hair, beautiful features (he was a handsome lad) and glorious
voice, addressed meetings in the open air and in every available
building of four walls. Thousands withdrew their names from
foot-ballery, nigh on Two Millions must have taken the pledge--and
not merely an anti-whiskey pledge but a fierce renunciation of the
most diluted alcohol as well; and approximately two hundred and
fifty thousand confessed their sins of unchastity and swore to be
reborn Galahads for the rest of their lives. It was a spiritual
Spring-cleaning, as drastic and as overdone as are the domestic
upheavals known by that name. But it did a vast deal of good, all
the same, to South Wales; and though it was a seventh wave, the tide
of temperance, thrift, cleanliness, bodily and spiritual, has risen
to a higher level of average in the beautiful romantic Principality
ever since. Evan Gwyllim Jones, however, overdid it. He had to
retire from the world to a Home--some said even to a Mental
Hospital. Six months afterwards he emerged, cured of his "voices,"
much plumper, and--perhaps--poor soul--shorn of some of his
illusions and ideals; but he married a grocer's widow of Cardiff,
and the _Daily Chronicle_ mentioned him no more.
The infection of his meetings however penetrated to the agricultural
district in which Pontystrad was situated. Five villages went
completely off their heads. The blacksmith-pastor had to be put
under temporary restraint. Quite decent-looking, unsuspected folk
confessed to far worse sins than they had ever committed. There
arose an aristocracy of outcasts. Three inns where little worse than
bad beer was sold were gutted, respectable farmers' wives drank
Eau-de-Cologne instead of spirits, several over-due marriages took
place, there were a number of premature births, and the membership
of the football clubs was disastrously reduced. Such excitement was
generated that little work was done, and the illegitimate birth rate
of west Glamorganshire--always high--for the opening months of 1903
became even higher.
David was enlisted by the employers of labour, the farmers,
chemical works, mining and smelting-works managers, squires, and
postmasters to restore order. He preached against the Revivalists.
Not with any lack of sympathy, any apology for the real ills which
they denounced. He spoke with emphasis against the loosening of
morality, recommended early marriage, and above all _education_;
denounced the consumption of alcohol so strenuously and convincedly
that then and there as he spoke he resolved himself henceforth to
abstain from anything stronger than lager beer or the lighter
French and German wines. But he threw cold water resolutely on the
fantastical nonsense that accompanied these emotional outbursts of
so-called religion; invited his hearers to study--at any rate
elementarily--astronomy and biology; did not run down football but
advised a moderate interest only being taken in such futile sports;
recommended volunteering and an acquaintance with rifles as far
preferable, seeing that we always stood in danger of a European war
or of a drastic revival of insolent conservatism.
Then he made his appeal to the women. He spoke of the dangers of
this hysteria; the need there was for level-headed house-keeping
women in our councils; how they should first qualify for and then
demand the suffrage, having already attained the civic vote. (Here
some of the employers of labour disapproved, plucked at his arm or
hem of his reefer jacket, and one squire lumbered off the platform.)
But he held on, warming with a theme that hitherto had hardly
interested him. His speeches were above the heads of his peasant
audiences; but they were a more sensitive harp to play on than the
average Anglo-Saxon audience. Many women wept, only decorously, as
he outlined their influence in a reformed village, a purified
Principality. The men applauded frantically because, despite some
prudent reserves, there seemed to be a promise of revolt in his
suggestions. David felt the electric thrill of the orator in harmony
with his audience; who for that reason will strive for further
triumphs, more resounding perorations. He introduced scraps of
Welsh--all his auto-intoxicated brain could remember (How physically
true was that taunt of Dizzy's--"Inebriated with the exuberance of
his own verbosity!").
And the delighted audience shouted back "You're the man we want!
Into Parliament you shall go, Davy-bach" and much else. So David
restored the five villages to sobriety in life and faith, yet left
them with a new enthusiasm kindled. Before he departed on his return
to London and the grind of his profession, he had effected another
change. Because he had spoken as he had spoken and touched the
hearts of emotional people, they came trickling back to his father's
church, to the "British" Church, as David now called it. Little
Bethel was empty, and the pastor-blacksmith not yet out of the
asylum at Swansea. The Revd. Howel Williams trod on air. His sermons
became terribly long and involved, but that was no drawback in the
minds of his Welsh auditory; though it made his son swear inwardly
and reconciled him to the approaching return to Fig Tree Court. The
old Druid felt inspired to convince the hundred people present that
the Church they had returned to _was_ the Church of their fathers,
not only back to Roman times, when Glamorganshire was basking in an
Italian civilization, but further still. He showed how the Druids
were rather to be described as Ante-Christian than Anti--with an
_i_; and played ponderously on this quip. In Druidism, he
observed--I am sure I cannot think why, but it was his hobby--you
had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the
human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic
Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not
else. He read portions of his privately-published _Tales of
Taliessin_. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked
face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own
lapses into conventional, stereotyped religion. The Church of
Britain might be stiff and stomachered, as the offspring of
Elizabeth, but it was stately, it was respectable--as outwardly was
the great virgin Queen--and it was easy to live with. Only he
counselled his father to do two things: never to preach for more
than half-an-hour--even if it meant keeping a small American clock
going inside the pulpit-ledge; and to obtain a curate, so that the
new enthusiasm might not cool and his father verging on seventy,
might not overstrain himself. He pointed out that by letting off
most of the glebe land and pretermitting David's "pocket-money" he
might secure a young and energetic Welsh-speaking curate, the
remainder of whose living-wage would--he felt sure--be found out of
the diocesan funds of St. David's bishopric.
The Revd. Howel let him have his way (This was after David had
returned to Fig Tree Court) and by the following June a stalwart
young curate was lodged in the village and took over the bulk of the
progressive church work from the fumbling hands of the dear old
Vicar. He was a thoroughly good sort, this curate, troubled by no
possible doubts whatever, a fervent tee-totaller, a half-back or
whole back--I forget which--at football, a good boxer, and an
unwearied organizer. Little Bethel was sold and eventually turned
into a seed-merchant's repository and drying-room. The curate in
course of time married the squire's daughter and I dare say long
afterwards succeeded the Revd. Howel Vaughan Williams when the
latter died--but that date is still far ahead of my story. At any
rate--isn't it _droll_ how these things come about?--David's action
in this matter, undertaken he hardly knew why--did much to fetter
Mr. Lloyd George's subsequent attempts to disestablish the British
Church in Wales.
What did Bridget think of all this, of the spiritual evolution of
her nursling, of his identity with the vicious, shifty, idle youth
whose uncanny gift of design seemed to have been completely lost
after his stay in South Africa? David Vavasour Williams had left
home to the relief of his father and the whole village, if even to
the half-pitying regret of his old nurse, in 1896. He had spent a
year or more in Mr. Praed's studio studying to be an architect or a
scene painter. Then somehow or other he did not get on with Mr.
Praed and he enlisted impulsively in a South African Police force
(in the Army, it seemed to Bridget). He had somehow become involved
in a war with a South African people, called by Bridget "the Wild
Boars"; he is wounded or ill in hospital; is little heard of, almost
presumed dead. Throughout all these five years he scarcely ever
writes to his forgiving father; maintains latterly a sulky silence.
Then, suddenly in the summer of 1901, returns; preceded only by a
telegram but apparently vouched for by this Mr. Praed; and announces
himself as having forgotten his Welsh and most of the events of his
youth, but having acquired a changed heart, and an anxiety to make
up for past ill-behaviour by a present good conduct which seems
almost miraculous.
Well: miracles were easily believed in by Bridget. Perhaps his
father's prayers had been answered. Providence sometimes meted out
an overwhelming boon to really good people. David was certainly a
Vavasour, if there was nothing Williamsy about his looks.... His
mother, in Mrs. Bridget Evanwy's private opinion, had been a
hussy.... Was David his father's son? Hadn't she once caught Mrs.
Howel Williams kissing a young stranger behind a holly bush and
wasn't that why Bridget had really been sent away? She had returned
to take charge of the pretty, motherless little boy when she herself
was a widow disappointed of children, and the child was only three.
Would she ever turn against her nursling now, above all, when he was
showing himself such a son to his old father? Not she. He might be
who and what he would. He was giving another ten years of renewed
life to the dear old Druid and the continuance of a comfortable home
to his old Nannie.
They talked a great deal up at Little Bethel of a "change of
heart." Perhaps such things really took place, though Bridget Evanwy
from a shrewd appraisement of the Welsh nature doubted it. She would
like to, but couldn't quite believe that an angel from heaven had
taken possession of David's body and come here to play a divine
part; because David sometimes talked so strangely--seemed not only
to doubt the existence of a heavenly host, but even of Something
beyond, so awful in Bridget's mind that she hardly liked to define
it in words, though in her own Welsh tongue it was so earthily
styled "the Big Man."
However, at all costs, she would stand by David ... and without
quite knowing why, she decided that on all future visits she herself
would "do out" his room, would attend to him exclusively. The "girl"
was a chatterer, albeit she looked upon Mr. David with eyes of awe
and a most respectful admiration, while David on his part scarcely
bestowed on her a glance.