It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of a day late in april. The
sun shone with bright warmth, a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea.
Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with
that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue
vault of the heavens. Gildea was descending the steps of the entrance to
St. Mary’s Cathedral, accompanied by a young man of about his own age. At
the foot of the steps they both paused.
“Well,” said Gildea with a look, “You will be at my rooms in time for
lunch, you say?”
The other nodded, and, in a few moments, saluting one another with a
movement of the hand, they parted. The young man went with a quick firm
step in the direction of St. James’ Church, while Gildea sauntered across
the road into the Domain. He was thinking of the young man, Francis
Fitzgerald, a young Jesuit whom he had met years ago at a seaside place
in the south of France, and who, as he said, for the sake of his health,
had come out on a voyage to Australia.
“It is wonderful,” said Gildea to himself, “how quickly and thoroughly
the religious bodies are waking up to the intellectual necessities of the
time. Romans—Anglicans—Lutherans, and even Calvinists are sucking lustily
at the two paps of the Modern Spirit which we call Science and Culture.
It is the instinct of self-preservation. If they do not suck they will
starve. But ah, how many of us are cross-tempered enough to prefer to
starve rather than imbibe the milk of a cross-tempered mother!” He looked
up with a fine smile, suddenly realizing his humour of thought. “I am
quite serious,” he said to himself, the smile deepening and broadening,
lighting up his face with amusement, “which shows how adaptive I am.
Really now, I listened to Fitzgerald’s hopes and beliefs in the future
of Romanism with quite as much interest as if I were a Romanist myself.
I can quite conceive of myself taking very considerable pains to forward
a cause in which somebody else believed. This surely was the central
idea of my attachment to Olivia Bruce? I used to think I should be
quite satisfied to live the life of a poet in that of my poetess? So
far, this power of living your own life in the life of one you love has
been a female gift. And indeed I have often thought that I should have
been better as a woman. I can quite imagine myself as Lady Bellfield
or d’Israeli’s delightful Berengaria; whereas now, I am but an aimless
wanderer on the face of an aimless planet, a pilgrim without a shrine.”
He walked on half-thoughtful half-amused, till he had crossed the Domain
and found himself opposite the Picture Gallery and the Botanical Gardens.
He entered the gardens, and was proceeding down one of the walks when,
some fifteen yards before him, he beheld a well-known figure. It was
Maddock, Maddock standing at the side of the walk, observing a plant
through his pince-nez with serene interest. Gildea came up to him with
pleasure.
“Ah, Doctor,” he said, “you here! This is a surprise!”
They shook hands: greeted one another, and exchanged health notes both of
themselves and Mrs. Maddock, as they went on down the walk together, the
Doctor rubbing his glasses with his silk handkerchief and keeping step.
“The truth is, my dear fellow,” he said, his head up and moving from side
to side as he drew into himself the enjoyment of the fine morning air
and scene, “the truth is, I am here for a holiday—or rather, for half
a holiday. Sydney is a favourite place of mine.—But,” he added in his
humorous confidential way, “you know I don’t care for the _people_! They
are not in earnest enough! I would sooner, I believe, have an earnest
atheist than a lukewarm orthodox man. Isn’t it your friend Renan who says
somewhere, that the atheist has an idea of things, a quite inadequate
idea, it is true, but still an idea, whereas ‘the average sensual man’
has none?—or something to that effect.”
“Yes,” said Gildea, “he says so; and he adds elsewhere that ‘atheism is
one sense the grossest of anthropomorphisms. The atheist sees justly
that God does not act in this world after the manner of man; hence
he concludes that he does not exist; he would believe if he beheld a
miracle—in other words, if God acted as a finite force with a determinate
object in view.’”
“That is good,” said Maddock, “I did not give Renan credit for saying
such a thing.”
“No,” said Gildea, “you have never got much further in Biblical criticism
than the Germans. Strauss satisfies you as the great _Against_, and poor
Westcott as the gigantic _For_!”
They both laughed.
“Come, come,” said Maddock, “you must not poke fun at me!”
“It is impossible,” Gildea answered, “to poke fun at an ecclesiastic who
calls Heine ‘a great poet and brilliant philosopher.’”
“Ah, you have been reading my last polemic, I see?—Yes, you _must_ have
been reading it; for no newspaper man would ever think of quoting an
opinion like that.”
“I have been reading it with admiration and wonder: admiration at its
excellence as polemical work, and wonder that you should take the
trouble to castigate a production which you yourself declare to be, as a
contribution to theological knowledge, utterly useless.”
“Yes, but did I not explain myself? The book is fundamentally vicious.
It confirms the shallow heterodox in their heterodoxy, the shallow
orthodox in their orthodoxy. It gives forth light to no one and darkness
to everyone. Progress in foolishness and stupidity, that is all that it
signalises; the foolishness of ‘go-aheadism,’ the stupidity of re-action.
I have no patience with a man of presumable intelligence who could write
such a book.”
“But do you not think that your attack on it will only, by bringing it
into public notice, increase its powers of mischief?”
“I hope not. I hope that I have sufficiently laid bare its gross
ignorance of the subject of which it treats to bring it into that
contempt whose fruit is oblivion.”
“In England—in London or in any country or capital where there is a
large intellectual life—this might be so. But am I not right, Doctor,
in believing that this Victorian Melbourne of yours is a place where
pure intellectual life scarcely exists? You have the mass of intelligent
money-makers who care, or who do not care, for things (I will not say
religious but) sectarian. Then there are those who care for things
political; but where will you find any number of men who aim at making
their life the purely intellectual life? They are all partizans here.
When, therefore, you attack a Rationalist like Judge Parker, all the
Rationalists rally round him, just as the orthodox rally round you; and
the result is, as the _Argus_ says, a boxing match, wherein the great
thing is to at all price shout down their man and shout up your own.
Truth turns away in disgust from such an exhibition of blind deaf bawling
partizanary. These men are not of the sort that are open to reason: you
cannot lay bare to such as these the gross ignorance or perfect science
of their champion; they will only hiss or applaud as you blame or praise
him. I may be wrong: my observation of your so-called intelligent public,
is, you know, necessarily but small.”
Maddock kept silence with rumpled brows. At last:
“I do not know,” he said, “that you are not, after all, to a large degree
right. We are very narrow here. A thing done in the street is done in the
city, and indeed in the whole country!”
“And am I not right in thinking that the only two native subjects,
which are capable of arousing public interest and curiosity here, are
those which appeal to the two portions of your mass of intelligent
money-makers—things pertaining to business, and things sectarian?”
The Doctor suddenly regained his humour.
“Are,” he said, the deep humorous smile playing about his mouth, “are all
the fashionable young men who come out here in yachts as acute observers
as you, Sir Horace?—But I object to your word sectarian: you should say
religious. I am quite ready to admit that (to put it as a Melbourne
printer put it to me the other day) the only subject that will pay for
book-printing here is Religion, and Religion, alas, in its polemical
aspect. But I cannot look upon this, as you seem to do, as a great
misfortune. I—I ... well, I may say _candidly_, that I rather _like_ a
bit of polemics now and then, and the shouts of the men round the ropes
do not altogether disgust me, as of course” (his eyebrows went up) “they
ought to do! No, I do not look upon that purely intellectual life of
yours as by any means the ideal for us to aim at. It smacks too much of
dilettantism for _me_!”
Gildea smiled.
“Dear Doctor,” he said, “we all know that you prefer a climate where
the sky is not always a cloudless vault of blue insipidity. The sound
and feel of a buffeting wind is pleasant to you. As I said just now,
you prefer Strauss to Renan, and the good secular Saint Matthew Arnold
finds small favour in your eyes. Now too that you are taking to science,
I expect every day to hear you tell us Cuvier was a greater man than
Darwin, and that Huxley is an impudent young amphioxus that has no place
beside the dignity of our dear old behemoth, Owen.”
“Now I really won’t let you poke fun at me,” said the Doctor, “I really
won’t! The next thing is, that you will be saying something rude about
Professor Mosley and his “Ruling Ideas in Early Ages,” and scoffing at my
idea of having some of his essays reproduced in our _Daily Telegraph_.”
“Oh no, Doctor, I will not do that. Even Mosley’s essays are better than
the sermons of the local ecclesiastics.”
“You are very impudent,” said Maddock, his face all beaming, “to call me
a local ecclesiastic! I shall have to get you to write a pamphlet on my
review of ‘Religionless Religion,’ so as to be able to denounce you _ex
cathedra_!”
“Well, I should very much like to do so, only ... you know my cowardice:
I cannot write——”
“Even letters to your best friends, to explain that you have only gone
off to sea at an hour’s notice, and are not, as they anxiously expected,
drowned, or murdered and secreted in some hole in the slums.”
“I prostrated myself in apology to Mrs. Maddock.”
“Yes, in over a week! As for Dr. Maddock, of course such a casual
acquaintance as _he_ could not expect.... Ah, you are a quite too
eccentric young man, Sir Horace! I wish you were well married, with a
definite aim in life. Someday one of your wild freaks will end you, and
then, what, what will have been the result of those great abilities with
which God has gifted you?—Now,” proceeded the Doctor, “this is not an
extract from the _Daily Telegraph_ sermon corner, but only the expression
of the affectionate anxiety of one who hopes you will allow him to call
himself your true friend.”
Gildea kept silence for a moment. Talk of this sort only served to show
him how completely his real inner view of things was unknown to his
companion, and so the idea of making an answer did not occur to him: he
felt how useless it would be. Then he genially thanked the Doctor for his
friendship and its kind wishes, and added lightly:
“You ask what will be the result of, as you are pleased to say, those
great abilities with which God has gifted me. The result (you perceive
it) will be nothing; but, Doctor, what, let me ask you, in a hundred
years will be the result of those great abilities with which God has
gifted _you_? In the hundred and first year we shall start equal; and
I, who have not a belief in a personal God and a personal immortality
as _you_ have, find the whole matter, I confess, rather absurd! This
would not probably have been so always. If I had lived in the days when
action indeed contained the highest stakes of life, I should have played
for them; but, as it is, the highest stakes now belong to the thinker,
the writer, and I—I cannot write ... even letters! I, like all my
contemporaries, am more or less under the sad dominion of the perception
of, what Leopardi calls, the ‘infinita vanità del tutto,’ but, unlike the
best of them, I have no care for the only immortality we have left, the
immortality of Art or Science. I think of the hundred, or thousand, or
million and first year, and find myself smiling.”
Gildea was soliloquising, Maddock forgotten. He had, then, after all,
drifted into making the answer, the idea of making which had, by reason
of its clear uselessness, not occurred to him; and yet he had not made
it to Maddock, but to himself. Maddock, indeed, did not altogether
understand it, but the feeling of it, the belief that inspired it, he
felt and hastened to reply to. He laid his hand gently on Gildea’s arm,
bringing him to a pause, and said simply:
“_Look!_”
They had come down as far as Farm Cove—skirted it, turning off along Lady
Macquarie’s Walk—then mounted up onto the drive, and, having passed by
the Chair, were now standing on the brow of the slope with an open view
of Garden Island (Clark Island being hidden), the harbour, and the woody
hills behind it. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and
there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were
moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Light and shade lay everywhere
in alternate streaks or patches. One round piece of water to the left
was like a burnished blazing mirror of steel. Other parts were blue,
gray, or dark, reflecting the cloud-colours above them. The anchored
ships rose and fell gently, their flags fluttering. A steamer came
stealing out of one of the harbour arms into the open. The only sounds
of life were the far-off hammer-strokes of the builders, the occasional
cry of the white fleeting sea-gulls, the striking of a ship’s bells, the
cricket humming at their feet.
“And,” Maddock said, in his deep voice of earnestness, “in the face of
such a scene as this—the free glory of nature so great and so glad,
the wonderful toil and effort and happiness of mankind—you will say to
yourself: ‘_There is no soul in me, for there is no God to give it!_’
Ah, my dear Sir Horace, you surprise and grieve me! Are you not—you, oh
heavens, _you_!—at heart an atheist? are you not guilty of that grossest
of anthropomorphisms yourself?”
Gildea smiled, a fine sweet smile of sadness that made even the strong
steady heart of his companion turn faint for a moment and sick. There was
something so absolutely inevitably hopeless, as it seemed to Maddock, in
this strange soul that he saw before him, now for the first time laid
bare. Here was a patient for which the physician felt he had no power
of healing or even alleviation. What view of christian faith and hope
and love did not this strange soul know? Maddock, for the first time in
his life, felt himself in the presence of one, the breadth and depth
and height of whose spiritual experience encompassed him like an ocean.
The words of remonstrance died on his lips: exhortation lay lifeless in
him: silence and sorrow possessed him. He turned away with a heavy sigh,
a sigh which was the unconscious acknowledgment to himself that life
and death, time and eternity, man and God, could indeed be read in two
diametrically different ways. For the first time in his life he realized
the truth of “the Everlasting No” in a human soul greater than his own.
They walked on together for a little in silence. Then Gildea said as
simply and naturally as if nothing unusual had happened:
“Now, Doctor, tell me will you come and have lunch with me? Mrs. Maddock,
you say, has shaken you off for the sake of a long morning with Lady
Whitfield, and why should you not retort on her spinster’s déjeuner with
a bachelor’s lunch? I ought to have thought of it before.”
The Doctor again suddenly regained his humour.
“Thank you,” he said, “I shall be charmed.”
“Nay,” said Gildea, smiling, “but I must bid you pause a moment, aimless
dreamer that I am, and tell you who you will meet there. Perhaps you will
want your assent back again.”
“Speak on,” said Maddock, “and, provided it is not some one who will
object to my smoking afterwards, I ... I don’t think I shall!”
“The guests, then, are three in number. Firstly, James Alcock, who, they
tell me, is the most secular and scientific member of all the Australian
Legislative Assemblies——”
“Go on,” said Maddock.
“Doctor,” Gildea said, “he reads Haeckel and swears by no other prophet
of Science. Pause before it is too late. They say too that he sleeps
every saturday and sunday with Mill “On Liberty” under his pillow, and
all Spencer’s “Principles” strewed about the counterpane. He knew my
father years ago in England, and his heart warms towards me as towards an
incipient disciple.”
“Secondly—”
“Secondly, Francis Fitzgerald, a young man learned with all the learning
of the Egyptians; a pilgrim and devotee at that simple west-England
shrine which holds the Catholic pearl beyond all price, John Henry
Newman; a scholar of the Parisian seminaries; a pupil of the inner Jesuit
circle—”
“Thirdly—”
“Frank Hawkesbury, the young Australian poet; a Socialist, delighting in
Trades-Unions, Religious Revivals (the Salvation Army is a hobby of his),
and Secular Organizations with a grand impartiality! Nay, it is even
whispered that he had dealings with Holden and the Irish and Continental
Nihilists two years ago in London. Our friend Mrs. Medwin almost fainted
when Sydney Medwin asked her if she would care to know him.”
“I have looked through one of the young man’s books of poems,” Maddock
said, serenely, “and rather liked them. He is in earnest. Your lunch
will be amusing.—It smacks to me,” he added, with a touch of grimness
in his humour, “a little of those shows one sees now and then at the
street-corners. They call them, I believe, happy families.”
Gildea laughed.
“Yes, Doctor,” he said, “but what if the animals should take to fighting?
Alas, then, for the canaries and the mice, who will be worried and eaten
by the dogs and the cats.”
“Which are who, or who are which?”
“Let us say that Alcock is a dog, and Fitzgerald a canary.”
“Then _you_, I suppose, are the mouse and _I_ the cat? But what is your
young Australian poet to be? You have left him out.”
“Oh, he will be a rabbit. You will see that he can burrow. It is the
forte of Socialists, burrowing.—Now,” he proceeded, “we must go this way
if we are to get to my rooms in time. And as we go, will you let me first
express some tentative thoughts of mine, and then ask you a few questions
about your friend Mr. Parker and yourself?”
“Ask on,” said Maddock, getting into step, “and I will do my best to
answer you.”