Arles, but the desire spoke in all her silences. She made no complaint,
but Roserra saw an unfriendliness growing up in her eyes which terrified
him. She held him, as she had held him since their first meeting, by a
kind of magnetism which he had come to realise was neither love nor
sympathy. He felt that he could hate her, and yet not free himself from
that influence. What was to be done? He would have to choose; his life
of the future could no longer be his life of the past. His introduction
of a woman to his best friend had been unfortunate, as such
introductions always are, in one way or another. He had tended his soul
for more than half a lifetime, waited upon it delicately, served it with
its favourite food; and now something stronger had come forward and
said: No more. What was it? He had no wish to speculate; it mattered
little whether it was what people called his higher nature, or what they
called his lower nature, which had brought him to this result. At least
he had some recompense.
When he told Livia that he had decided to go back to Marseilles ('Arles
does not suit you,' he said; 'you have not been well since we came
here') Livia flung herself into his arms with an uncontrollable delight.
On the night before they left, he sat for a long time, alone, under the
Allee des Tombeaux. When he came back, Livia was watching for him from
the window. She ran to the door and opened it.
It was midday when they reached Marseilles. The sun burned on the blue
water, which lay hot, motionless, and glittering. There was not a breath
of wind, and the dust shone on the roads like a thick white layer of
powder. The light beat downwards from the blue sky, and upwards from the
white dust of the roads. The heat was enveloping; it wrapped one from
head to foot like the caress of a hot furnace. Roserra pressed his hands
to his forehead, as he leaned with Livia over the terrace above the sea;
his head throbbed, it was an effort even to breathe. He remembered the
grey coolness of the Allee des Tombeaux, where the old men sat among the
tombs. A nausea, a suffocating nausea, rose up within him as he felt the
heat and glare of this vulgar, exuberant paradise of snobs and tourists.
He sickened with revolt before this over-fed nature, sweating the fat of
life. He looked at Livia; she stood there, perfectly cool under her
sunshade, turning to watch a carriage that came towards them in a cloud
of dust. She was once more in her element, she was quite happy; she had
plunged back into the warmth of life out of that penetential chillness
of Arles; and it was with real friendliness that she turned to Roserra,
as she saw his eyes fixed upon her.
SEAWARD LACKLAND.
Seaward Lackland was born on a day of storm, when his father was out at
sea in his fishing-boat; and the mother vowed that if her husband came
home alive the boy should be dedicated to the Lord. Isaac Lackland was
the only one of his mates who came home alive out of the storm; and the
boy got the queer name of Seaward because his mother had looked out to
sea, as soon as she had strength enough to be propped up in bed, praying
for her husband every minute of the time until he came back. She could
see the sea through the little leaded windows of the cottage which stood
right on the edge of the cliff above Carbis Bay. The child's earliest
recollection was of the shape and colour of the waves, between the
diamond leadings, as he was held up to the window in his mother's arms.
It was like looking at pictures in frames, he thought afterwards.
The child was dedicated to the Lord. Isaac knelt down by the bedside and
prayed over him as Mary held him in her arms, and when he got up from
his knees he said: 'Mary, if the boy lives, please God, he shall have
his schooling; and I wouldn't say but he might make a fine preacher of
the Gospel.'
'It was little schooling Peter ever had,' said his wife.
'Peter was wanted in the boat; this youngster can wait.'
'Oh, Isaac, do you think he'll go to America, when he's grown up, like
Peter?'
'No, Mary, he'll not go farther than Land's End by land, or Mount's Bay
by sea, if what I feel is the truth. We've given him to the Lord, and I
say the Lord will lend him to us.'
Mary said under her breath, 'Oh, please, Lord Jesus,' several times
over, with her eyes tight shut, as she did when she seemed to pray best.
Her first son had been drowned at sea, her second had run away from home
and gone to America; and she hardly dared think of what would happen to
this one. But they had done what they could. Would not God watch over
him, and would he not be kind to her because she had given up some of
her rights in the child?
The child grew strong and gentle; he learned quickly what he was taught,
and when he had learned it he would set himself to think out what it
really meant, and why it meant that and not something else. He was
always good to his mother, and as soon as he had learned to read he
would read to her out of a few books which she cared for, the Bible
chiefly, and Bogatzky's 'Golden Treasury,' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'
Through reading it over and over to his mother, he got to know a good
part of the Bible by heart, and he was always asking what this and that
puzzling passage meant exactly, and, when he got no satisfying answer,
trying to puzzle out a meaning for himself.
Every day he went in to the Wesleyan day-school at St. Ives, and as he
walked there and back along the cliff-path, generally alone, all sorts
of whimsical ideas turned over in his head, ideas that came to him out
of books, and out of what people said, and out of the queer world in
which he found himself, half land and half water. It was always changing
about him and yet always there, in the same place, with its regular and
yet unaccountable tides and harvests. Sometimes there was a storm at sea
and all the boats did not come back, and the people he had talked with
yesterday had gone, like the stone he kicked over the cliff in walking,
or he saw them carried up the beach with covered faces. Death is always
about the life of fishermen, and he saw it more visibly and a thing more
natural and expected than it must seem to most children.
He had always loved the sea, and it was his greatest delight to be taken
out when the pilchards were in the bay, and to sit in the boat watching
the silver shoals as they crowded into the straining net. He waited for
the cry of 'Heva!' from the watchman on the hill, and often sat beside
him, or stared out to sea through his long telescope, longing to be the
first to catch the moving glitter of silver. He talked with the men
'like a grown-up chap' they said, and they talked with him as if he
were a man, telling him stories, not the stories they would have told
children, but things out of their own lives, and ideas that came into
their heads as they lay out at sea all night in the drift-boats.
There was one old man with whom the boy liked best to talk, because he
had been a sailor in his youth and had gone through all the seas and
landed at many ports, and had been shipwrecked on a wild island and
lived for a year among savages, and he was not like the other men, who
had always been fishers, and thought Plymouth probably as good as
London. Old Minshull seemed to the boy a very clever as well as a
far-travelled person, and he discussed some of his difficulties with him
and got help, he thought, from the old man.
His difficulties were chiefly religious ones. He knew much more about
the Bible than about the world, and his imagination was constantly at
work on those absorbing stories in Kings and Judges, and all sorts of
cloudy pictures which he made up for himself out of obscure hints in the
Prophets and the Apocalypse. The old Cornishman knew his Bible pretty
well, but not so well as the boy; and the boy would bring the book out
on the cliff and read over some of the confusing things; murders, with
God's approval, it seemed, and treacheries which set nations free, and
are called 'blessed,' and the sins of the saints; and then mysterious
curses and unintelligible idolatries, and the Scarlet Woman and Jonah's
whale. He liked best the Old Testament, and had formed a clear idea of
God the Father as a perfectly just but constantly avenging deity; it
pained him if he could not bring everything into agreement with this
idea; and in the New Testament he was often perplexed by what Jesus
seemed to do and undo in the divine affairs. The old sailor turned over
all these matters in his head; they were new to him, but he faced them,
and he was sometimes able to suggest just the common-sense way out of
the difficulty.
When Mary Lackland thought the boy old enough to understand the full
meaning of it, she told him how, on the day of his birth, he had been
dedicated to God, and she told him that he was never to forget this,
but to think much of God's claims upon him, and to be certain of a
special divine guardianship. He listened gravely, and promised. From
that time he began to look on God, not with less awe, but with a more
intimate sense of his continual presence, and a kind of filial feeling
grew up in him quite simply, a love of God, which came as a great
reality into his life. He felt that he must never dishonour this divine
father, either by anything he did or by the way in which he thought of
him even. Did not God, in a sense, depend on him as a father depends on
his son, to keep his honour spotless, to be more jealous of that honour
than of his own? That, or something like it, only half-defined to
himself, was what he felt about God, to whom his whole life had been
dedicated.
When he had finished his schooling, the boy joined his father in the
boats, first, only by day, in the pilchard fishery, and then in the
drift-boats that went far out, at night, in the herring season. His
father was a silent man and rarely spoke to him; the other men half
feared and half despised him, because he would not drink or play cards
with them, and seemed to be generally either reading or thinking. He
thought a great deal in those long nights, and when he was eighteen he
began to be seriously alarmed because, so far as he knew, he was not
converted.
He knew that he tried to do what was right, that he kept all the
commandments, prayed night and morning, and that he had this instinctive
love of God; but, according to the Methodists, all that was not enough.
There must be a moment, they held, in every man's life when he becomes
actively conscious of salvation; for every man there is a road to
Damascus. Seaward Lackland had not yet come to that great crisis, and he
waited for it, wondering what it was and when he would come to it.
He began to be troubled about his sins. The Bible said that every evil
thought was a sin, and he did not know how many evil thoughts had come
into his mind since he had become conscious of good and evil. A heavy
burden of guilt weighed upon him; he could not put it aside; the more
he thought of God, the more conscious did he become of that awful gulf
which lay between him and God. Conversion, he had heard, bridged that
gulf, or your sins fell off into it and were no more seen, even if,
somewhere out of sight, they still existed, and would exist through all
eternity. He would have despaired but for the hope of that miracle. And
if I die, he said to himself, before I am converted?
He had always gone regularly to chapel on Sundays and as often as he
could on week-days, but now he began to stay to the prayer-meetings
after the service, and the minister at St. Ives noticed him, and often
prayed with him and talked with him, but to no avail. A year went by,
and he grew more despondent; even his love for God seemed to be
slackening. One winter evening he heard that a famous revivalist was
coming to Lelant. He thought he would go and hear him, then something
seemed to urge him not to go; and he walked half-way there, and then
back again, unable to make up his mind. Then, thinking that it was the
devil who was trying to keep him away, he turned and walked resolutely
to Lelant.
When he reached the chapel the service had begun. They were singing
'Jesu, lover of my soul,' and the preacher was standing inside the
communion-rail (he liked to be nearer the people than he could be in the
pulpit), and, as Seaward had the first glimpse of his face, he was
singing as if every word of the hymn meant something wonderful to him.
His eyes were wide open and shining; he held the closed hymn-book in
both hands, rigid in front of him, and the people seemed already to have
begun to feel that magnetic influence which he rarely failed to
establish between himself and his hearers. After the hymn he stretched
out his hand with a sudden gesture, and the people stood motionless for
a moment and then gradually sank down on their knees as he began to pray
rapidly. He seemed to be talking with God as if God were there in the
midst of them, and as he passed from supplication into a kind of vivid
statement, meant for the people rather than for the ear of God, there
seemed to be a dialogue going on, as if the answers which he gave were
hardly his own answers. He ended abruptly, and, without the harmonium,
started an almost incoherent marching-song which was well known at all
revivals. 'Hallelujah, send the glory!' he sang, and the voices of the
people rose louder and louder and feet began to beat time to the heavy
swing of the tune. Then he read the lesson and, without a pause, gave
out the text, and began to speak.
Seaward Lackland had stepped into a pew near the door, and in the
furthest corner of the chapel. Something in the preacher's voice had
thrilled him, and he could not take his eyes off the long lean face,
with its eyes like two burning coals, as it seemed to him, under a high
receding forehead, from which the longish hair was brushed straight
back. A huge moustache seemed to eat up the whole lower part of the
face; and, as the man spoke, you saw nothing but the eyes and the
quivering moustache. He began quietly, but, from the first, in the
manner of one who has some all-important, and perhaps fatal, secret to
tell. An uneasiness spread gradually through the chapel, which
increased as he went on, with more urgency. People shifted in their
seats, looked sideways at their neighbours, as if they feared to have
betrayed themselves. Seaward felt himself turning hot and cold, for no
reason that he could think of, and he took out his handkerchief and
wiped his forehead. Near him he saw a young woman begin to cry, quite
quietly, and a man not far off drew long breaths, that he could hear,
almost like groans. The preacher's voice sounded like pathetic music,
and he heard the tones rather than the words, tones which seemed to
plead with him like music, asking something of him, as music did; and he
wanted to respond; and he realised that it was his sin that was keeping
him back from somehow completing the harmony, and he heard the
preacher's voice talking with his soul, as if no one were there but they
two. And God? God, perhaps.
By this time many people in the chapel were weeping, men groaned
heavily, some jumped up crying 'Hallelujah!' and when the preacher ended
and said, 'Now let us have silent prayer,' and came down into the
aisle, and moved from pew to pew, one after another, as he spoke to
them, got up, and went to the communion-rail, and knelt there, some of
them with looks of great happiness. As Seaward saw the preacher coming
near him, he felt a horrible fear, he did not know of what; and he rose
quietly and stepped out into the night. But there, as he stood listening
to some exultant voices which he still heard crying 'Hallelujah!' and as
he felt the comfort of the cool air about him, and looked up at the
stars and the thin white clouds which were rushing across the moon, a
sense of quiet and well-being came over him, and he felt as if some
bitter thing had been taken out of his soul, and he were free to love
God and life at the same time, and not, as he had done till then, with
alternate pangs of regret. 'If God so loved the world,' he found himself
repeating; and the whole mercy of the text enveloped him. He walked home
along the cliff like one in a dream: he only hoped not to waken out of
that happiness.
From this time, year by year, Seaward Lackland grew more eager to do
some work for God. He had made few friends among the young men and women
of his own age; to the women he seemed at once too cold and too earnest,
and the men were not quite certain of the comradeship of one who had so
much book-learning, and who was so full of strange ideas. He did not
mean to be unfriendly, but he had not the qualities that go to the easy
making of friendships; and he found no one, neither man nor woman, with
whom he had anything in common. The men respected him, for he was a good
fisherman; but the women had for the most part a certain contempt for
this large-boned, dull-eyed, heavy-jawed young man, who was never at his
ease when he was with them, and who waited on no occasions for meeting
them when they might have liked his company. The minister at St. Ives
had noticed him and asked him sometimes to come and have a talk with him
in his study. One day Lackland, warmed out of his reserve, had been
talking so well that the minister said to him: 'I think we must have
you as a local preacher, Lackland. What do you say to it?' He said
quietly: 'I would like to try, sir.'
A few weeks afterwards, when the quarterly 'plan' was handed in at the
Lacklands' cottage, and Mrs. Lackland had unfolded it eagerly, to see
who were appointed to take the services at Carbis, she came suddenly
upon a name which startled her so much, that the broad sheet of paper
fluttered off her knees to the floor. 'My boy,' she said, as Seaward
picked it up, and handed it back to her with a smile, 'I have been
praying for this ever since I dedicated you to the Lord. Now I hardly
know what there is left for me to pray for.'
'Pray that I may be steadfast in the faith, mother,' said Seaward.
'I will, my son; but I wouldn't mind trusting him for that.'
Everybody in the village was in Carbis Chapel to hear Seaward Lackland's
first sermon. He was not afraid of them; he had something to say, and he
was to speak for God; he said quietly all that was in his mind to say.
After the sermon, while he was walking across to the cottage with his
father and mother, both very happy, and saying nothing at all, one or
two of the older people stayed behind to discuss the sermon. 'Do you
think he is quite orthodox?' said one of them, dubiously. 'I don't
know,' said another; 'there were some ideas, sure enough, I never heard
before; but I wouldn't say for that they weren't orthodox.' 'We must be
careful,' said a third; 'these young people think too much.' 'A great
deal too much,' said the first, 'once you begin to think for yourself,
what's to stop you?'
* * * * *
From the time of his first sermon Seaward Lackland looked upon his
dedication to God as not only complete, but, in a sense, accepted. He
had offered himself as an interpreter of the will of God to men, and
power was put into his hand. Now, he said to himself, if I should prove
a backslider, that would be a calamity for God also. The thought of his
sins, which he believed God to have pardoned, came back to him again and
again; he saw them still existing, like atoms which refused to go out
into nothingness; even if pardoned, not literally extinct. What if his
soul were one day to reinherit them, to slip back into their midst,
having let go of the hand of God, which needed at all times to hold him
up out of that deadly gulf? And now that he, who needed help so much,
had taken it upon him to try to help others, could he be sure that he
was rightly helping them? Could he, in all obedience, be sure that he
was interpreting the divine will aright?
He had never found help in any book but the Bible. Once or twice he had
borrowed a commentary from the minister at St. Ives, but he could not
read these dry and barren discourses, which seemed to tell you so many
unnecessary things, but never the things that you wanted to know. He put
them aside, and the conviction came to him that with prayer and thought
everything would explain itself to him. Did not the Holy Ghost still
descend into men's minds, illuminating that patient darkness? He waited
more and more expectantly on that divine light, and it seemed to come
to him with a more punctual answer. At night, on the water, while the
other men lay across the seats, smoking their pipes in silence, he would
withdraw into his own mind until visible things no longer existed, and
he was alone in a darkness which began to glow with soft light. Only
then did he seem to see quite clearly, and what he saw was not always
what he had reasoned out for himself; but it was a solution, and it came
irresistibly.
Once, when he had fallen asleep, he dreamed a dream from which he awoke
with a cry of terror. In his dream he had seen an evil spirit (it had
the appearance of a man, but he knew it to be an evil spirit because of
the infinitely evil joy which shone through the melancholy of its eyes),
and he was sitting talking with the evil spirit on the edge of a tall
cliff above the sea; and it said to him: Do you know that Seaward
Lackland is damned? and he said No, and it said: He is damned because he
has sinned the sin against the Holy Ghost; and the evil joy began to
grow and grow in its eyes, and it was watching him as if to discover
whether he knew that he himself was Seaward Lackland, and he tried to
say No again, more loudly, and as he drew back, the cliff began to
crumble away, but very slowly, so that a hundred years might have passed
while he felt himself slipping down into the gulf of the sea; and his
own cry awakened him.
He knew that he had been dreaming, but the dream might have been a
message. He knew the text in the Bible, and he had often wondered what
it meant. Had not Jesus said: 'All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be
forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be
forgiven unto men'? It was the most terrible saying in the Bible. What
was the sin which even God could not forgive? He remembered that
reiteration in Matthew: 'And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son
of Man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the
Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in
the world to come.' Might it not be possible for a man to sin that sin
in ignorance? Would his ignorance avail him, if he had actually sinned
it? These thoughts troubled him strangely, and he tried to put them away
from him.
They came back to him again, and more searchingly. Since his conversion
he had been as much troubled by the thought of his past sins as he had
been before that change occurred. They were put away; yes, but was it
not a kind of putting off the payment of a debt which might be still
accumulating? And now, if there was one sin which could never be atoned
for, and if he had committed that one sin? It was possible, and the
thought filled him with horror.
One July night, when the boats were away in the North Sea, he set
himself to think the whole matter out; he would get at the truth, and
not endure this doubt and trouble any longer. He was sitting in the
stern of the boat, the other men were talking in low voices, but he was
used not to hear them. He put his elbows on his knees, and bowed his
head over till his hands met above it. He shut his eyes and stared hard
into the darkness under his eyelids. The boat rocked gently: he wanted
to keep quite still, so that he might think, and he put his feet against
the sides of the boat, steadying himself.
As he sat there, annihilating thought that he might think the more
deeply, it seemed to him after a time as if all his past life came back
to him under a new aspect, as something which had been wrong from the
beginning. Had he not, as a child, been angry, greedy, loving only his
own pleasure, ungrateful to those who had refused him any of his desires
for his own good? Had he not been heedless and self-willed as a young
man, had he not even made a boast of his own righteousness after he had
found Christ? Was there a day since he had come to a knowledge of good
and evil when he had not sinned at least in thought? He imagined God
adding up all those sins, from the animal sins of childhood to the sins
of the mature mind. 'The Lamb's book of life': he remembered the words,
and they became terrible to him, for he saw all the pages in which his
account was written. For him it would be the book of eternal death.
He lifted his head and looked up. God was up there, beyond that roof
which was his pavement. He was afraid of the great loneliness which lay
between him and God.