CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN
§ 1
Two eternal beings, magnificently enhaloed, the one in a blinding excess
of white radiance and the other in a bewildering extravagance of
colours, converse amidst stupendous surroundings. These surroundings are
by tradition palatial, but there is now also a marked cosmic tendency
about them. They have no definite locality; they are above and
comprehensive of the material universe.
There is a quality in the scene as if a futurist with a considerable
knowledge of modern chemical and physical speculation and some obscure
theological animus had repainted the designs of a pre-Raphaelite. The
vast pillars vanish into unfathomable darknesses, and the complicated
curves and whorls of the decorations seem to have been traced by the
flight of elemental particles. Suns and planets spin and glitter through
the avanturine depths of a floor of crystalline ether. Great winged
shapes are in attendance, wrought of iridescences and bearing globes,
stars, rolls of the law, flaming swords, and similar symbols. The voices
of the Cherubim and Seraphim can be heard crying continually, “Holy,
Holy, Holy.”
Now, as in the ancient story, it is a reception of the sons of God.
The Master of the gathering, to whom one might reasonably attribute a
sublime boredom, seeing that everything that can possibly happen is
necessarily known to him, displays on the contrary as lively an interest
in his interlocutor as ever. This interlocutor is of course Satan, the
Unexpected.
The contrast of these two eternal beings is very marked; while the
Deity, veiled and almost hidden in light, with his hair like wool and
his eyes like the blue of infinite space, conveys an effect of stable,
remote, and mountainous grandeur, Satan has the compact alertness of
habitual travel; he is as definite as a grip-sack, and he brings a
flavour of initiative and even bustle upon a scene that would otherwise
be one of serene perfection. His halo even has a slightly travelled
look. He has been going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down
in it; his labels are still upon him. His status in heaven remains as
undefined as it was in the time of Job; it is uncertain to this day
whether he is to be regarded as one of the sons of God or as an
inexplicable intruder among them. (But see upon this question the
Encyclopædia Biblica under his name.) Whatever his origin there can be
little doubt of his increasing assurance of independence and importance
in the Divine presence. His freedom may be sanctioned or innate, but he
himself has no doubt remaining of the security of his personal autonomy.
He believes that he is a necessary accessory to God, and that his
incalculable quality is an indispensable relief to the acquiescences of
the Archangels. He never misses these reunions. If God is omnipresent by
a calm necessity, Satan is everywhere by an infinite activity. They
engage in unending metaphysical differences into which Satan has
imported a tone of friendly badinage. They play chess together.
But the chess they play is not the little ingenious game that originated
in India; it is on an altogether different scale. The Ruler of the
Universe creates the board, the pieces, and the rules; he makes all the
moves; he may make as many moves as he likes whenever he likes; his
antagonist, however, is permitted to introduce a slight inexplicable
inaccuracy into each move, which necessitates further moves in
correction. The Creator determines and conceals the aim of the game, and
it is never clear whether the purpose of the adversary is to defeat or
assist him in his unfathomable project. Apparently the adversary cannot
win, but also he cannot lose so long as he can keep the game going. But
he is concerned, it would seem, in preventing the development of any
reasoned scheme in the game.
§ 2
Celestial badinage is at once too high and broad to come readily within
the compass of earthly print and understanding. The Satanic element of
unexpectedness can fill the whole sphere of Being with laughter; thrills
begotten of those vast reverberations startle our poor wits at the
strangest moments. It is the humour of Satan to thrust upon the Master
his own title of the Unique and to seek to wrest from him the authorship
of life. (But such jesting distresses the angels.)
“I alone create.”
“But I—I ferment.”
“Matter I made and all things.”
“Stagnant as a sleeping top but for the wabble I give it.”
“You are just the little difference of the individual. You are the
little Uniqueness in everyone and everything, the Unique that breaks the
law, a marginal idiosyncracy.”
“Sire, _you_ are the Unique, the Uniqueness of the whole.”
Heaven smiled, and there were halcyon days in the planets. “I shall
average you out in the end and you will disappear.”
“And everything will end.”
“Will be complete.”
“Without me!”
“You spoil the symmetry of my universe.”
“I give it life.”
“Life comes from me.”
“No, Sire, life comes from me.”
One of the great shapes in attendance became distinct as Michael bearing
his sword. “He blasphemes, O Lord. Shall I cast him forth?”
“But you did that some time ago,” answered Satan, speaking carelessly
over his shoulder and not even looking at the speaker. “You keep on
doing it. And—I am here.”
“He returns,” said the Lord soothingly. “Perhaps I will him to return.
What should we be without him?”
“Without me, time and space would freeze into crystalline perfection,”
said Satan, and at his smile the criminal statistics of a myriad planets
displayed an upward wave. “It is I who trouble the waters. I trouble all
things. I am the spirit of life.”
“But the soul,” said God.
Satan, sitting with one arm thrown over the back of his throne towards
Michael, raised his eyebrows by way of answer. This talk about the soul
he regarded as a divine weakness. He knew nothing of the soul.
“I made man in my own image,” said God.
“And I made him a man of the world. If it had not been for me he would
still be a needless gardener—pretending to cultivate a weedless garden
that grew right because it couldn’t grow wrong—in ‘those endless summers
the blessed ones see.’ Think of it, ye Powers and Dominions! Perfect
flowers! Perfect fruits! Never an autumn chill! Never a yellow leaf!
Golden leopards, noble lions, carnivores unfulfilled, purring for his
caresses amidst the aimless friskings of lambs that would never grow
old! Good Lord! How bored he would have been! How bored! Instead of
which, did I not launch him on the most marvellous adventures? It was I
who gave him history. Up to the very limit of his possibilities. Up to
the very limit.... And did not you, O Lord, by sending your angels with
their flaming swords, approve of what I had done?”
God gave no answer.
“But that reminds me,” said Satan unabashed.
§ 3
The great winged shapes drew nearer, for Satan is the celestial
raconteur. He alone makes stories.
“There was a certain man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.”
“We remember him.”
“We had a wager of sorts,” said Satan. “It was some time ago.”
“The wager was never very distinct—and now that you remind me of it,
there is no record of your paying.”
“Did I lose or win? The issue was obscured by discussion. How those men
did talk! You intervened. There was no decision.”
“You lost, Satan,” said a great Being of Light who bore a book. “The
wager was whether Job would lose faith in God and curse him. He was
afflicted in every way, and particularly by the conversation of his
friends. But there remains an undying fire in man.”
Satan rested his dark face on his hand, and looked down between his
knees through the pellucid floor to that little eddying in the ether
which makes our world. “Job,” he said, “lives still.”
Then after an interval: “The whole earth is now—Job.”
Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture. He leant
back in his seat with an expression of quiet satisfaction. “Job,” he
said, in easy narrative tones, “lived to a great age. After his
disagreeable experiences he lived one hundred and forty years. He had
again seven sons and three daughters, and he saw his offspring for four
generations. So much is classical. These ten children brought him
seventy grandchildren, who again prospered generally and had large
families. (It was a prolific strain.) And now if we allow three
generations to a century, and the reality is rather more than that, and
if we take the survival rate as roughly three to a family, and if we
agree with your excellent Bishop Usher that Job lived about thirty-five
centuries ago, that gives us——How many? Three to the hundred and fifth
power?... It is at any rate a sum vastly in excess of the present
population of the earth.... You have globes and rolls and swords and
stars here; has anyone a slide rule?”
But the computation was brushed aside.
“A thousand years in my sight are but as yesterday when it is past. I
will grant what you seek to prove; that Job has become mankind.”
§ 4
The dark regard of Satan smote down through the quivering universe and
left the toiling light waves behind. “See there,” he said pointing. “My
old friend on his little planet—Adam—Job—Man—like a roast on a spit. It
is time we had another wager.”
God condescended to look with Satan at mankind, circling between day and
night. “Whether he will curse or bless?”
“Whether he will even remember God.”
“I have given my promise that I will at last restore Adam.”
The downcast face smiled faintly.
“These questions change from age to age,” said Satan.
“The Whole remains the same.”
“The story grows longer in either direction,” said Satan, speaking as
one who thinks aloud; “past and future unfold together.... When the
first atoms jarred I was there, and so conflict was there—and progress.
The days of the old story have each expanded to hundreds of millions of
years now, and still I am in them all. The sharks and crawling monsters
of the early seas, the first things that crept out of the water into the
jungle of fronds and stems, the early reptiles, the leaping and flying
dragons of the great age of life, the mighty beasts of hoof and horn
that came later; they all feared and suffered and were perplexed. At
last came this Man of yours, out of the woods, hairy, beetle-browed and
blood-stained, peering not too hopefully for that Eden-bower of the
ancient story. It wasn’t there. There never had been a garden. He had
fallen before he arose, and the weeds and thorns are as ancient as the
flowers. The Fall goes back in time now beyond man, beyond the world,
beyond imagination. The very stars were born in sin....
“If we can still call it sin,” mused Satan.
“On a little planet this Thing arises, this red earth, this Adam, this
Edomite, this Job. He builds cities, he tills the earth, he catches the
lightning and makes a slave of it, he changes the breed of beast and
grain. Clever things to do, but still petty things. You say that in some
manner he is to come up at last to _this_.... He is too foolish and too
weak. His achievements only illuminate his limitations. Look at his
little brain boxed up from growth in a skull of bone! Look at his bag of
a body full of rags and rudiments, a haggis of diseases! His life is
decay.... _Does_ he grow? I do not see it. Has he made any perceptible
step forward in quality in the last ten thousand years? He quarrels
endlessly and aimlessly with himself.... In a little while his planet
will cool and freeze.”
“In the end he will rule over the stars,” said the voice that was above
Satan. “My spirit is in him.”
Satan shaded his face with his hand from the effulgence about him. He
said no more for a time, but sat watching mankind as a boy might sit on
the bank of a stream and watch the fry of minnows in the clear water of
a shallow.
“Nay,” he said at last, “but it is incredible. It is impossible. I have
disturbed and afflicted him long enough. I have driven him as far as he
can be driven. But now I am moved to pity. Let us end this dispute. It
has been interesting, but now——Is it not enough? It grows cruel. He has
reached his limit. Let us give him a little peace now, Lord, a little
season of sunshine and plenty, and then some painless universal
pestilence and so let him die.”
“He is immortal and he does but begin.”
“He is mortal and near his end. At times no doubt he has a certain air
that seems to promise understanding and mastery in his world; it is but
an air; give me the power to afflict and subdue him but a little, and
after a few squeaks of faith and hope he will whine and collapse like
any other beast. He will behave like any kindred creature with a smaller
brain and a larger jaw; he too is doomed to suffer to no purpose, to
struggle by instinct merely to live, to endure for a season and then to
pass.... Give me but the power and you shall see his courage snap like a
rotten string.”
“You may do all that you will to him, only you must not slay him. For my
spirit is in him.”
“That he will cast out of his own accord—when I have ruined his hopes,
mocked his sacrifices, blackened his skies and filled his veins with
torture.... But it is too easy to do. Let me just slay him now and end
his story. Then let us begin another, a different one, and something
more amusing. Let us, for example, put brains—and this Soul of
yours—into the ants or the bees or the beavers! Or take up the octopus,
already a very tactful and intelligent creature!”
“No; but do as you have said, Satan. For you also are my instrument. Try
Man to the uttermost. See if he is indeed no more than a little stir
amidst the slime, a fuss in the mud that signifies nothing....”
§ 5
The Satan, his face hidden in shadow, seemed not to hear this, but
remained still and intent upon the world of men.
And as that brown figure, with its vast halo like the worn tail of some
fiery peacock, brooded high over the realms of being, this that follows
happened to a certain man upon the earth.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA
§ 1
In an uncomfortable armchair of slippery black horsehair, in a mean
apartment at Sundering-on-Sea, sat a sick man staring dully out of the
window. It was an oppressive day, hot under a leaden sky; there was
scarcely a movement in the air save for the dull thudding of the gun
practice at Shorehamstow. A multitude of flies crawled and buzzed
fitfully about the room, and ever and again some chained-up cur in the
neighbourhood gave tongue to its discontent. The window looked out upon
a vacant building lot, a waste of scorched grass and rusty rubbish
surrounded by a fence of barrel staves and barbed wire. Between the
ruinous notice-board of some pre-war building enterprise and the gaunt
verandah of a convalescent home, on which the motionless blue forms of
two despondent wounded men in deck chairs were visible, came the sea
view which justified the name of the house; beyond a wide waste of mud,
over which quivered the heat-tormented air, the still anger of the
heavens lowered down to meet in a line of hard conspiracy, the steely
criminality of the remote deserted sea.
The man in the chair flapped his hand and spoke. “You accursed
creature,” he said. “Why did God make flies?”
After a long interval he sighed deeply and repeated: “_Why?_”
He made a fitful effort to assume a more comfortable position, and
relapsed at last into his former attitude of brooding despondency.
When presently his landlady came in to lay the table for lunch, an
almost imperceptible wincing alone betrayed his sense of the threatening
swish and emphasis of her movements. She was manifestly heated by
cooking, and a smell of burnt potatoes had drifted in with her
appearance. She was a meagre little woman with a resentful manner,
glasses pinched her sharp red nose, and as she spread out the grey-white
diaper and rapped down the knives and forks in their places she glanced
at him darkly as if his inattention aggrieved her. Twice she was moved
to speak and did not do so, but at length she could endure his
indifference no longer. “Still feeling ill I suppose, Mr. ’Uss?” she
said, in the manner of one who knows only too well what the answer will
be.
He started at the sound of her voice, and gave her his attention as if
with an effort. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Croome?”
The landlady repeated with acerbity, “I arst if you was still feeling
ill, Mr. ’Uss.”
He did not look at her when he replied, but glanced towards her out of
the corner of his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. I am afraid I am
ill.” She made a noise of unfriendly confirmation that brought his face
round to her. “But mind you, Mrs. Croome, I don’t want Mrs. Huss worried
about it. She has enough to trouble her just now. Quite enough.”
“Misfortunes don’t ever come singly,” said Mrs. Croome with quiet
satisfaction, leaning across the table to brush some spilt salt from off
the cloth to the floor. She was not going to make any rash promises
about Mrs. Huss.
“We ’ave to bear up with what is put upon us,” said Mrs. Croome. “We
’ave to find strength where strength is to be found.”
She stood up and regarded him with pensive malignity. “Very likely all
you want is a tonic of some sort. Very likely you’ve just let yourself
go. I shouldn’t be surprised.”
The sick man gave no welcome to this suggestion.
“If you was to go round to the young doctor at the corner—Barrack
isnameis—very likely he’d put you right. Everybody says he’s very
clever. Not that me and Croome put much faith in doctors. Nor need to.
But you’re in a different position.”
The man in the chair had been to see the young doctor at the corner
twice already, but he did not want to discuss that interview with Mrs.
Croome just then. “I must think about it,” he said evasively.
“After all it isn’t fair to yourself, it isn’t fair to others, to sicken
for—it might be anythink—without proper advice. Sitting there and doing
nothing. Especially in lodgings at this time of year. It isn’t, well—not
what I call considerate.”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Huss weakly.
“There’s homes and hospitals properly equipped.”
The sick man nodded his head appreciatively.
“If things are nipped in the bud they’re nipped in the bud, otherwise
they grow and make trouble.”
It was exactly what her hearer was thinking.
Mrs. Croome ducked to the cellarette of a gaunt sideboard and rapped out
a whisky bottle, a bottle of lime-juice, and a soda-water syphon upon
the table. She surveyed her handiwork with a critical eye. “Cruet,” she
whispered, and vanished from the room, leaving the door, after a
tormenting phase of creaking, to slam by its own weight behind her....
The invalid raised his hand to his forehead and found it wet with
perspiration. His hand was trembling violently. “My _God_!” he
whispered.
§ 2
This man’s name was Job Huss. His father had been called Job before him,
and so far as the family tradition extended the eldest son had always
been called Job. Four weeks ago he would have been esteemed by most
people a conspicuously successful and enviable man, and then had come a
swift rush of disaster.
He had been the headmaster of the great modern public school at
Woldingstanton in Norfolk, a revived school under the Papermakers’ Guild
of the City of London; he had given himself without stint to its
establishment and he had made a great name in the world for it and for
himself. He had been the first English schoolmaster to liberate the
modern side from the entanglement of its lower forms with the classical
masters; it was the only school in England where Spanish and Russian
were honestly taught; his science laboratories were the best school
laboratories in Great Britain and perhaps in the world, and his new
methods in the teaching of history and politics brought a steady stream
of foreign inquirers to Woldingstanton. The hand of the adversary had
touched him first just at the end of the summer term. There had been an
epidemic of measles in which, through the inexplicable negligence of a
trusted nurse, two boys had died. On the afternoon of the second of
these deaths an assistant master was killed by an explosion in the
chemical laboratory. Then on the very last night of the term came the
School House fire, in which two of the younger boys were burnt to death.
Against any single one of these misfortunes Mr. Huss and his school
might have maintained an unbroken front, but their quick succession had
a very shattering effect. Every circumstance conspired to make these
events vividly dreadful to Mr. Huss. He had been the first to come to
the help of his chemistry master, who had fallen among some carboys of
acid, and though still alive and struggling, was blinded, nearly
faceless, and hopelessly mangled. The poor fellow died before he could
be extricated. On the night of the fire Mr. Huss strained himself
internally and bruised his foot very painfully, and he himself found and
carried out the charred body of one of the two little victims from the
room in which they had been trapped by the locking of a door during some
“last day” ragging. It added an element of exasperating inconvenience to
his greater distresses that all his papers and nearly all his personal
possessions were burnt.
On the morning after the fire Mr. Huss’s solicitor committed suicide. He
was an old friend to whom Mr. Huss had entrusted the complete control of
the savings that were to secure him and Mrs. Huss a dignified old age.
The lawyer was a man of strong political feelings and liberal views, and
he had bought roubles to his utmost for Mr. Huss as for himself, in
order to demonstrate his confidence in the Russian revolution.
All these things had a quite sufficiently disorganizing effect upon Mr.
Huss; upon his wife the impression they made was altogether disastrous.
She was a worthy but emotional lady, effusive rather than steadfast.
Like the wives of most schoolmasters, she had been habitually
preoccupied with matters of domestic management for many years, and her
first reaction was in the direction of a bitter economy, mingled with a
display of contempt she had never manifested hitherto for her husband’s
practical ability. Far better would it have been for Mr. Huss if she had
broken down altogether; she insisted upon directing everything, and
doing so with a sort of pitiful vehemence that brooked no contradiction.
It was impossible to stay at Woldingstanton through the vacation, in
sight of the tragic and blackened ruins of School House, and so she
decided upon Sundering-on-Sea because of its nearness and its pre-war
reputation for cheapness. There, she announced, her husband must “pull
himself together and pick up,” and then return to the rebuilding of
School House and the rehabilitation of the school. Many formalities had
to be gone through before the building could be put in hand, for in
those days Britain was at the extremity of her war effort, and labour
and material were unobtainable without special permits and great
exertion. Sundering-on-Sea was as convenient a place as anywhere from
which to write letters, but his idea of going to London to see
influential people was resisted by Mrs. Huss on the score of the
expense, and overcome when he persisted in it by a storm of tears.
On her arrival at Sundering Mrs. Huss put up at the Railway Hotel for
the night, and spent the next morning in a stern visitation of possible
lodgings. Something in the unassuming outlook of Sea View attracted her,
and after a long dispute she was able to beat down Mrs. Croome’s demand
from five to four and a half guineas a week. That afternoon some
importunate applicant in an extremity of homelessness—for there had been
a sudden rush of visitors to Sundering—offered six guineas. Mrs. Croome
tried to call off her first bargain, but Mrs. Huss was obdurate, and
thereafter all the intercourse of landlady and her lodgers went to the
unspoken refrain of “I get four and a half guineas and I ought to get
six.” To recoup herself Mrs. Croome attempted to make extra charges for
the use of the bathroom, for cooking after five o’clock, for cleaning
Mr. Huss’s brown boots with specially bought brown cream instead of
blacking, and for the ink used by him in his very voluminous
correspondence; upon all of which points there was much argument and
bitterness.
But a heavier blow than any they had hitherto experienced was now to
fall upon Mr. and Mrs. Huss. Job in the ancient story had seven sons and
three daughters, and they were all swept away. This Job was to suffer a
sharper thrust; he had but one dear only son, a boy of great promise,
who had gone into the Royal Flying Corps. News came that he had been
shot down over the German lines.
Unhappily there had been a conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Huss about this
boy. Huss had been proud that the youngster should choose the heroic
service; Mrs. Huss had done her utmost to prevent his joining it. The
poor lady was now ruthless in her anguish. She railed upon him as the
murderer of their child. She hoped he was pleased with his handiwork. He
could count one more name on his list; he could add it to the roll of
honour in the chapel “with the others.” Her _baby_ boy! This said, she
went wailing from the room.
The wretched man sat confounded. That “with the others” cut him to the
heart. For the school chapel had a list of V.C.’s, D.C.M.’s and the
like, second to none, and it had indeed been a pride to him.
For some days his soul was stunned. He was utterly exhausted and
lethargic. He could hardly attend to the most necessary letters. From
dignity, hope, and a great sheaf of activities, his life had shrunken
abruptly to the compass of this dingy lodging, pervaded by the
squabbling of two irrational women; his work in the world was in ruins;
he had no strength left in him to struggle against fate. And a vague
internal pain crept slowly into his consciousness.
His wife, insane now and cruel with sorrow, tried to put a great quarrel
upon him about wearing mourning for their son. He had always disliked
and spoken against these pomps of death, but she insisted that whatever
callousness he might display she at least must wear black. He might, she
said, rest assured that she would spend no more money than the barest
decency required; she would buy the cheapest material, and make it up in
her bedroom. But black she must have. This resolution led straight to a
conflict with Mrs. Croome, who objected to her best bedroom being
littered with bits of black stuff, and cancelled the loan of her sewing
machine. The mourning should be made, Mrs. Huss insisted, though she had
to sew every stitch of it by hand. And the poor distraught lady in her
silly parsimony made still deeper trouble for herself by cutting her
material in every direction half an inch or more short of the paper
pattern. She came almost to a physical tussle with Mrs. Croome because
of the state of the carpet and counterpane, and Mrs. Croome did her
utmost to drag Mr. Huss into an altercation upon the matter with her
husband.
“Croome don’t interfere much, but some things he or nobody ain’t going
to stand, Mr. ’Uss.”
For some days in this battlefield of insatiable grief and petty cruelty,
and with a dull pain steadily boring its way to recognition, Mr. Huss
forced himself to carry on in a fashion the complex of business
necessitated by the school disaster. Then in the night came a dream, as
dreams sometimes will, to enlighten him upon his bodily condition.
Projecting from his side he saw a hard, white body that sent round,
wormlike tentacles into every corner of his being. A number of doctors
were struggling to tear this thing away from him. At every effort the
pain increased.
He awoke, but the pain throbbed on.
He lay quite still. Upon the heavy darkness he saw the word “Cancer,”
bright red and glowing—as pain glows....
He argued in the face of invincible conviction. He kept the mood
conditional. “If it be so,” he said, though he knew that the thing was
so. What should he do? There would have to be operations, great
expenses, enfeeblement....
Whom could he ask for advice? Who would help him?...
Suppose in the morning he were to take a bathing ticket as if he meant
to bathe, and struggle out beyond the mud-flats. He could behave as
though cramp had taken him suddenly....
Five minutes of suffocation he would have to force himself through, and
then peace—endless peace!
“No,” he said, with a sudden gust of courage. “I will fight it out to
the end.”
But his mind was too dull to form plans and physically he was afraid. He
would have to find a doctor somehow, and even that little task appalled
him.
Then he would have to tell Mrs. Huss....
For a time he lay quite still as if he listened to the alternative swell
and diminuendo of his pain.
“Oh! if I had someone to help me!” he whispered, and was overcome by the
lonely misery of his position. “If I had someone!”
For years he had never wept, but now tears were wrung from him. He
rolled over and buried his face in the pillow and tried to wriggle his
body away from that steady gnawing; he fretted as a child might do.
The night about him was as it were a great watching presence that would
not help nor answer.
§ 3
Behind the brass plate at the corner which said “Dr. Elihu Barrack” Mr.
Huss found a hard, competent young man, who had returned from the war to
his practice at Sundering after losing a leg. The mechanical substitute
seemed to have taken to him very kindly. He appeared to be both modest
and resourceful; his unfavourable diagnosis was all the more convincing
because it was tentative and conditional. He knew the very specialist
for the case; no less a surgeon than Sir Alpheus Mengo came, it
happened, quite frequently to play golf on the Sundering links. It would
be easy to arrange for him to examine Mr. Huss in Dr. Barrack’s little
consulting room, and if an operation had to be performed it could be
managed with a minimum of expense in Mr. Huss’s own lodgings without any
extra charge for mileage and the like.
“Of course,” said Mr. Huss, “of course,” with a clear vision of Mrs.
Croome confronted with the proposal.
Sir Alpheus Mengo came down the next Saturday, and made a clandestine
examination. He decided to operate the following week-end. Mr. Huss was
left at his own request to break the news to his wife and to make the
necessary arrangements for this use of Mrs. Croome’s rooms. But it was
two days before he could bring himself to broach the matter.
He sat now listening to the sounds of his wife moving about in the
bedroom overhead, and to the muffled crashes that intimated the climax
of Mrs. Croome’s preparation of the midday meal. He heard her calling
upstairs to know whether Mrs. Huss was ready for her to serve up. He was
seized with panic as a schoolboy might be who had not prepared his
lesson. He tried hastily to frame some introductory phrases, but nothing
would come into his mind save terms of disgust and lamentation. The
sullen heat of the day mingled in one impression with his pain. He was
nauseated by the smell of cooking. He felt it would be impossible to sit
up at table and pretend to eat the meal of burnt bacon and potatoes that
was all too evidently coming.
It came. Its progress along the passage was announced by a clatter of
dishes. The door was opened by a kick. Mrs. Croome put the feast upon
the table with something between defence and defiance in her manner.
“What else,” she seemed to intimate, “could one expect for four and a
half guineas a week in the very height of the season? From a woman who
could have got six!”
“Your dinner’s there,” Mrs. Croome called upstairs to Mrs. Huss in tones
of studied negligence, and then retired to her own affairs in the
kitchen, slamming the door behind her.
The room quivered down to silence, and then Mr. Huss could hear the
footsteps of his wife crossing the bedroom and descending the staircase.
Mrs. Huss was a dark, graceful, and rather untidy lady of seven and
forty, with the bridling bearing of one who habitually repels implicit
accusations. She lifted the lid of the vegetable dish. “I thought I
smelt burning,” she said. “The woman is impossible.”
She stood by her chair, regarding her husband and waiting.
He rose reluctantly, and transferred himself to a seat at table.
It had always been her custom to carve. She now prepared to serve him.
“No,” he said, full of loathing. “I can’t eat. I _can’t_.”
She put down the tablespoon and fork she had just raised, and regarded
him with eyes of dark disapproval.
“It’s all we can get,” she said.
He shook his head. “It isn’t that.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to get for you here,” she complained.
“The tradesmen don’t know us—and don’t care.”
“It isn’t that. I’m ill.”
“It’s the heat. We are all ill. Everyone. In such weather as this. It’s
no excuse for not making an effort, situated as we are.”
“I mean I am really ill. I am in pain.”
She looked at him as one might look at an unreasonable child. He was
constrained to more definite statement.
“I suppose I must tell you sooner or later. I’ve had to see a doctor.”
“Without consulting me!”
“I thought if it turned out to be fancy I needn’t bother you.”
“But how did you find a doctor?”
“There’s a fellow at the corner. Oh! it’s no good making a long story of
it. I have cancer.... Nothing will do but an operation.” Self-pity wrung
him. He controlled a violent desire to cry. “I am too ill to eat. I
ought to be lying down.”
She flopped back in her chair and stared at him as one stares at some
hideous monstrosity. “Oh!” she said. “To have cancer now! In these
lodgings!”
“I can’t _help_ it,” he said in accents that were almost a whine. “I
didn’t choose the time.”
“_Cancer!_” she cried reproachfully. “The horror of it!”
He looked at her for a moment with hate in his heart. He saw under her
knitted brows dark and hostile eyes that had once sparkled with
affection, he saw a loose mouth with downturned corners that had been
proud and pretty, and this mask of dislike was projecting forward upon a
neck he had used to call her head-stalk, so like had it seemed to the
stem of some pretty flower. She had had lovely shoulders and an impudent
humour; and now the skin upon her neck and shoulders had a little
loosened, and she was no longer impudent but harsh. Her brows were moist
with heat, and her hair more than usually astray. But these things did
not increase, they mitigated his antagonism. They did not repel him as
defects; they hurt him as wounds received in a common misfortune. Always
he had petted and spared and rejoiced in her vanity and weakness, and
now as he realized the full extent of her selfish abandonment a
protective pity arose in his heart that overcame his physical pain. It
was terrible to see how completely her delicacy and tenderness of mind
had been broken down. She had neither the strength nor the courage left
even for an unselfish thought. And he could not help her; whatever power
he had possessed over her mind had gone long ago. His magic had
departed.
Latterly he had been thinking very much of her prospects if he were to
die. In some ways his death might be a good thing for her. He had an
endowment assurance running that would bring in about seven thousand
pounds immediately at his death, but which would otherwise involve heavy
annual payments for some years. So far, to die would be clear gain. But
who would invest this money for her and look after her interests? She
was, he knew, very silly about property; suspicious of people she knew
intimately, and greedy and credulous with strangers. He had helped to
make her incompetent, and he owed it to her to live and protect her if
he could. And behind that intimate and immediate reason for living he
had a strong sense of work in the world yet to be done by him, and a
task in education still incomplete.
He spoke with his chin in his hand and his eyes staring at the dark and
distant sea. “An operation,” he said, “might cure me.”
Her thoughts, it became apparent, had been travelling through some
broken and unbeautiful country roughly parallel with the course of his
own. “But need there be an operation?” she thought aloud. “Are they ever
any good?”
“I could die,” he admitted bitterly, and repented as he spoke.
There had been times, he remembered, when she had said and done sweet
and gallant things, poor soul! poor broken companion! And now she had
fallen into a darkness far greater than his. He had feared that he had
hurt her, and then when he saw that she was not hurt, and that she
scrutinized his face eagerly as if she weighed the sincerity of his
words, his sense of utter loneliness was completed.
Over his mean drama of pain and debasement in its close atmosphere
buzzing with flies, it was as if some gigantic and remorseless being
watched him as a man of science might hover over some experiment, and
marked his life and all his world. “You are alone,” this brooding
witness counselled, “you are utterly alone. _Curse God and die._”
It seemed a long time before Mr. Huss answered this imagined voice, and
when he answered it he spoke as if he addressed his wife alone.
“_No_,” he said with a sudden decisiveness. “No. I will face that
operation.... We are ill and our hearts are faint. Neither for you,
dear, nor for me must our story finish in this fashion. No. I shall go
on to the end.”
“And have your operation here?”
“In this house. It is by far the most convenient place, as things are.”
“You may die here!”
“Well, I shall die fighting.”
“Leaving me here with Mrs. Croome.”
His temper broke under her reply. “Leaving you here with Mrs. Croome,”
he said harshly.
He got up. “I can eat nothing,” he repeated, and dropped back sullenly
into the horsehair armchair.
There was a long silence, and then he heard the little, almost
mouselike, movements of his wife as she began her meal. For a while he
had forgotten the dull ache within him, but now, glowing and fading and
glowing, it made its way back into his consciousness. He was helpless
and perplexed; he had not meant to quarrel. He had hurt this poor thing
who had been his love and companion; he had bullied her. His clogged
brain could think of nothing to set matters right. He stared with dull
eyes at a world utterly hateful to him.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE THREE VISITORS
§ 1
While this unhappy conversation was occurring at Sundering-on-Sea, three
men were discussing the case of Mr. Huss very earnestly over a meatless
but abundant lunch in the bow window of a club that gives upon the trees
and sunshine of Carlton Gardens. Lobster salad engaged them, and the ice
in the jug of hock cup clinked very pleasantly as they replenished their
glasses.
The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the patentee and manufacturer of those
Temanite building blocks which have not only revolutionized the
construction of army hutments, but put the whole problem of industrial
and rural housing upon an altogether new footing; his guests were Mr.
William Dad, formerly the maker of the celebrated Dad and Showhite car
de luxe, and now one of the chief contractors for aeroplanes in England;
and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section of Woldingstanton
School. Both the former gentlemen were governors of that foundation and
now immensely rich, and Sir Eliphaz had once been a pupil of the father
of Mr. Huss and had played a large part in the appointment of the latter
to Woldingstanton. He was a slender old man, with an avid vulturine head
poised on a long red neck, and he had an abundance of parti-coloured
hair, red and white, springing from a circle round the crown of his
head, from his eyebrows, his face generally, and the backs of his hands.
He wore a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar within a roomy blue
serge suit, and that and something about his large loose black tie
suggested scholarship and refinement. His manners were elaborately
courteous. Mr. Dad was a compacter, keener type, warily alert in his
bearing, an industrial fox-terrier from the Midlands, silver-haired and
dressed in ordinary morning dress except for a tan vest with a bright
brown ribbon border. Mr. Farr was big in a grey flannel Norfolk suit; he
had a large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands,
and it was apparent that he carried pocket-books and suchlike luggage in
his breast pocket.
They consumed the lobster appreciatively, and approached in a
fragmentary and tentative manner the business that had assembled them:
namely, the misfortunes that had overwhelmed Mr. Huss and their bearing
upon the future of the school.
“For my part I don’t think there is such a thing as misfortune,” said
Mr. Dad. “I don’t hold with it. Miscalculation _if_ you like.”
“In a sense,” said Mr. Farr ambiguously, glancing at Sir Eliphaz.
“If a man keeps his head screwed on the right way,” said Mr. Dad, and
attacked a claw with hope and appetite. Mr. Dad affected the parsimony
of unfinished sentences.
“I can’t help thinking,” said Sir Eliphaz, putting down his glass and
wiping his moustache and eyebrows with care before resuming his lobster,
“that a man who entrusts his affairs to a solicitor, after the fashion
of the widow and orphan, must be singularly lacking in judgment. Or
reckless. Never in the whole course of my life have I met a solicitor
who could invest money safely and profitably. Clergymen I have known,
women of all sorts, savages, monomaniacs, criminals, but _never_
solicitors.”
“I have known some smart business parsons,” said Mr. Dad judicially.
“One in particular. Sharp as nails. They are a much underestimated
class.”
“Perhaps it is natural that a solicitor should be a wild investor,” Sir
Eliphaz pursued his subject. “He lives out of the ordinary world in a
dirty little office in some antiquated inn, his office fittings are
fifty years out of date, his habitual scenery consists of tin boxes
painted with the names of dead and disreputable clients; he has to take
the law courts, filled with horseboxes and men dressed up in gowns and
horsehair wigs, quite seriously; nobody ever goes near him but abnormal
people or people in abnormal states: people upset by jealousy, people
upset by fear, blackmailed people, cheats trying to dodge the law,
lunatics, litigants and legatees. The only investments he ever discusses
are queer investments. Naturally he loses all sense of proportion.
Naturally he becomes insanely suspicious; and when a client asks for
positive action he flounders and gambles.”
“Naturally,” said Mr. Dad. “And here we find poor Huss giving all his
business over—”
“Exactly,” said Sir Eliphaz, and filled his glass.
“There’s been a great change in him in the last two years,” said Mr.
Farr. “He let the war worry him for one thing.”
“No good doing that,” said Mr. Dad.
“And even before the war,” Sir Eliphaz.
“Even before the war,” said Mr. Farr, in a pause.
“There was a change,” said Sir Eliphaz. “He had been bitten by
educational theories.”
“No business for a headmaster,” said Mr. Farr.
“Our intention had always been a great scientific and technical school,”
said Sir Eliphaz. “He introduced Logic into the teaching of plain
English—against my opinion. He encouraged some of the boys to read
philosophy.”
“All he could,” said Mr. Farr.
“I never held with his fad for teaching history,” said Mr. Dad. “He was
history mad. It got worse and worse. What’s history after all? At the
best, it’s over and done with.... But he wouldn’t argue upon it—not
reasonably. He was—overbearing. He had a way of looking at you.... It
was never our intention to make Woldingstanton into a school of
history.”
“And now, Mr. Farr,” said Sir Eliphaz, “what are the particulars of the
fire?”
“It isn’t for me to criticize,” said Mr. Farr.
“What I say,” said Mr. Dad, projecting his muzzle with an appearance of
great determination, “is, fix responsibility. _Fix responsibility._ Here
is a door locked that common sense dictated should be open. Who was
responsible?”
“No one in School House seems to have been especially responsible for
that door so far as I can ascertain,” said Mr. Farr.
“All responsibility,” said Mr. Dad, with an expression of peevish
insistence, as though Mr. Farr had annoyed him, “_all_ responsibility
that is not delegated rests with the Head. That’s a hard and fast and
primary rule of business organization. In my factory I say quite plainly
to everyone who comes into it, man or woman, chick or child....”
Mr. Dad was still explaining in a series of imaginary dialogues, tersely
but dramatically, his methods of delegating authority, when Sir Eliphaz
cut across the flow with, “Returning to Mr. Huss for a moment....”
The point that Sir Eliphaz wanted to get at was whether Mr. Huss
expected to continue headmaster at Woldingstanton. From some chance
phrase in a letter Sir Eliphaz rather gathered that he did.
“Well,” said Mr. Farr portentously, letting the thing hang for a moment,
“he does.”
“Tcha!” said Mr. Dad, and shut his mouth tightly and waved his head
slowly from side to side with knitted brows as if he had bitten his
tongue.
“I would be the first to recognize the splendid work he did for the
school in his opening years,” said Mr. Farr. “I would be the last to
alter the broad lines of the work as he set it out. Barring that I
should replace a certain amount of the biological teaching and
practically all this new history stuff by chemistry and physics. But one
has to admit that Mr. Huss did not know when to relinquish power nor
when to devolve responsibility. We, all of us, the entire staff—it is no
mere personal grievance of mine—were kept, well, to say the least of it,
in tutelage. Rather than let authority go definitely out of his hands,
he would allow things to drift. Witness that door, witness the business
of the nurse.”
Mr. Dad, with his lips compressed, nodded his head; each nod like the
tap of a hammer.
“I never believed in all this overdoing history in the school,” Mr. Dad
remarked rather disconnectedly. “If you get rid of Latin and Greek, why
bring it all back again in another form? Why, I’m told he taught ’em
things about Assyria. Assyria! A modern school ought to be a modern
school—business first and business last and business all the time. And
teach boys to work. We shall need it, mark my words.”
“A certain amount of modern culture,” waved Sir Eliphaz.
“_Modern_,” said Mr. Farr softly.
Mr. Dad grunted. “In my opinion that sort of thing gives the boys
ideas.”
Mr. Farr steered his way discreetly. “Science with a due regard to its
technical applications should certainly be the substantial part of a
modern education.”...
They were in the smoking-room and half way through three princely cigars
before they got beyond such fragmentary detractions of the fallen
headmaster. Then Mr. Dad in the clear-cut style of a business man,
brought his companions to action. “Well,” said Mr. Dad, turning abruptly
upon Sir Eliphaz, “what about it?”
“It is manifest that Woldingstanton has to enter on a new phase; what
has happened brings us to the parting of the ways,” said Sir Eliphaz.
“Much as I regret the misfortunes of an old friend.”
“_That_,” said Mr. Dad, “spells Farr.”
“If he will shoulder the burthen,” said Sir Eliphaz, smiling upon Mr.
Farr not so much with his mouth as by the most engaging convolutions,
curvatures and waving about of his various strands of hair.
“I don’t want to see the school go down,” said Mr. Farr. “I’ve given it
a good slice of my life.”
“Right,” said Mr. Dad. “Right. File that. That suits us. And now how do
we set about the affair? The next thing, I take it, is to break it to
Huss.... How?”
He paused to give the ideas of his companions a fair chance.
“Well, _my_ idea is this. None of us want to be hard on Mr. Huss. Luck
has been hard enough as it is. We want to do this job as gently as we
can. It happens that I go and play golf at Sundering-on-Sea ever and
again. Excellent links, well kept up all things considered, and the big
hotel close by does you wonderfully, the railway company sees to that;
in spite of the war. Well, why shouldn’t we all, if Sir Eliphaz’s
engagements permit, go down there in a sort of _casual_ way, and take
the opportunity of a good clear talk with him and settle it all up? The
thing’s got to be done, and it seems to me altogether more kindly to go
there personally and put it to him than do it by correspondence. Very
likely we could put it to him in such a way that he himself would
suggest the very arrangement we want. You particularly, Sir Eliphaz,
being as you say an old friend.”...
§ 2
Since there was little likelihood of Mr. Huss going away from
Sundering-on-Sea, it did not appear necessary to Mr. Dad to apprise him
of the projected visitation. And so these three gentlemen heard nothing
about any operation for cancer until they reached that resort.
Mr. Dad came down early on Friday afternoon to the Golf Hotel, where he
had already engaged rooms for the party. He needed the relaxation of the
links very badly, the task of accumulating a balance sufficiently large
to secure an opulent future for British industry, with which Mr. Dad in
his straightforward way identified himself, was one that in a controlled
establishment between the Scylla of aggressive labour and the Charybdis
of the war-profits tax, strained his mind to the utmost. He was joined
by Mr. Farr at dinner-time, and Sir Eliphaz, who was detained in London
by some negotiations with the American Government, arrived replete by
the dining-car train. Mr. Farr made a preliminary reconnaissance at Sea
View, and was the first to hear of the operation.
Sir Alpheus Mengo was due at Sea View by the first morning train on
Saturday. He had arranged to operate before lunch. It was clear
therefore that the only time available for a conversation between the
three and Mr. Huss was between breakfast and the arrival of Sir Alpheus.
Mr. Huss, whose lethargy had now departed, displayed himself feverishly
anxious to talk about the school. “There are points I must make clear,”
he said, “vital points,” and so a meeting was arranged for half-past
nine. This would give a full hour before the arrival of the doctors.
“He feels that in a way it will be his testament, so to speak,” said Mr.
Farr. “Naturally he has his own ideas about the future of the school. We
all have. I would be the last person to suggest that he could say
anything about Woldingstanton that would not be well worth hearing. Some
of us may have heard most of it before, and be better able to discount
some of his assertions. But that under the present circumstances is
neither here nor there.”
§ 3
Matters in the confined space of Sea View were not nearly so strained as
Mr. Huss had feared. The prospect of an operation was not without its
agreeable side to Mrs. Croome. Possibly she would have preferred that
the subject should have been Mrs. rather than Mr. Huss, but it was clear
that she made no claim to dictate upon this point. Her demand for
special fees to meet the inconveniences of the occasion had been met
quite liberally by Mr. Huss. And there was a genuine appreciation of
order and method in Mrs. Croome; she was a furious spring-cleaner, a
hurricane tidier-up, her feeling for the discursive state of Mrs. Huss’s
hair was almost as involuntary as a racial animosity; and the swift
dexterous preparations of the nurse who presently came to convert the
best bedroom to surgical uses, impressed her deeply. She was allowed to
help. Superfluous hangings and furnishings were removed, everything was
thoroughly scrubbed, at the last moment clean linen sheets of a
wonderful hardness were to be spread over every exposed surface. They
were to be brought in sterilized drums. The idea of sterilized drums
fascinated her. She had never heard of such things before. She wished
she could keep her own linen in a sterilized drum always, and let her
lodgers have something else instead.
She felt she was going to be a sort of assistant priestess at a
sacrifice, the sacrifice of Mr. Huss. She had always secretly feared his
submissive quiet as a thing unaccountable that might at any time turn
upon her; she suspected him of ironies; and he would be helpless, under
chloroform, subject to examination with no possibilities of
disconcerting repartee. She did her best to persuade Dr. Barrack that
she would be useful in the room during the proceedings. Her imagination
conjured up a wonderful vision of the Huss interior as a great chest
full of strange and interesting viscera with the lid wide open and Sir
Alpheus picking thoughtfully, with deprecatory remarks, amid its
contents. But that sight was denied her.
She was very helpful and cheerful on the Saturday morning, addressing
herself to the consolation of Mr. and the bracing-up of Mrs. Huss. She
assisted in the final transformation of the room.
“It might be a real ’ospital,” she said. “Nursing must be nice work. I
never thought of it like this before.”
Mr. Huss was no longer depressed but flushed and resolute, but Mrs.
Huss, wounded by the neglect of everyone—no one seemed to consider for a
moment what she must be feeling—remained very much in her own room,
working inefficiently upon the mourning that might now be doubly needed.
§ 4
Mr. Huss knew Mr. Farr very well. For the last ten years it had been his
earnest desire to get rid of him, but he had been difficult to replace
because of his real accomplishment in technical chemistry. In the course
of their five minutes’ talk in his bedroom on Friday evening, Mr. Huss
grasped the situation. Woldingstanton, his creation, his life work, was
to be taken out of his hands, and in favour of this, his most
soul-deadening assistant. He had been foolish no doubt, but he had never
anticipated that. He had never supposed that Farr would dare.
He thought hard through that long night of Friday. His pain was no
distraction. He had his intentions very ready and clear in his mind when
his three visitors arrived.
He had insisted upon getting up and dressing fully.
“I can’t talk about Woldingstanton in bed,” he said. The doctor was not
there to gainsay him.
Sir Eliphaz was the first to arrive, and Mrs. Huss retrieved him from
Mrs. Croome in the passage and brought him in. He was wearing a Norfolk
jacket suit of a coarse yet hairy consistency and of a pale sage green
colour. He shone greatly in the eyes of Mrs. Huss. “I can’t help
thinking of you, dear lady,” he said, bowing over her hand, and all his
hair was for a moment sad and sympathetic like a sick Skye terrier’s.
Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr entered a moment later; Mr. Farr in grey flannel
trousers and a brown jacket, and Mr. Dad in a natty dark grey suit with
a luminous purple waistcoat.
“My dear,” said Mr. Huss to his wife, “I must be alone with these
gentlemen,” and when she seemed disposed to linger near the
understanding warmth of Sir Eliphaz, he added, “Figures, my
dear—_Finance_,” and drove her forth....
“’Pon my honour,” said Mr. Dad, coming close up to the armchair,
wrinkling his muzzle and putting through his compliments in good
business-like style before coming to the harder stuff in hand; “I don’t
like to see you like this, Mr. Huss.”
“Nor does Sir Eliphaz, I hope—nor Farr. Please find yourselves chairs.”
And while Mr. Farr made protesting noises and Sir Eliphaz waved his hair
about before beginning the little speech he had prepared, Mr. Huss took
the discourse out of their mouths and began:
“I know perfectly well the task you have set yourselves. You have come
to make an end of me as headmaster of Woldingstanton. And Mr. Farr has
very obligingly....”
He held up his white and wasted hand as Mr. Farr began to disavow.
“No,” said Mr. Huss. “But before you three gentlemen proceed with your
office, I should like to tell you something of what the school and my
work in it, and my work for education, is to me. I am a man of little
more than fifty. A month ago I counted with a reasonable confidence upon
twenty years more of work before I relaxed.... Then these misfortunes
rained upon me. I have lost all my private independence; there have been
these shocking deaths in the school; my son, my only son ... killed ...
trouble has darkened the love and kindness of my wife ... and now my
body is suffering so that my mind is like a swimmer struggling through
waves of pain ... far from land.... These are heavy blows. But the
hardest blow of all, harder to bear than any of these others—I do not
speak rashly, gentlemen, I have thought it out through an endless
night—the last blow will be this rejection of my life work. That will
strike the inmost me, the heart and soul of me....”
He paused.
“You mustn’t take it quite like that, Mr. Huss,” protested Mr. Dad. “It
isn’t fair to us to put it like that.”
“I want you to listen to me,” said Mr. Huss.
“Only the very kindest motives,” continued Mr. Dad.
“Let me speak,” said Mr. Huss, with the voice of authority that had
ruled Woldingstanton for five and twenty years. “I cannot wrangle and
contradict. At most we have an hour.”
Mr. Dad made much the same sound that a dog will make when it has
proposed to bark and has been told to get under the table. For a time he
looked an ill-used man.
“To end my work in the school will be to end me altogether.... I do not
see why I should not speak plainly to you, gentlemen, situated as I am
here. I do not see why I should not talk to you for once in my own
language. Pain and death are our interlocutors; this is a rare and raw
and bleeding occasion; in an hour or so the women may be laying out my
body and I may be silent for ever. I have hidden my religion, but why
should I hide it now? To you I have always tried to seem as practical
and self-seeking as possible, but in secret I have been a fanatic; and
Woldingstanton was the altar on which I offered myself to God. I have
done ill and feebly there I know; I have been indolent and rash; those
were my weaknesses; but I have done my best. To the limits of my
strength and knowledge I have served God.... And now in this hour of
darkness where is this God that I have served? Why does he not stand
here between me and this last injury you would do to the work I have
dedicated to him?”
At these words Mr. Dad turned horrified eyes to Mr. Farr.
But Mr. Huss went on as though talking to himself. “In the night I have
looked into my heart; I have sought in my heart for base motives and
secret sins. I have put myself on trial to find why God should hide
himself from me now, and I can find no reason and no justification....
In the bitterness of my heart I am tempted to give way to you and to
tell you to take the school and to do just what you will with it.... The
nearness of death makes the familiar things of experience flimsy and
unreal, and far more real to me now is this darkness that broods over
me, as blight will sometimes overhang the world at noon, and mocks me
day and night with a perpetual challenge to curse God and die....
“Why do I not curse God and die? Why do I cling to my work when the God
to whom I dedicated it is—silent? Because, I suppose, I still hope for
some sign of reassurance. Because I am not yet altogether defeated. I
would go on telling you why I want Woldingstanton to continue on its
present lines and why it is impossible for you, why it will be a sort of
murder for you to hand it over to Farr here, if my pain were ten times
what it is....”
At the mention of his name, Mr. Farr started and looked first at Mr.
Dad, and then at Sir Eliphaz. “Really,” he said, “really! One might
think I had conspired—”
“I am afraid, Mr. Huss,” said Sir Eliphaz, with a large reassuring
gesture to the technical master, “that the suggestion that Mr. Farr
should be your successor came in the first instance from _me_.”
“You must reconsider it,” said Mr. Huss, moistening his lips and staring
steadfastly in front of him.
Here Mr. Dad broke out in a querulous voice: “Are you really in a state,
Mr. Huss, to discuss a matter like this—feverish and suffering as you
are?”
“I could not be in a better frame for this discussion,”
said Mr. Huss.... “And now for what I have to say about the
school:—Woldingstanton, when I came to it, was a humdrum school of some
seventy boys, following a worn-out routine. A little Latin was taught
and less Greek, chiefly in order to say that Greek was taught; some
scraps of mathematical processes, a few rags of general knowledge,
English history—not human history, mind you, but just the national
brand, cut dried flowers from the past with no roots and no meaning, a
smattering of French.... That was practically all; it was no sort of
education, it was a mere education-like posturing. And to-day, what has
that school become?”
“We never grudged you money,” said Sir Eliphaz.
“Nor loyal help,” said Mr. Farr, but in a half whisper.
“I am not thinking of its visible prosperity. The houses and
laboratories and museums that have grown about that nucleus are nothing
in themselves. The reality of a school is not in buildings and numbers
but in matters of the mind and soul. Woldingstanton has become a torch
at which lives are set aflame. I have lit a candle there—the winds of
fate may yet blow it into a world-wide blaze.”
As Mr. Huss said these things he was uplifted by enthusiasm, and his
pain sank down out of his consciousness.
“What,” he said, “is the task of the teacher in the world? It is the
greatest of all human tasks. It is to ensure that Man, Man the Divine,
grows in the souls of men. For what is a man without instruction? He is
born as the beasts are born, a greedy egotism, a clutching desire, a
thing of lusts and fears. He can regard nothing except in relation to
himself. Even his love is a bargain; and his utmost effort is vanity
because he has to die. And it is we teachers alone who can lift him out
of that self-preoccupation. We teachers.... We can release him into a
wider circle of ideas beyond himself in which he can at length forget
himself and his meagre personal ends altogether. We can open his eyes to
the past and to the future and to the undying life of Man. So through us
and through us only, he escapes from death and futility. An untaught man
is but himself alone, as lonely in his ends and destiny as any beast; a
man instructed is a man enlarged from that narrow prison of self into
participation in an undying life, that began we know not when, that
grows above and beyond the greatness of the stars....”
He spoke as if he addressed some other hearer than the three before him.
Mr. Dad, with eyebrows raised and lips compressed, nodded silently to
Mr. Farr as if his worst suspicions were confirmed, and there were signs
and signals that Sir Eliphaz was about to speak, when Mr. Huss resumed.
“For five and twenty years I have ruled over Woldingstanton, and for all
that time I have been giving sight to the blind. I have given
understanding to some thousands of boys. All those routines of teaching
that had become dead we made live again there. My boys have learnt the
history of mankind so that it has become their own adventure; they have
learnt geography so that the world is their possession; I have had
languages taught to make the past live again in their minds and to be
windows upon the souls of alien peoples. Science has played its proper
part; it has taken my boys into the secret places of matter and out
among the nebulæ.... Always I have kept Farr and his utilities in their
due subordination. Some of my boys have already made good business
men—because they were more than business men.... But I have never sought
to make business men and I never will. My boys have gone into the
professions, into the services, into the great world and done well—I
have had dull boys and intractable boys, but nearly all have gone into
the world gentlemen, broad-minded, good-mannered, understanding and
unselfish, masters of self, servants of man, because the whole scheme of
their education has been to release them from base and narrow things....
When the war came, my boys were ready.... They have gone to their
deaths—how many have gone to their deaths! My own son among them.... I
did not grudge him.... Woldingstanton is a new school; its tradition has
scarcely begun; the list of its old boys is now so terribly depleted
that its young tradition wilts like a torn seedling.... But still we can
keep on with it, still that tradition will grow, if my flame still
burns. But my teaching must go on as I have planned it. It must. It
must.... What has made my boys all that they are, has been the history,
the biological science, the philosophy. For these things are wisdom. All
the rest is training and mere knowledge. If the school is to live, the
head must still be a man who can teach history—history in the widest
sense; he must be philosopher, biologist, and archæologist as well as
scholar. And you would hand that task to Farr! Farr! Farr here has never
even touched the essential work of the school. He does not know what it
is. His mind is no more opened than the cricket professional’s.”
Mr. Dad made an impatient noise.
The sick man went on with his burning eyes on Farr, his lips bloodless.
“He thinks of chemistry and physics not as a help to understanding but
as a help to trading. So long as he has been at Woldingstanton he has
been working furtively with our materials in the laboratories, dreaming
of some profitable patent. Oh! I know you, Farr. Do you think I didn’t
see because I didn’t choose to complain? If he could have discovered
some profitable patent he would have abandoned teaching the day he did
so. He would have been even as you are. But with a lifeless imagination
you cannot even invent patentable things. He would talk to the boys of
the empire at times, but the empire to him is no more than a trading
conspiracy fenced about with tariffs. It goes on to nothing.... And he
thinks we are fighting the Germans, he thinks my dear and precious boy
gave his life and that all these other brave lads beyond counting died,
in order that we might take the place of the Germans as the
chapman-bullies of the world. That is the measure of his mind. He has no
religion, no faith, no devotion. Why does he want my place? Because he
wants to serve as I have served? No! But because he envies my house, my
income, my headship. Whether I live or die, it is impossible that
Woldingstanton, my Woldingstanton, should live under his hand. Give it
to him, and in a little while it will be dead.”
§ 5
“Gentlemen!” Mr. Farr protested with a white perspiring face.
“I had no idea,” ejaculated Mr. Dad, “I had no idea that things had gone
so far.”
Sir Eliphaz indicated by waving his hand that his associates might allay
themselves; he recognized that the time had come for him to speak.
“It is deplorable,” Sir Eliphaz began.
He put down his hands and gripped the seat of his chair as if to hold
himself on to it very tightly, and he looked very hard at the horizon as
if he was trying to decipher some remote inscription. “You have imported
a tone into this discussion,” he tried.
He got off at the third attempt. “It is an extremely painful thing to
me, Mr. Huss, that to you, standing as you do on the very brink of the
Great Chasm, it should be necessary to speak in any but the most cordial
and helpful tones. But it is my duty, it is our duty, to hold firmly to
those principles which have always guided us as governors of the
Woldingstanton School. You speak, I must say it, with an extreme
arrogance of an institution to which all of us here have in some measure
contributed; you speak as though you, and you alone, were its creator
and guide. You must pardon me, Mr. Huss, if I remind you of the facts,
the eternal verities of the story. The school, sir, was founded in the
spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, and many a good man guided its
fortunes down to the time when an unfortunate—a diversion of its
endowments led to its temporary cessation. The Charity Commissioners
revived it after an inquiry some fifty years ago, and it has been
largely the lavish generosity of the Papermakers’ Guild, of which I and
Dad are humble members, that has stimulated its expansion under you.
Loth as I am to cross your mood, Mr. Huss, while you are in pain and
anxiety, I am bound to recall to you these things which have made _your_
work possible. You could not have made bricks without straw, you could
not have built up Woldingstanton without the money obtained by that
commercialism for which you display such unqualified contempt. We sordid
cits it was who planted, who watered....”
Mr. Huss seemed about to speak, but said nothing.
“Exactly what I say,” said Mr. Dad, turning for confirmation to Mr.
Farr. “The school is essentially a modern commercial school. It should
be run as that.”
Mr. Farr nodded his white face ambiguously with his eye on Sir Eliphaz.
“I should have been chary, Mr. Huss, of wrangling about our particular
shares and contributions on an occasion so solemn as this, but since you
will have it so, since you challenge discussion....”
He turned to his colleagues as if for support.
“Go on,” said Mr. Dad. “Facts are facts.”
§ 6
Sir Eliphaz cleared his throat, and continued to read the horizon.
“I have raised these points, Mr. Huss, by way of an opening. The gist of
what I have to say lies deeper. So far I have dealt with the things you
have said only in relation to us; as against us you assume your own
righteousness, you flout our poor judgments, you sweep them aside; the
school must be continued on _your_ lines, the teaching must follow
_your_ schemes. You can imagine no alternative opinion. God forbid that
I should say a word in my own defence; I have given freely both of my
time and of my money to our school; it would tax my secretaries now to
reckon up how much; but I make no claims.... None....
“But let me now put all this discussion upon a wider and a graver
footing. It is not only us and our poor intentions you arraign. Strange
things have dropped from you, Mr. Huss, in this discussion, things it
has at once pained and astonished me to hear from you. You have spoken
not only of man’s ingratitude, but of God’s. I could scarcely believe my
ears, but indeed I heard you say that God was silent, unhelpful, and
that he too had deserted you. In spite of the most meritorious exertions
on your part.... Standing as you do on the very margin of the Great
Secret, I want to plead very earnestly with you against all that you
have said.”
Sir Eliphaz seemed to meditate remotely. He returned like a soaring
vulture to his victim. “I would be the last man to obtrude my religious
feelings upon anyone.... I make no parade of religion, Mr. Huss, none at
all. Many people think me no better than an unbeliever. But here I am
bound to make my confession. I owe much to God, Mr. Huss....”
He glowered at the sick man. He abandoned his grip upon the seat of his
chair for a moment, to make a gesture with his hairy claw of a hand.
“Your attitude to my God is a far deeper offence to me than any merely
personal attack could be. Under his chastening blows, under trials that
humbler spirits would receive with thankfulness and construe as lessons
and warnings, you betray yourself more proud, more self-assured,
more—froward is not too harsh a word—more froward, Mr. Huss, than you
were even in the days when we used to fret under you on Founder’s Day in
the Great Hall, when you would dictate to us that here you must have an
extension and there you must have a museum or a picture room or what
not, leaving nothing to opinion, making our gifts a duty.... You will
not recognise the virtue of gifts and graces either in man or God....
Cannot you see, my dear Mr. Huss, the falsity of your position? It is
upon that point that I want to talk to you now. God does not smite man
needlessly. This world is all one vast intention, and not a sparrow
falls to the ground unless He wills that sparrow to fall. Is your heart
so sure of itself? Does nothing that has happened suggest to you that
there may be something in your conduct and direction of Woldingstanton
that has made it not quite so acceptable an offering to God as you have
imagined it to be?”
Sir Eliphaz paused with an air of giving Mr. Huss his chance, but
meeting with no response, he resumed: “I am an old man, Mr. Huss, and I
have seen much of the world and more particularly of the world of
finance and industry, a world of swift opportunities and sudden
temptations. I have watched the careers of many young men of parts, who
have seemed to be under the impression that the world had been waiting
for them overlong; I have seen more promotions, schemes and enterprises,
great or grandiose, than I care to recall. Developing Woldingstanton
from the mere endowed school of a market-town it was, to its present
position, has been for me a subordinate incident, a holiday task, a
piece of by-play upon a crowded scene. My experiences have been on a far
greater scale. Far greater. And in all my experience I have never seen
what I should call a really right-minded man perish or an innocent
dealer—provided, that is, that he took ordinary precautions—destroyed.
Ups and downs no doubt there are, for the good as well as the bad. I
have seen the foolish taking root for a time—it was but for a time. I
have watched the manœuvres of some exceedingly crafty men....”
Sir Eliphaz shook his head slowly from side to side and all the hairs on
his head waved about.
He hesitated for a moment, and decided to favour his hearers with a
scrap of autobiography.
“Quite recently,” he began, “there was a fellow came to us, just as we
were laying down our plant for production on a large scale. He was a
very plausible, energetic young fellow indeed, an American Armenian.
Well, he happened to know somehow that we were going to use kaolin from
felspar, a by-product of the new potash process, and he had got hold of
a scheme for washing London clay that produced, he assured us, an
accessible kaolin just as good for our purpose and not a tenth of the
cost of the Norwegian stuff. It would have reduced our prime cost
something like thirty per cent. Let alone tonnage. Excuse these
technicalities. On the face of it it was a thoroughly good thing. The
point was that I knew all along that his stuff retained a certain amount
of sulphur and couldn’t possibly make a building block to last. That
wouldn’t prevent us selling and using the stuff with practical impunity.
It wasn’t up to us to know. No one could have made us liable. The thing
indeed looked so plain and safe that I admit it tempted me sorely. And
then, Mr. Huss, God came in. I received a secret intimation. I want to
tell you of this in all good faith and simplicity. In the night when all
the world was deep in sleep, I awoke. And I was in the extremest terror;
my very bones were shaking; I sat up in my bed afraid almost to touch
the switch of the electric light; my hair stood on end. I could see
nothing, I could hear nothing, but it was as if a spirit passed in front
of my face. And in spite of the silence something seemed to be saying to
me: ‘How about God, Sir Eliphaz? Have you at last forgotten Him? How can
you, that would dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is the dust,
escape His judgments?’ That was all, Mr. Huss, just that. ‘Whose
foundation is the dust!’ Straight to the point. Well, Mr. Huss, I am not
a religious man, but I threw over that Armenian.”
Mr. Dad made a sound to intimate that he would have done the same.
“I mention this experience, this intervention—and it is not the only one
of which I could tell—because I want you to get my view that if an
enterprise, even though it is as fair and honest-seeming a business as
Woldingstanton School, begins suddenly to crumple and wilt, it means
that somehow, somewhere you must have been putting the wrong sort of
clay into it. It means not that God is wrong and going back upon you,
but that you are wrong. You may be a great and famous teacher now, Mr.
Huss, thanks not a little to the pedestal we have made for you, but God
is a greater and more famous teacher. He manifestly you have not
convinced, even if you could have convinced us, of Woldingstanton’s
present perfection....
“That is practically all I have to say. When we propose, in all
humility, to turn the school about into new and less pretentious courses
and you oppose us, that is our answer. If you had done as well and
wisely as you declare, you would not be in this position and this
discussion would never have arisen.”
He paused.
“Said with truth and dignity,” said Mr. Dad. “You have put my opinion,
Sir Eliphaz, better than I could have put it myself. I thank you.”
He coughed briefly.
§ 7
“The question you put to me I have put to myself,” said Mr. Huss, and
thought deeply for a little while....
“No, I do not feel convicted of wrong-doing. I still believe the work I
set myself to do was right, right in spirit and intention, right in plan
and method. You invite me to confess my faith broken and in the dust;
and my faith was never so sure. There is a God in my heart, in my heart
at least there is a God, who has always guided me to right and who
guides me now. My conscience remains unassailable. These afflictions
that you speak of as trials and warnings I can only see as inexplicable
disasters. They perplex me, but they do not cow me. They strike me as
pointless and irrelevant events.”
“But this is terrible!” said Mr. Dad, deeply shocked.