the worshipped God, was to blame Him thoroughly and completely for
every human misfortune and to deny the responsibility of mankind for
its current muddle and wretchedness. Throughout the land and
throughout most of the world, Sunday after Sunday, by chant and hymn
and prayer and gesture, it was being dinned into the minds of young
people, whenever for a moment the service broke through the surface
of their protective instinctive inattention, that mankind was
worthless and hopeless, the helpless plaything of a moody, impulsive,
vain, and irresistible Being. This rain of suggestion came between
their minds and the Sun of Life; it hid the Wonderful from them; it
robbed them of access to the Spirit of Courage. But so alien was
this doctrine of abasement from the heart of man, that for the most
part the congregation sat or stood or knelt in rows in its pews
repeating responses and singing mechanically, with its minds
distracted to a thousand distant more congenial things, watching the
deportment of its neighbours, scheming about business or pleasure,
wandering in reverie.
"There would come at times into this service, sometimes but not
always, parts of another service, the Communion Service. This was
the reduced remainder of that Catholic Mass of which we have all
learnt in our histories. As you know, the world of Christianity was
still struggling, nineteen hundred years after Christianity had
begun, to get rid of the obsession of a mystical blood sacrifice, to
forget a traditional killing of a God-man, that was as old as
agriculture and the first beginnings of human settlement. The
English State Church was so much a thing of compromise and tradition
that in the two churches it had in Cherry Gardens the teaching upon
this issue was diametrically opposed; one, the new and showy one, St.
Jude's, was devoted to an exaggeration of the importance of the
Communion, called it the Mass, called the table on which it was
celebrated the Altar, called the Rev. Mr. Snapes the Priest, and
generally emphasised the ancient pagan interpretation, while the
other, the little old church of St. Osyth, called its priest a
Minister, its altar the Lord's Table, and the Communion the Lord's
Supper, denied all its mystical importance, and made it merely a
memorial of the life and death of the Master. These age-long
controversies between the immemorial temple worship of our race and
the new life of intellectual and spiritual freedom that had then been
dawning in the world for three or four centuries were far above my
poor little head as I fretted and 'behaved myself' in our sitting.
To my youthful mind the Communion Service meant nothing more than a
long addition to the normal tediums of worship. In those days I had
a pathetic belief in the magic of prayer, and oblivious of the
unflattering implications of my request I would whisper throughout
the opening prayers and recitations of the morning: 'Pray God there
won't be a Communion Service. Pray God there won't be a Communion
Service.'
"Then would come the sermon, the original composition of the Rev. Mr.
Snapes, and the only thing in the whole service that was not set and
prescribed and that had not been repeated a thousand times before.
"Mr. Snapes was a youngish pinkish man with pinkish golden hair and a
clean-shaven face; he had small chubby features like a cluster of
_champignons_, an expression of beatific self-satisfaction, and a
plump voice. He had a way of throwing back the ample white sleeve of
his surplice when he turned the pages of his manuscript, a sort of
upthrow of the posed white hand, that aroused in me one of the
inexplicable detestations of childhood. I used to hate this gesture,
watch for its coming and squirm when it came.
"The sermons were so much above my head that I cannot now tell what
any of them were about. He would talk of things like the 'Comfort of
the Blessed Eucharist' and the 'Tradition of the Fathers of the
Church.' He would discourse too of what he called the Feasts of the
Church, though a collection plate was the nearest approach to
feasting we saw. He made much of Advent and Epiphany and
Whitsuntide, and he had a common form of transition to modern
considerations, 'And we too, dear Brethren, in these latter days have
our Advents and our Epiphanies.' Then he would pass to King Edward's
proposed visit to Lowcliffe or to the recent dispute about the Bishop
of Natal or the Bishop of Zanzibar. You cannot imagine how remote it
was from anything of moment in our normal lives.
"And then suddenly, when a small boy was losing all hope of this
smooth voice ever ceasing, came a little pause and then the blessed
words of release: 'And now to God the Father, God the Son----'
"It was over! There was a stir throughout the church. We roused
ourselves, we stood up. Then we knelt for a brief moment of apparent
prayer and then we scrabbled for hats, coats, and umbrellas, and so
out into the open air, a great pattering of feet upon the pavement,
dispersing this way and that, stiff greetings of acquaintances, Prue
to the baker's for the Sunday dinner and the rest of us straight home.
"Usually there were delightful brown potatoes under the Sunday joint
and perhaps there would be a fruit pie also. But in the spring came
rhubarb, which I hated. It was held to be peculiarly good for me,
and I was always compelled to eat exceptionally large helpings of
rhubarb tart.
"In the afternoon there was Sunday school or else 'Children's
Service,' and, relieved of the presence of our parents, we three
children went to the school-house or to the church again to receive
instruction in the peculiarities of our faith. In the Sunday school
untrained and unqualified people whom we knew in the week-days as
shop assistants and an auctioneer's clerk and an old hairy deaf
gentleman named Spendilow, collected us in classes and discoursed to
us on the ambiguous lives and doings of King David of Israel and of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the misbehaviour of Queen Jezebel and
the like topics. And we sang easy hymns in unison. At times our
teachers spoke of the Master of Mankind, but they spoke without
understanding; they spoke of him as a sort of trickster who worked
miracles and achieved jail delivery from the tomb. And so had
'saved' us--in spite of the manifest fact that we were anything but
saved. The teaching of the Master was, you know, buried under these
tales of Resurrection and Miracles for two thousand years. He was a
light shining in the darkness and the darkness knew it not. And of
the great past of life, of the races of men and their slow growth in
knowledge, of fears and dark superstitions and the dawning victories
of truth, of the conquest and sublimation of human passions through
the ages, of the divinity of research and discovery, of the latent
splendour of our bodies and senses, and the present dangers and
possibilities amidst which the continually more crowded masses of our
race were then blundering so tragically and yet with such bright
gleams of hope and promise, we heard no talk at all. We were given
no intimation that there was so much as a human community with a
common soul and an ultimate common destiny. It would have been
scandalous and terrifying to those Sunday-school teachers to have
heard any such things spoken about in Sunday school.
"And mind you," said Sarnac, "there was no better preparation for
life in all the world then than the sort of thing I was getting. The
older church of St. Osyth was in the hands of the Rev. Thomas
Benderton, who dispersed a dwindling congregation by bellowing
sermons full of the threat of hell. He had scared my mother to the
church of St. Jude by his frequent mention of the devil, and the
chief topic of his discourse was the sin of idolatry; he treated it
always with especial reference to the robes adopted by Mr. Snapes
when he celebrated Holy Communion and to something obscure that he
did with small quantities of bread and wine upon his Communion table.
"Of what the Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists did and
taught in their places of resort, their chapels and Sunday schools, I
do not know very exactly, because my mother would have been filled
with a passion of religious terror if ever I had gone near those
assemblies. But I know that their procedure was only a plainer
version of our church experiences with still less of the Mass and
still more of the devil. The Primitive Methodists, I know, laid
their chief stress upon the belief that the greater portion of
mankind, when once they had done with the privations and miseries of
this life, would be tortured exquisitely for ever and ever in hell.
I got this very clearly because a Primitive Methodist boy a little
older than myself conveyed his anxieties to me one day when we had
gone for a walk into Cliffstone.
"He was a bent sort of boy with a sniff and he wore a long white
woollen comforter; there hasn't been such a figure in the world now
for hundreds of years. We walked along the promenade that followed
the cliff edge, by the bandstand and by the people lounging in
deck-chairs. There were swarms of people in their queer holiday
clothes, and behind, rows of the pallid grey houses in which they
lodged. And my companion bore his testimony. 'Mr. Molesly 'e says
that the Day of Judgment might come any minute--come in fire and
glory before ever we get to the end of these Leas. And all them
people'd be tried....'
"'Jest as they are?'
"'Jest as they are. That woman there with the dog and that fat man
asleep in 'is chair and--the policeman.'
"He paused, a little astonished at the Hebraic daring of his
thoughts. 'The policeman,' he repeated. 'They'd be weighed and
found wanting, and devils would come and torture them. Torture that
policeman. Burn him and cut him about. And everybody. Horrible,
horrible torture....'
"I had never heard the doctrines of Christianity applied with such
particularity before. I was dismayed.
"'I sh'd 'ide,' I said.
"''_E_'d see you. '_E_'d see you and tell the devils,' said my
little friend. ''_E_ sees the wicked thoughts in us now....'"
"But did people really believe such stuff as that?" cried Sunray.
"As far as they believed anything," said Sarnac. "I admit it was
frightful, but so it was. Do you realise what cramped, distorted
minds grew up under such teaching in our under-nourished, infected
bodies?"
"Few people could have really believed so grotesque a fairy-tale as
hell," said Radiant.
"More people believed than you would think," said Sarnac. "Few
people, of course, held it actively for long--or they would have gone
mad--but it was in the background of a lot of minds. And the others?
The effect of this false story about the world upon the majority of
minds was a sort of passive rejection. They did not deny, but they
refused to incorporate the idea with the rest of their thoughts. A
kind of dead place, a scar, was made just where there ought to have
been a sense of human destiny, a vision of life beyond the immediate
individual life ...
"I find it hard to express the state of mind into which one grew.
The minds of the young had been outraged by these teachings; they
were no longer capable of complete mental growth, a possibility had
been destroyed. Perhaps we never did really take into ourselves and
believe that grotesque fairy-tale, as you call it, about hell but,
because of what it had done to our minds, we grew up without a living
faith and without a purpose. The nucleus of our religious being was
this suppressed fear of hell. Few of us ever had it out fairly into
the light of day. It was considered to be bad taste to speak of any
such things, or indeed of any of the primaries of life, either by way
of belief or denial. You might allude circuitously. Or joke. Most
of the graver advances in life were made under a mask of
facetiousness.
"Mentally that world in the days of Mortimer Smith was a world
astray. It was astray like a lost dog and with no idea of direction.
It is true that the men of that time were very like the men of this
time--in their possibilities--but they were unhealthy in mind as well
as body, they were adrift and incoherent. Walking as we do in the
light, and by comparison simply and directly, their confusion, the
tortuous perplexity of their thoughts and conduct, is almost
inconceivable to us. There is no sort of mental existence left in
our world now, to which it can be compared."
§ 5
"I think I mentioned the line of hills, the Downs that bounded the
world of my upbringing to the north. What lay beyond them was a
matter for wonder and speculation to me long before I was able to
clamber to their crests. In summer time the sun set behind them to
the north-west, often in a glow of gold and splendour, and I remember
that among my fancies was a belief that the Day of Judgment was over
there and that Celestial City to which Mr. Snapes would some day lead
us--in procession, of course, and with a banner.
"My first ascent of this childhood's boundary must have occurred when
I was eight or nine. I do not remember with whom I went or any other
particulars, but I have a very acute memory of my disappointment at
looking down a long, very gentle slope and seeing nothing but fields
and hedges and groups of large sheep feeding. What I had expected to
find I cannot now remember. I seem to have noted only the foreground
then, and it must have been after many such excursions that I began
to realise the variegated spaciousness of the country to the north.
The view indeed went very far; on a clear day we saw blue hills
nearly twenty miles away; there were woodlands and parklands, brown
ridges of plough-land that became golden ridges of corn in summer
time, village churches amidst clustering greenery, and the gleaming
of ponds and lakes. Southward the horizon lifted as the Downs were
ascended and the breadth of the sea-belt increased. It was my father
who drew my attention to that, on the first occasion of our crossing
the Downs together.
"'Go as 'igh as you like, 'Arry,' he said, 'and the sea goes up as
'igh. There it is, you see--level with us and we ever so 'igh above
Cherry Gardens. And yet it don't _drown'd_ Cherry Gardens! And why
don't it drown'd Cherry Gardens seeing that it might? Tell me that,
'Arry.'
"I couldn't.
"'Providence,' said my father triumphantly. 'Providence does it.
'Olds back the sea, Thus Far. And over there, see 'ow plain it is!
is France.'
"I saw France and it was exceptionally plain.
"'Sometimes you see France and sometimes you don't,' said my father.
'There's a lesson in that too, my boy, for those who care to take it.'
"It had always been the custom of my father to go out after tea on
Sundays, summer and winter alike, and walk right over the Downs to
Chessing Hanger, six miles and more away. He went, I knew, to see my
Uncle John, Uncle John Julip, my mother's brother, who was gardener
to Lord Bramble of Chessing Hanger Park. But it was only when he
began to take me with him that I realised that these walks had any
other motive than fraternal (in law) affection and the natural desire
of a pent-up shopkeeper for exercise. But from the first journey on
I knew that the clue to these expeditions lay in the burthens with
which we returned to Cherry Gardens. Always there was supper in the
cosy little gardener's cottage, and always as we departed we picked
up an unobtrusive load of flowers, fruit or vegetables, celery, peas,
aubergines, mushrooms or what-not, and returned through the dusk or
moonlight or darkness or drizzle as the season and the weather might
determine to the little shop. And sometimes my father would be
silent or whistle softly and sometimes he would improve our journey
with a discourse on the wonders of nature, the beauty of goodness,
and the beneficence of Providence to man.
"He talked of the moon one moonlight night. 'Look at it, 'Arry,' he
said--'a dead world. Like a skull it is, up there, stripped of its
soul which is its flesh so to speak and all its trees, which, if you
take me, were its 'air and its whiskers--stripped and dead for ever
and ever. Dry as a bone. And everyone who lived there gone too.
Dust and ashes and gone.'
"'Where they gone, farver?' I would ask.
"'Gorn to their judgment,' he would explain with gusto. 'Kings and
greengroshers, all the lot of 'em, tried and made sheep and goats of,
and gone to their bliss or their sufferings, 'Arry. According to
their iniquities. Weighed and found wanting.'
"Long pause.
"'It's a pity,' he said.
"'What is, farver?'
"'Pity it's over. It 'ud be something to look at, them running about
up there. Friendly-like it 'ud be. But that's questioning the ways
of Providence, that is. I suppose we'd be always staring up and
falling over things.... You never see a thing in this world, 'Arry,
that you think isn't right but what when you come to think it out it
isn't wiser than you knew. Providence is as deep as E is I and you
can't get be'ind 'im. And don't go banging them pears against your
side, my boy; they'm Wi'yums, and they won't like it.'
"About the curious habits of animals and the ways and migrations of
birds my father would also talk very freely.
"'Me and you, 'Arry, we walk by the light of reason. We 'ave
reasonable minds given us to do it with. But animals and birds and
worms and things, they live by Instink; they jus' feel they 'ave to
do this or that and they do it. It's Instink keeps the whale in the
sea and the bird in the air; but we go where our legs carry us as
reason 'as directed. You can't ask an animal Why did you do this? or
Why did you do that?--you just 'it it; but a man you ask and 'e 'as
to answer, being a reasonable creature. That's why we 'as jails and
punishment and are answerable for our sins, 'Arry. Every sin we 'as
to answer for, great or small. But an animal don't 'ave to answer.
It's innocent. You 'it it or else you leave it be....'
"My father thought for a time. 'Except for dogs and some _old_
cats,' he said. He mused among his memories for a time. 'I've known
some _sinful_ cats, 'Arry,' he said.
"He would enlarge on the wonders of instinct.
"He would explain how swallows and starlings and storks and such-like
birds were driven by instinct thousands of miles, getting drowned on
the way and dashed to pieces against lighthouses. 'Else they'd
freeze and starve where they was, 'Arry,' said my father. And every
bird knew by instinct what sort of nest it had to build, no one ever
showing it or telling it. Kangaroos carried their young in pouches
by instinct, but man being a reasonable creature made perambulators.
Chickens ran about by instinct directly they were born; not like
human children, who had to be carried and taken care of until reason
came. And jolly lucky that was for the chicken, 'For 'ow a 'en would
carry them,' said my father, 'I carn't imagine.'
"I remember that I put my father into a difficulty by asking him why
Providence had not given birds an instinct against beating themselves
against lighthouses and moths against the gas-jet and the
candle-flame. For in the room over the shop on a summer's night it
was quite unpleasant to read a book because of the disabled flies and
moths that fell scorched upon its pages. 'It's to teach 'em some
lesson,' said my father at last. 'But what it's to teach them,
'Arry, I don't rightly know.'
"And sometimes he would talk, with illustrative stories, of
ill-gotten gold never staying with the getter, and sometimes he would
talk of murders--for there were still many murders in the world--and
how they always came out, 'hide them as you may.' And always he was
ready to point out the goodness and wisdom, the cleverness,
forethought, ingenuity, and kindliness of Providence in the most
earnest and flattering manner.
"With such high discourse did we enliven our long trudges between
Cherry Gardens and Chessing Hanger, and my father's tone was always
so exalted that with a real shock I presently came to realise that
every Sunday evening we were in plain English stealing and receiving
stolen produce from Lord Bramble's gardens. Indeed, I cannot imagine
how we should have got along without that weekly raid. Our little
home at Cherry Gardens was largely supported by my father's share in
the profits of these transactions. When the produce was too good and
costly for Cherry Gardens' needs, he would take it down to Cliffstone
and sell it to a friend there who had a fashionable trade."
Sarnac paused.
"Go on," said Radiant. "You are making us believe in your story. It
sounds more and more as if you had been there. It is so
circumstantial. Who was this Lord Bramble? I have always been
curious about Lords."
§ 6
"Let me tell my story in my own way," said Sarnac. "If I answer
questions I shall get lost. You are all ready to ask a hundred
questions already about things I have mentioned and points familiar
to me but incomprehensible to you because our world has forgotten
them, and if I weaken towards you you will trail me away and away
further and further from my father and my Uncle Julip. We shall just
talk about manners and customs and about philosophy and history. I
want to tell my story."
"Go on with your story," said Sunray.
"This Uncle John Julip of mine, although he was my mother's brother,
was a cynical, opinionated man. He was very short and fatter than
was usual among gardeners. He had a smooth white face and a wise,
self-satisfied smile. To begin with, I saw him only on Sundays and
in white shirt sleeves and a large straw hat. He made disparaging
remarks about my physique and about the air of Cherry Gardens every
time he saw me. His wife had been a dissenter of some sort and had
become a churchwoman under protest. She too was white-faced and her
health was bad. She complained of pains. But my Uncle John Julip
disparaged her pains because he said they were not in a reasonable
place. There was stomachache and backache and heartburn and the
wind, but her pains were neither here nor there; they were therefore
pains of the imagination and had no claim upon our sympathy.
"When I was nearly thirteen years old my father and uncle began
planning for me to go over to the Chessing Hanger gardens and be an
under-gardener. This was a project I disliked very greatly; not only
did I find my uncle unattractive, but I thought weeding and digging
and most of the exercises of a garden extremely tiring and boring. I
had taken very kindly to reading, I liked languages, I inherited
something of my father's loquaciousness, and I had won a special
prize for an essay in my school. This had fired the most
unreasonable ambitions in me--to write, to write in newspapers,
possibly even to write books. At Cliffstone was what was called a
public library to which the householders of Cliffstone had access and
from which members of their families could borrow books--during
holidays I would be changing my book almost every day--but at
Chessing Hanger there were no books at all. My sister Fanny
encouraged me in my reading; she too was a voracious reader of
novels, and she shared my dislike of the idea that I should become a
gardener.
"In those days, you must understand, no attempt was made to gauge the
natural capacity of a child. Human beings were expected to be
grateful for any opportunity of 'getting a living.' Parents bundled
their children into any employment that came handy, and so most
people followed occupations that were misfits, that did not give full
scope for such natural gifts as they possessed and which commonly
cramped or crippled them. This in itself diffused a vague discontent
throughout the community, and inflicted upon the great majority of
people strains and restraints and suppressions that ate away their
possibility of positive happiness. Most youngsters as they grew up,
girls as well as boys, experienced a sudden tragic curtailment of
freedom and discovered themselves forced into some unchosen specific
drudgery from which it was very difficult to escape. One summer
holiday came, when, instead of enjoying delightful long days of play
and book-devouring in Cliffstone, as I had hitherto done, I was sent
off over the hills to stay with Uncle John Julip, and 'see how I got
on' with him. I still remember the burning disgust, the sense of
immolation, with which I lugged my little valise up the hills and
over the Downs to the gardens.