She had not meant to stay for the service. The door had stood invitingly
open, and a glimpse of the interior had suggested to her the idea that it
would make good copy. "Old London Churches: Their Social and Historical
Associations." It would be easy to collect anecdotes of the famous
people who had attended them. She might fix up a series for one of the
religious papers. It promised quite exceptional material, this
particular specimen, rich in tombs and monuments. There was character
about it, a scent of bygone days. She pictured the vanished
congregations in their powdered wigs and stiff brocades. How picturesque
must have been the marriages that had taken place there, say in the reign
of Queen Anne or of the early Georges. The church would have been
ancient even then. With its air of faded grandeur, its sculptured
recesses and dark niches, the tattered banners hanging from its roof, it
must have made an admirable background. Perhaps an historical novel in
the Thackeray vein? She could see her heroine walking up the aisle on
the arm of her proud old soldier father. Later on, when her journalistic
position was more established, she might think of it. It was still quite
early. There would be nearly half an hour before the first worshippers
would be likely to arrive: just time enough to jot down a few notes. If
she did ever take to literature it would be the realistic school, she
felt, that would appeal to her. The rest, too, would be pleasant after
her long walk from Westminster. She would find a secluded seat in one of
the high, stiff pews, and let the atmosphere of the place sink into her.
And then the pew-opener had stolen up unobserved, and had taken it so for
granted that she would like to be shown round, and had seemed so pleased
and eager, that she had not the heart to repel her. A curious little old
party with a smooth, peach-like complexion and white soft hair that the
fading twilight, stealing through the yellow glass, turned to gold. So
that at first sight Joan took her for a child. The voice, too, was so
absurdly childish--appealing, and yet confident. Not until they were
crossing the aisle, where the clearer light streamed in through the open
doors, did Joan see that she was very old and feeble, with about her
figure that curious patient droop that comes to the work-worn. She
proved to be most interesting and full of helpful information. Mary
Stopperton was her name. She had lived in the neighbourhood all her
life; had as a girl worked for the Leigh Hunts and had "assisted" Mrs.
Carlyle. She had been very frightened of the great man himself, and had
always hidden herself behind doors or squeezed herself into corners and
stopped breathing whenever there had been any fear of meeting him upon
the stairs. Until one day having darted into a cupboard to escape from
him and drawn the door to after her, it turned out to be the cupboard in
which Carlyle was used to keep his boots. So that there was quite a
struggle between them; she holding grimly on to the door inside and
Carlyle equally determined to open it and get his boots. It had ended in
her exposure, with trembling knees and scarlet face, and Carlyle had
addressed her as "woman," and had insisted on knowing what she was doing
there. And after that she had lost all terror of him. And he had even
allowed her with a grim smile to enter occasionally the sacred study with
her broom and pan. It had evidently made a lasting impression upon her,
that privilege.
"They didn't get on very well together, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle?" Joan
queried, scenting the opportunity of obtaining first-class evidence.
"There wasn't much difference, so far as I could see, between them and
most of us," answered the little old lady. "You're not married, dear,"
she continued, glancing at Joan's ungloved hand, "but people must have a
deal of patience when they have to live with us for twenty-four hours a
day. You see, little things we do and say without thinking, and little
ways we have that we do not notice ourselves, may all the time be
irritating to other people."
"What about the other people irritating us?" suggested Joan.
"Yes, dear, and of course that can happen too," agreed the little old
lady.
"Did he, Carlyle, ever come to this church?" asked Joan.
Mary Stopperton was afraid he never had, in spite of its being so near.
"And yet he was a dear good Christian--in his way," Mary Stopperton felt
sure.
"How do you mean 'in his way'?" demanded Joan. It certainly, if Froude
was to be trusted, could not have been the orthodox way.
"Well, you see, dear," explained the little old lady, "he gave up things.
He could have ridden in his carriage"--she was quoting, it seemed, the
words of the Carlyles' old servant--"if he'd written the sort of lies
that people pay for being told, instead of throwing the truth at their
head."
"But even that would not make him a Christian," argued Joan.
"It is part of it, dear, isn't it?" insisted Mary Stopperton. "To suffer
for one's faith. I think Jesus must have liked him for that."
They had commenced with the narrow strip of burial ground lying between
the south side of the church and Cheyne Walk. And there the little pew-
opener had showed her the grave of Anna, afterwards Mrs. Spragg. "Who
long declining wedlock and aspiring above her sex fought under her
brother with arms and manly attire in a flagship against the French." As
also of Mary Astell, her contemporary, who had written a spirited "Essay
in Defence of the Fair Sex." So there had been a Suffrage Movement as
far back as in the days of Pope and Swift.
Returning to the interior, Joan had duly admired the Cheyne monument, but
had been unable to disguise her amusement before the tomb of Mrs.
Colvile, whom the sculptor had represented as a somewhat impatient lady,
refusing to await the day of resurrection, but pushing through her coffin
and starting for Heaven in her grave-clothes. Pausing in front of the
Dacre monument, Joan wondered if the actor of that name, who had
committed suicide in Australia, and whose London address she remembered
had been Dacre House just round the corner, was descended from the
family; thinking that, if so, it would give an up-to-date touch to the
article. She had fully decided now to write it. But Mary Stopperton
could not inform her. They had ended up in the chapel of Sir Thomas
More. He, too, had "given up things," including his head. Though Mary
Stopperton, siding with Father Morris, was convinced he had now got it
back, and that with the remainder of his bones it rested in the tomb
before them.
There, the little pew-opener had left her, having to show the
early-comers to their seats; and Joan had found an out-of-the-way pew
from where she could command a view of the whole church. They were
chiefly poor folk, the congregation; with here and there a sprinkling of
faded gentility. They seemed in keeping with the place. The twilight
faded and a snuffy old man shuffled round and lit the gas.
It was all so sweet and restful. Religion had never appealed to her
before. The business-like service in the bare cold chapel where she had
sat swinging her feet and yawning as a child had only repelled her. She
could recall her father, aloof and awe-inspiring in his Sunday black,
passing round the bag. Her mother, always veiled, sitting beside her, a
thin, tall woman with passionate eyes and ever restless hands; the women
mostly overdressed, and the sleek, prosperous men trying to look meek. At
school and at Girton, chapel, which she had attended no oftener than she
was obliged, had had about it the same atmosphere of chill compulsion.
But here was poetry. She wondered if, after all, religion might not have
its place in the world--in company with the other arts. It would be a
pity for it to die out. There seemed nothing to take its place. All
these lovely cathedrals, these dear little old churches, that for
centuries had been the focus of men's thoughts and aspirations. The
harbour lights, illumining the troubled waters of their lives. What
could be done with them? They could hardly be maintained out of the
public funds as mere mementoes of the past. Besides, there were too many
of them. The tax-payer would naturally grumble. As Town Halls, Assembly
Rooms? The idea was unthinkable. It would be like a performance of
Barnum's Circus in the Coliseum at Rome. Yes, they would disappear.
Though not, she was glad to think, in her time. In towns, the space
would be required for other buildings. Here and there some gradually
decaying specimen would be allowed to survive, taking its place with the
feudal castles and walled cities of the Continent: the joy of the
American tourist, the text-book of the antiquary. A pity! Yes, but then
from the aesthetic point of view it was a pity that the groves of ancient
Greece had ever been cut down and replanted with currant bushes, their
altars scattered; that the stones of the temples of Isis should have come
to be the shelter of the fisher of the Nile; and the corn wave in the
wind above the buried shrines of Mexico. All these dead truths that from
time to time had encumbered the living world. Each in its turn had had
to be cleared away.
And yet was it altogether a dead truth: this passionate belief in a
personal God who had ordered all things for the best: who could be
appealed to for comfort, for help? Might it not be as good an
explanation as any other of the mystery surrounding us? It had been so
universal. She was not sure where, but somewhere she had come across an
analogy that had strongly impressed her. "The fact that a man feels
thirsty--though at the time he may be wandering through the Desert of
Sahara--proves that somewhere in the world there is water." Might not
the success of Christianity in responding to human needs be evidence in
its favour? The Love of God, the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, the Grace
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Were not all human needs provided for in that
one comprehensive promise: the desperate need of man to be convinced that
behind all the seeming muddle was a loving hand guiding towards good; the
need of the soul in its loneliness for fellowship, for strengthening; the
need of man in his weakness for the kindly grace of human sympathy, of
human example.
And then, as fate would have it, the first lesson happened to be the
story of Jonah and the whale. Half a dozen shocked faces turned suddenly
towards her told Joan that at some point in the thrilling history she
must unconsciously have laughed. Fortunately she was alone in the pew,
and feeling herself scarlet, squeezed herself into its farthest corner
and drew down her veil.
No, it would have to go. A religion that solemnly demanded of grown men
and women in the twentieth century that they should sit and listen with
reverential awe to a prehistoric edition of "Grimm's Fairy Stories,"
including Noah and his ark, the adventures of Samson and Delilah, the
conversations between Balaam and his ass, and culminating in what if it
were not so appallingly wicked an idea would be the most comical of them
all: the conception of an elaborately organized Hell, into which the God
of the Christians plunged his creatures for all eternity! Of what use
was such a religion as that going to be to the world of the future?
She must have knelt and stood mechanically, for the service was ended.
The pulpit was occupied by an elderly uninteresting-looking man with a
troublesome cough. But one sentence he had let fall had gripped her
attention. For a moment she could not remember it, and then it came to
her: "All Roads lead to Calvary." It struck her as rather good. Perhaps
he was going to be worth listening to. "To all of us, sooner or later,"
he was saying, "comes a choosing of two ways: either the road leading to
success, the gratification of desires, the honour and approval of our
fellow-men--or the path to Calvary."
And then he had wandered off into a maze of detail. The tradesman,
dreaming perhaps of becoming a Whiteley, having to choose whether to go
forward or remain for all time in the little shop. The statesman--should
he abide by the faith that is in him and suffer loss of popularity, or
renounce his God and enter the Cabinet? The artist, the writer, the mere
labourer--there were too many of them. A few well-chosen examples would
have sufficed. And then that irritating cough!
And yet every now and then he would be arresting. In his prime, Joan
felt, he must have been a great preacher. Even now, decrepit and wheezy,
he was capable of flashes of magnetism, of eloquence. The passage where
he pictured the Garden of Gethsemane. The fair Jerusalem, only hidden
from us by the shadows. So easy to return to. Its soft lights shining
through the trees, beckoning to us; its mingled voices stealing to us
through the silence, whispering to us of its well-remembered ways, its
pleasant places, its open doorways, friends and loved ones waiting for
us. And above, the rock-strewn Calvary: and crowning its summit, clear
against the starlit sky, the cold, dark cross. "Not perhaps to us the
bleeding hands and feet, but to all the bitter tears. Our Calvary may be
a very little hill compared with the mountains where Prometheus suffered,
but to us it is steep and lonely."
There he should have stopped. It would have been a good note on which to
finish. But it seemed there was another point he wished to make. Even
to the sinner Calvary calls. To Judas--even to him the gates of the life-
giving Garden of Gethsemane had not been closed. "With his thirty pieces
of silver he could have stolen away. In some distant crowded city of the
Roman Empire have lived unknown, forgotten. Life still had its
pleasures, its rewards. To him also had been given the choice. The
thirty pieces of silver that had meant so much to him! He flings them at
the feet of his tempters. They would not take them back. He rushes out
and hangs himself. Shame and death. With his own hands he will build
his own cross, none to help him. He, too--even Judas, climbs his
Calvary. Enters into the fellowship of those who through all ages have
trod its stony pathway."
Joan waited till the last of the congregation had disappeared, and then
joined the little pew-opener who was waiting to close the doors. Joan
asked her what she had thought of the sermon, but Mary Stopperton, being
a little deaf, had not heard it.
"It was quite good--the matter of it," Joan told her. "All Roads lead to
Calvary. The idea is that there comes a time to all of us when we have
to choose. Whether, like your friend Carlyle, we will 'give up things'
for our faith's sake. Or go for the carriage and pair."
Mary Stopperton laughed. "He is quite right, dear," she said. "It does
seem to come, and it is so hard. You have to pray and pray and pray. And
even then we cannot always do it." She touched with her little withered
fingers Joan's fine white hand. "But you are so strong and brave," she
continued, with another little laugh. "It won't be so difficult for
you."
It was not until well on her way home that Joan, recalling the
conversation, found herself smiling at Mary Stopperton's literal
acceptation of the argument. At the time, she remembered, the shadow of
a fear had passed over her.
Mary Stopperton did not know the name of the preacher. It was quite
common for chance substitutes to officiate there, especially in the
evening. Joan had insisted on her acceptance of a shilling, and had made
a note of her address, feeling instinctively that the little old woman
would "come in useful" from a journalistic point of view.
Shaking hands with her, she had turned eastward, intending to walk to
Sloane Square and there take the bus. At the corner of Oakley Street she
overtook him. He was evidently a stranger to the neighbourhood, and was
peering up through his glasses to see the name of the street; and Joan
caught sight of his face beneath a gas lamp.
And suddenly it came to her that it was a face she knew. In the dim-lit
church she had not seen him clearly. He was still peering upward. Joan
stole another glance. Yes, she had met him somewhere. He was very
changed, quite different, but she was sure of it. It was a long time
ago. She must have been quite a child.