Saul Kane was an amateur prizefighter. He and his friend Bill have a
fight in the opening lines of the tale, and Saul wins. This victory
is followed by the usual debauch, which lasts until all the drunken
crowd are asleep on the floor of the "Lion." No Russian novelist, nor
a Dostoievesky, nor another, ever dared such realism as Masefield has
given us in his picture of this night's sin. He makes sin all that it
is--black and hideous:
"From three long hours of gin and smokes,
And two girls' breath and fifteen blokes,
A warmish night and windows shut
The room stank like a fox's gut.
The heat, and smell, and drinking deep
Began to stun the gang to sleep."
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
But this was too much for Saul Kane. He had still enough decency left
to be ashamed. He wanted air. He went to a window and threw it open:
"I opened window wide and leaned
Out of that pigsty of the fiend,
And felt a cool wind go like grace
About the sleeping market-place.
The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly,
The bells chimed, Holy, Holy, Holy;
And in a second's pause there fell
The cold note of the chapel bell,
And then a cock crew flapping wings,
And summat made me think of things!"
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
There it is: sin, and conviction of sin. Perhaps he thought of another
man who had virtually betrayed the Christ, and the cock crew and made
that other "think o' things."
Then came the reaction from that conviction; the battle against that
same conviction that he must give up sin and surrender to the Christ;
and a terrific battle it is, and a terrific description of that battle
Masefield gives us, lightninglike in its vividness until there comes
the little woman of God, Miss Bourne (a deaconess, if you please), who
has always known the better man in Saul, who has followed him with her
Christly love like "The Hound of Heaven." And how tenderly, yet how
insistently, how pleadingly she speaks:
"'Saul Kane,' she said, 'when next you drink,
Do me the gentleness to think
That every drop of drink accursed
Makes Christ within you die of thirst;
That every dirty word you say
Is one more flint upon His way,
Another thorn about His head,
Another mock by where He tread;
Another nail another cross;
All that you are is that Christ's loss.'"
The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
These searching words were beyond defeat. They went home to his already
convicted heart and mind like arrows. They hurt. They cut. They
awakened. They called. They pierced. They pounded with giant fists.
They lashed like spiked whips. They burned like a soul on fire. They
clamored, and they whispered like a mother's love, and at last his
heart opened: