They all sat round the table looking at him. They were his disciples and
the friends of his heart, and yet as Jim met their ardent, excited
glances, he was aware that he had never been so much alone. They were
excited by the success of Calvary, by Jim’s enormous congregations, and
his passing celebrity. They didn’t like what he meant, because, half the
time they didn’t know what he meant, and when they did, it struck sharp
against the fruits of his success. They couldn’t be quite unselfish
about it; his success was theirs, they mounted on the wings of his
flight. They hadn’t been anything at all before Jim came to Poplar, not
even good. Now they had the Kingdom of Heaven, and a much better
position on earth. Naturally, they wanted to keep it.
It was a small committee: Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins, Mr. Belk, the
churchwarden, Mr. Amble and Mr. Cadge, the two chief sidesmen. Mr. Belk
was a grocer by profession—all the week long sugar and sand, butter and
margarine, the grind of big wholesale firms and the petty pilfering of
subordinates kept his shrewd mind on the stretch. He had done very well
for himself in spite of everything, and he took to religion on Sunday as
weaker vessels take to theatres and dances—it exercised the muscles of
his soul. Behind his hard, commercial surface lay a very kind heart, and
in the end Jim always touched it.
Mr. Cadge had a violent faith. Religion excited him uncontrollably, like
alcohol. His pugnacity revelled in fighting sin; he pounced on
backsliding with the eager zest of a butterfly collector who succeeds in
netting a rare and splendid specimen. It must be owned that the scoring
off of badness meant more to Mr. Cadge than the cultivation of virtue.
He was a carpenter by profession, and a malignant Christian.
Mr. Amble, the other sidesman, wasn’t at all practical. He didn’t care
for life very much. What he had had of it had not been very nice. He
took his capacity for pleasure out in visions. The new Jerusalem
supplemented Poplar. Mr. Amble’s wife and three children had died early
and very horribly of diphtheria after a wild six years’ trying to make
Mr. Amble’s loose ends meet; and Mr. Amble had gone on ever since with
his ends looser than ever and his sense of pilgrimage more acute.
He had fallen from being a schoolmaster in a world of indeterminate
gentility into being a sandwich man in a world of no gentility at all.
Then he had met Jim, and been dragged back up the thorny, uneven path of
reformation, into being a schoolmaster again.
He did not really want alcohol when he was sure of Heaven.
There were two subjects down for the committee to discuss—free seats,
and the dismissal of Mr. Herbert Moggridge. Mr. Belk knew that they had
done very well financially already, but he wanted paid seats to ensure a
regular income; besides a man who has a seat of his own looks like
something.
He knew he couldn’t use the latter point in a discussion with Jim, and
he was a little uneasy lest Jim should put his finger on it, whether he
used it or not.
Mr. Cadge wanted paid seats because he thought there should be short,
sharp lines drawn between goats and sheep. Goats might come to church,
but they should be made to pay for it or go without seats.
Mrs. Hodgkins wished for paid seats because it was her own idea, and
wouldn’t be at all likely to be Jim’s.
Mr. Amble had never given the matter a thought, and Mr. Hodgkins fixed
agonised eyes upon Jim in the hope that he would be strong enough to get
his own way (he knew Jim’s way would be free seats) without calling on
him for support.
Mrs. Hodgkins summed up the prevalent feeling. ‘I am sure,’ she said,
after listening meekly to the male opinion which she had first provoked
and then guided, ‘that what we pay for we value. It is the sacrifice we
put into it, not, of course, the money that counts. I feel it would be
blessed to the congregation. They come in large numbers very regularly.
Their spiritual home is here; no doubt—just as in a real home—they
would appreciate a spot they could call their own. I know that Calvary
sets out to be freer than other religious institutions, but I think if
it were put to the congregation themselves they would choose to pay for
their places, partly in recognition of what we try to do for them here,
and partly as I have tried to explain, because they would value their
own place in the House of God.’
‘That’s the theory of the favourite arm-chair, isn’t it?’ Jim replied
bluntly. ‘I’m afraid of people having seats of their own. I’d like a
church to be a place where nobody had anything of their own—not even
his prayers.’
‘That’s loose,’ said Mr. Cadge emphatically; ‘I call that very loose,
Mr. Barton. Cain had a mark on his forehead, hadn’t he? You may be sure
it wasn’t there for nothing!’
‘Well, I dare say it was all right for Cain,’ said Jim, ‘but I notice
Abel didn’t, and I suppose we’d all rather consider ourselves on the
line of Abel.’
‘The way I look at it,’ said Mr. Belk, ‘is, a little goes a long
way—with regular payments we know where we are—offertories vary—it’s
the difference, to put it to a vulgar way, between cash payments and
running up an account. St. Paul’s Cathedral is all right free, but
that’s a large firm—relatively speaking, we are a small one.’
‘I call that godless,’ said Mr. Cadge heatedly, ‘mint and cummin, that’s
what I call that argument. Who wants to be like St. Paul’s? But what I
say is, I have never been in a cinema or a low haunt in my life, and why
shouldn’t I spend my money on a private seat in our own place of worship
if I want to? Is all our pockets to go into sinks of iniquity, and the
Church of God to be sent empty away?’
‘That’s the look out of your own conscience, Cadge,’ Jim said
good-humouredly. ‘I’m not going to stop your giving—you can give till
you burst—all I want to see is that giving is voluntary, not
compulsory, and that we don’t follow the Apostles’ handsome precedent
and ask for seats on the right hand and the left, when we ought to be
thankful to get into the building at all.’
‘I like to see people wandering in and out,’ Mr. Amble murmured vaguely.
Mr. Belk laid a fat and confidential finger on Jim’s arm. ‘The point I
should like to make, Mr. Barton,’ he said, ‘is let people of all sorts
have seats, and set aside certain seats for payment. That will surely
suit all parties. No one need feel shut out, and yet we could depend,
say, on church expenses regular.’
Jim grinned at him.
‘Belk,’ he said, ‘you have no more principle than a magnate. It sounds
all right, but it isn’t. This building wasn’t given for people who could
pay for it, but for people who wanted it. They pay, too, most of ’em,
all they can afford. I’m with that; whatever’s worth having is worth
paying for. Put it to the congregational vote if you like, but I’ll tell
them what I think of it first.’
‘It won’t be any good if you do that,’ said Mr. Belk disconsolately.
‘You always turn them.’
Mrs. Hodgkins did not sniff. She lifted her eyes to Heaven and prayed
inaudibly for grace. Jim saw that she was engaged in this provocative
practice, but though he was prepared to let Mrs. Hodgkins force him
along any line that merely involved externals, he wasn’t prepared to
submit to any force but his own in matters which led beyond. Still, he
always wanted to please her.
‘They’ve got to know what they are doing,’ he explained with an
appealing glance at Mrs. Hodgkins’ raised eyes and fervently moving
lips. ‘I can’t twist facts, Mrs. Hodgkins, but I’m pretty sure you’ve
stated your case already, and it’s only fair that I should state mine.’
Mrs. Hodgkins’ eyes came down and met Jim’s serenely. Grace had been
given to her. She had canvassed the entire district to get her views
accepted, but she saw what a vast difference there was between her
perfectly straightforward persuasions and Jim’s unscrupulous appeals.
‘Of course,’ she said gently, ‘if you prefer to appeal to the emotions,
I have no more to say.’
Jim hung his head; he always felt very miserable when people weren’t
fair, especially very good people, as if he couldn’t have been very fair
himself, or it wouldn’t have happened.
‘Shall we all think it over a bit?’ he asked apologetically, ‘and
perhaps some of us may see differently next week.’
To every one’s surprise Mr. Cadge leaned forward and exclaimed
impressively. ‘I see differently now. It is a temptation of the
devil—Jesus Christ spent all He had feeding the multitude; that’s why
’e ’ad the miracle in ’and. None of the four thousand paid for their
seats. Mr. Barton, I’ve made a mistake. Say no more. You were right and
I was wrong. You have my vote.’
Jim’s eyes rose and fixed themselves on his favourite disciple. Mr.
Hodgkins looked piteously from Jim to his wife. She was praying
again—her cheeks were flushed. Mr. Cadge had inadvertently coupled her
name with the devil. Her husband did worse. His was the casting vote. He
said in a trembling voice, ‘There seems to be much to be said for free
seats. I understand, in a sense, of course, there isn’t, but on the
whole—well, on the whole, I think perhaps there is.’
Mr. Belk capitulated good-naturedly. He privately intended to bring the
matter up again in a more attractive form. ‘A thing can be fig syrup
without being called fig syrup,’ he thought contentedly. ‘Let us adjourn
the question,’ he said aloud soothingly. ‘That’s what I suggest. And
now, friends, there’s the painful subject of Mr. ’Erbert Moggridge; ’e
comes next on the agenda.’
Mr. Cadge’s eyes lit up with joy.
‘Now,’ he said, with a sigh of relief, ‘we can get to business. Barton,
we’ve got to look facts in the face. This time we are dealing with open
sin. It’s a perfectly straight question; are we, or are we not, to have
as an organist a man who is a drunkard and a thief?’
Jim’s eyes went down on the table. He didn’t see the plain dark cloth
with an ink stain his impatient hand had caused; he saw, instead, the
face of Mr. Herbert Moggridge. It was not an attractive face—furtive,
narrow like a weasel’s, with watery blue eyes, and a perpetual tremor of
the lower lip. Mr. Moggridge was not even a clever thief. He had been
easily caught fumbling in an overcoat pocket at the working men’s club.
‘He hasn’t broken down at the organ,’ said Jim miserably.
‘Let’s stick to the point,’ said Mr. Cadge furiously. ‘Hasn’t he broken
down everywhere else? Is there a Saturday night he hasn’t been seen in a
disgraceful condition on the ’Igh? Answer me that, Mr. Barton, _and_ the
eighth commandment? Are we to have real religion here in this ’Ouse of
God, or are we to ’ave it a nest of permitted vagabonds and criminals?’
It was a splendid climax; the small, heated room shook with it; the
placid face of Mr. Belk responded to it. He was not a persecutor, but he
was a profiteer. He had all that dislike of thieves which people feel
for their poorer relatives.
Mrs. Hodgkins looked remote, but she didn’t feel remote; she meant to
cut in when she saw a good opportunity for scoring.
Mr. Hodgkins moved uneasily in his seat; beads of perspiration stood out
on his brow. He wanted Mr. Moggridge saved, but he wanted him saved
without his help. He had flown in the face of Providence once already
about free seats, but he couldn’t do it twice—his wings would not bear
him, and there was no angel to keep his feet from being dashed against
the stones. Jim’s eyes turned to meet his; they rested upon him kindly,
but he waited, to give his friend time to come to the rescue; then he
looked away again as if he knew that rescue wasn’t there.
Mr. Amble spoke suddenly with more vivacity than usual. ‘It’s the only
thing he’s got,’ he said, ‘the organ. I notice—I dare say I’m
wrong—but I do notice that if you take away from a man the only thing
he’s got, he gets worse.
‘I knew a man once who only had a canary. I don’t say the canary helped
to keep him straight. I don’t think he kept very straight. But when the
canary died he went to pieces. It was a case of what you might call _in
extremis_. Of course he was a very poor specimen indeed, I know that—a
very poor specimen——’ Mr. Amble’s voice faded reminiscently away.
Jim smiled at him. He loved the shrewdness of Mr. Belk, the pugnacity of
Mr. Cadge, and the unending ordered kindness of Mrs. Hodgkins, but he
loved Mr. Hodgkins and Mr. Amble for themselves; they usually failed
him, and they were invariably ineffectual in carrying out their duties,
but their spirits never went astray, the meaning behind their blunders
was more magnificent than success.
Jim had given Albert Hodgkins time—he looked again at him now still
smiling. Mr. Hodgkins cleared his throat.
‘In a sense,’ he said in a feeble, fluttering voice, ‘I see what Mr.
Amble means, perhaps severe talking to, a suspension even, and then one
more chance.’ He spoke pleadingly with his eyes on his wife’s face. She
had not spoken, but she looked at him; her look literally took him down,
picked him up and laid him in a drawer. The drawer shut on him with a
kind of snap. No more came from him.
‘I gave him a talking, too,’ said Jim reluctantly. ‘He won’t do much
better, of course, but I don’t think he’ll do much worse. What I should
suggest doing is to raise his stipend a little. We only pay him £10 a
year. I should think another £10 might keep him out of mischief. I don’t
think the habit of theft is very deep-seated.’
‘What about _gin_?’ demanded Mr. Cadge, trembling with resentment ‘Ten
pounds a year more on gin, because a man’s a thief! What price
respectability at Calvary?’
Mr. Belk frowned and blinked; the use of the word Calvary was
unfortunate. He saw that Jim was off on an inner trail of his own, and
he suspected him of laughter. Cadge was a poor teamster, he pulled too
hard.
‘If I might ask,’ Mr. Belk observed soothingly, ‘just as a guide to our
feelings, Mr. Barton, what passed between you and Mr. Moggridge on the
subject?’
Jim paused. He remembered exactly what he had said to the tearful,
cowering little man, dragged red-handed into his study; but it didn’t
sound suitable for repetition. He had said ‘You’re a bad old lot, aren’t
you, Moggridge?’ and then he had put him into his arm-chair and given
him a hot drink, and when Mr. Moggridge had stopped shivering and
crying, and looking about wild-eyed, for imaginary policemen, Jim had
said, ‘I’d go slow for a bit, you know, Moggridge. I would really.
Gin’ll rot your liver, and other people’s pockets will land you in jail.
It isn’t worth it, you know—it isn’t really. If you’re short of tobacco
you can always come in here and stop up your pipe with mine.’ And then
they’d talked about Palestrina masses and the music of the fifteenth
century. Jim didn’t know one note of music from another, and he hadn’t
the vaguest idea, even after Mr. Moggridge had finished talking, whether
Palestrina was an epoch, a river, or a man, but he saw that just to talk
about music put a little honour and grip back into Mr. Moggridge, and
Mr. Moggridge had so little honour that it was just as well to restore
promptly to him what he had mislaid.
Jim leaned forward and spoke with a flash of emotion.
‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘he’ll never be any better. He’s gin-sodden and
his will is like a damp match; but he could very easily get worse. Now,
I shouldn’t like to be responsible for making old Moggridge worse; would
you?’
‘Isn’t it a question of principle?’ asked Mrs. Hodgkins coldly; ‘what
about our duty to the church and its music?’
‘He’s no choir-master,’ agreed Mr. Belk.
‘Still, we have Higgins to train the choir,’ Jim pleaded ‘Higgins is as
efficient as a buzz saw. Moggridge does get something out of the organ
nobody else we’ve got can do, and the organ keeps him from all the gin
he’d soak up if he hadn’t got it. You see, the way I look at it is this:
if you’ve only got gin and an organ, and people take away the organ,
well, then, you’ve only got gin.’
‘It’s putting a premium on vice,’ said Mr. Cadge defiantly. ‘What we
want is a man at the organ we can point to and say, “That’s one of our
Calvary men,” not “Please look the other way—rolling down the ’Igh
comes the organist of—of——“’ Mr. Cadge pulled himself up short just
in time to avoid an involuntary plunge into rhyme.
‘Come,’ said Jim, ‘it’s nearly church time, and nobody has said old
Moggridge is a bad musician. Think of all the awful characters Jesus
Christ went about with in the gospels. Some of them would look a bit
shocking even in Poplar, but I wouldn’t like to think we shut any of
them out of the place that was meant for them, would you? There’s plenty
of room for the ninety-and-nine just persons in the West End, isn’t
there? What do you all think about that extra ten pounds? You couldn’t
make Moggridge any worse by it, could you? Let’s see if we can’t make
him any better.’
A slow, shrewd smile crept over Mr. Belk’s face. ‘I vote,’ he said, ‘we
raise Moggridge’s screw ten pounds—or else Mr. Barton’s—for I am of
the opinion if we don’t agree to do it, he’ll do it out of his own
pocket.’
The meeting ended in laughter. They all melted personally to Jim before
they left him, though Mr. Cadge and Mrs. Hodgkins kept their principles
intact.
Jim stood quite still for a moment after they’d gone, then he went into
a small inner room and put on his cassock. Jim didn’t like his cassock,
and he was a little afraid of tearing it; but he put it on carefully and
brushed his rebellious lock of hair down flat.
Then he kneeled down and prayed; he prayed that he might not grow
tyrannical, because it is so difficult not to be tyrannical when you see
things very plainly, and very differently from those around you.
The sense of loneliness deepened upon him. It wasn’t fair to count on
Hodgkins, it would only get him into trouble with his wife; and Amble
could never be trusted to remember anything outside his dreams.
God was very far away. There was the church and the settlement built for
His service—men’s and boys’ clubs—mothers’ meetings—girls’
classes—even a dining-hall and lounge for working people, all used and
loved as they had been in Jim’s old eager dreams. He had realised his
dreams now; only the quality in them which transcended fact had gone.
Could one’s heart be too full of other people’s business? Where beneath
all the lively, earnest bustle of his days was the fount of the Eternal?
Only a week ago he would have known, humbly but triumphantly, that the
strength of it was in himself. He loved his work then, it seemed vast
with possibilities. Now suddenly as if the sun shining at its zenith, on
a lovely land, went out and left it blind—he felt nothing. His work
looked useless in his hands, his heart was out of it.
Jim had never known what exhaustion meant. His magnificent physical
strength had kept him from depression. Nothing slackened in him from
use; body, mind, and will moved easily and as punctually as the ordered
stars.
But something had gone out of him now. He buried his head deeper in his
hands, he cried over and over again that prayer which comforts the soul
at its lowest moments of vitality—‘Lord, I believe—help Thou my
unbelief, increase my faith!’
His watch ticked warningly on, but he held his mind away from time,
fixed in silence.
It was nearly the hour for his service, and he would have to give, even
out of his empty heart, if he received nothing. But was it empty? What
was there instead of his church needs and daily interests, sharp in him,
as if against his bared heart he could feel the nails?
He knew only too well what face it was; it never left him and he could
not look away from it. Jim did not struggle against Viola’s image with
the sterile agony of the ascetic; he believed that not even his useless
love of her was wrong. But he tried always to go deeper to find for her
as well as for himself, an outlet into the love of God.
He wanted to keep love and be free, but no man, however strong, has ever
done this suddenly or once for all. The union of love and freedom must
always be a lifelong gradual task.
Jim had no memories to degrade her image or to set the love of Viola
apart from God. He knew that he was safe if he could keep them together,
but he had never valued his personal safety. What he wanted was to be
sure that Viola was safe—safe from life, from the corroding selfishness
of luxury, from the panic of idealism confronted by facts; and he knew
that he could not keep her safe, for all his prayers.
He prayed persistently that this virtue which had gone out of him might
go to her, and give her courage. He prayed that she might have all his
ardour—let him be dry, as dry as a dead leaf and as powerless—let him
find no consolation and no comradeship in his work—let him go halting,
all his days like Jacob after he had wrestled with the angel—but let
her be strong, companioned, whole! Jim could pray more freely now; he
could feel his heart beat and the tears rise. If only this little,
slender, lovely being who had hurt him with her beauty, might be safe.
It was time for him to go into his church. He wouldn’t be quite
empty-handed for his people after all, because he had lost something. He
was tried as they were, despondent as they were. He could go to them
with a quickened understanding, because for the first time in all his
ministry he did not want to go to them.