“Well, it’s worth thinking about. There’s a lot in it. You’ll get a lot
out of it. The holy man is not the hermit on his knees in the desert,
or the saint in colored glass, or anything that we make to correspond
to them. He’s the fellow who’s whole—who’s sound in wind and limb and
intelligence and sympathy and everything that makes power. When we
say, ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ we mean, O worship
the Lord in the beauty of the all-round man, who’s developed in every
direction, and whose degree of holiness is just in proportion to that
development.”
“That’s a big thought, sir,” I said. “I don’t believe many people who
speak the English language ever get hold of it. But how does it happen
that one of the two words is spelt with a ‘w,’ while the other—”
He laughed, showing two rows of small, regular white teeth, as pretty as
a girl’s.
“That was another lot of intuitive guys; and a very neat trick they
played on us. They saw that once the Anglo-Saxon, with his fine, big
sporting instinct, got hold of the idea that holiness meant spreading out
and living out in all manly directions—and by that I don’t mean giving
free rein to one’s appetites, of course—but they saw that once the idea
became plain to us the triumph of lust would be lost. So they inserted
that little bluffing, blinding ‘w,’ which doesn’t belong there at all,
to put us off the scent; and off the scent we went. Church and state
and human society have all combined to make holiness one of the most
anemic, flat-chested words in the language, when it’s really a synonym of
normality.”
We exchanged these thoughts in the narrow hall of the club, as he
happened to be passing, and stopped for a few words. It was always his
way. He never treated us to long and formal interviews. From a handclasp
and a few chance sentences we got the secret of a personality which gave
out its light and heat like radium, without effort and without exhaustion.
“What do yer think ’e says to me?” Lovey demanded of me one day.
“‘Lovey,’ says ’e, ‘yer’ve got a terr’ble responsibility on ye with
that young fella, Slim. If you go under ’e goes under, and if you keep
straight ’e keeps straight.’ What do yer think of that?”
“I think you’re doing an awful lot for me, Lovey.”
He slapped his leg.
“Ye got that number right, old son. There’s nobody else in the world
I’d ’a’ done it for. If you ’adn’t taken a fancy to me, like, that
night, and arsked me to go ’ome with you—But, say, Slim,” he went on,
confidentially, “wouldn’t you like to ’ave a drink?”
Wouldn’t I like to have a drink? There was thirst in the very rustle of
Lovey’s throat. There was the same thirst in my own. It was more than
a thirst of the appetite—it was a thirst of the being, of whatever had
become myself. It was one of the moments at which the lost identity
seemed farther away than ever, and the Frank Melbury of the last three
years the man in possession.