To every man his proper gift
Dame Nature gives complete.
I
The sun was glaring over a Suffolk heath that spread on either side of a sandy road thick with dust. The heath had two prevailing colours—the hue of its bracken green and tall, the tint of its flowering ling. These colours were clearly denoted and merged in isolated tracts, as though in the comity of vegetation one had commanded: thus far the purple, and the other: thus far the green. At the edge of the green ferns, haunt of heath fleas and lady-birds, some brown skeletons of last year’s foliage, blown there by mournful airs, lay clinging to their youthful offspring as if to say: “Dream not, but mourn for us.” On this July afternoon the blue of the sky was swart and clear although some stray clouds, trussed like the wool on a sheep’s back, soared over a few odd groups of pine and a white windmill turning on a knoll.
And along the road came padding a small black pony swishing its tail; wisps of dust puffed up from its hoofs, and bareback upon the pony sat a small uncomely boy about ten years old, carrying on his arm a bright tin bucket half full of red currants. The boy, who had the queer name of Blandford Febery, though he commonly answered to the call of “Cheery,” was off to meet his father, who had gone to market. The pony pranced along the heath road for a mile or so until they came to the town and so into the market. Mr. Febery was sitting at a table in the cool courtyard of the Tumble Down Dick inn with a group of men clad in cutaway coats and gaiters. He got up, took the bucket of currants from his son, and set it down by the table. “That’s my Cheery boy!” he cried gaily, lifting his son from the pony. “Now you jest slip along to Mrs. Farringay’s and leave her those currants from me while I put pony in stall, and I’ll wait here for you.”
“They be large currants, Albert,” said George Sands, as Blandford carried them away.
“A fairish sample, George,” shouted Mr. Febery, leading the pony off; “but my stomach can’t never abide such traffic, it turns on ’em, it do. And all our family be the same.”
“Has he got a large family?” asked Henry Ottershaw, a man with a big rosy face and a black patch over one eye.
“He’s got two boys,” replied George; “two boys and a gal. That one’s the oldest.”
“He’s the very image of his father, whether or no.”
“Oh, ay,” George answered; “Albert might have spit ’e out of his blessed mouth.”
This was only externally true. Albert Febery was a small yeoman farmer of cheerful disposition, for in those days—the 1880’s—farming was still a pretty business, and farmers, like his friends bluff George Sands and Henry Ottershaw, were spruce men whose wants were modest and their cares few. But his son was morose, and his wants were not modest.
The sky had grown overcast. Around the inn the air was full of protesting sounds and the smell of ordure, for the cattle were being routed out of the pens and screaming pigs were being lugged into carts. The market was over, though some stall-holders were still trading briskly in sweets and shoddy clothing.
The boy returned from his errand before his father had finished stalling the pony, and he sat himself silently down on the bench beside George Sands.
“I was a-going to begin cutting our oats tomorrow,” said Henry Ottershaw, casting a glance at the sky, “but I don’t like the look o’ they raggedy clouds; they can’t hold their water, we shall have a dirty Thursday. I think I do know when rain’s about—I can smell it.”
“Teasy weather,” remarked Sands. “Weather is teasy, you can never be sure. I had ten pole of early potatoes this year in my kitchen garden; sweet and blooming they was. Come a frost in May and cut ’em off like a soot sack.”
Ottershaw held up an admonishing finger. “We shall have a hard winter, George, mark you. Last week I was digging up a nut hazel bush and there was a frog and a toad under the root of it. ‘Ho, ho,’ I says, ‘there’s a hard weather brewing, you mark my words, people.’ I recollect two year ago a man prophesying as this very winter before us now was going to be the worst known for two hundred year. ‘Oh my,’ I says to him, ‘how ever can you recollect all that?’ ‘Never you mind,’ he says, ‘it’s the God’s truth I’m be telling you.’”
“Who was that, Henry?”
“Maybe you don’t know him—Will Goodson?”
“Oh, ah! Went bankrupt, didn’t he?”
“That’s the chap. And owed me thirteen pound ten. He come and telled me one day, leaned on the back of his cart and cried till the tears rolled all along the tailboard and dropped on to the road. I saw ’em, couldn’t take my eyes off ’em, George.”
“Cried! That man Goodson!”
“Like a girl, George.”
Sands shook his head and pursed his lips derisively: “A must have put pepper in his eyes.”
Young Blandford went into the inn to seek his father. The taproom was empty. On the wall hung a theatre poster:
THE MARKET HALL
TONIGHT
The boy went to it at once and stood intently transcribing its meaning. He made out that it was the bill of a benefit performance with all sorts of attractions for that night only, such as scenes from The Lady of Lyons and The Dumb Man of Manchester, including a recitation (illuminated with lantern slides) by the world-renowned tragedian, Caesar Truman (Hamlet, Belphegor, The Duke’s Motto, etc., etc.). At the bottom of the bill was a small woodcut, the picture of a carter with a long whip pulling at a horse that looked tired, and a verse beginning:
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.”
Mr. Febery came in. “Hallo!” he said. The boy did not answer, and his father peered over his shoulder at the bill.
“That’s a nice bit of poetry. Yes, it is; and you’ll be able to read it all if you live long enough.”
The boy still silently studied it, while his father rambled on: “My! You could hear some grand reciting twenty years ago. You never hear anything like it now. They’d frighten you, they would! They’d make the tears pour out of your eyes, they would then.”
“Father,” said the boy, “it’s tonight, let us go.”
“Oh, we can’t do that,” his father gruffly answered. “No, no, we must have a cup of tea and then cut along home. It’s going to rain, I think.”
To his amazement his son’s eyes were brimmed with tears!
“Oh, father, take me!” cried the boy. “Take me, I must go!”
“Hoi! hoi! What’s amiss?” the elder sternly asked. “You’re too young for that sort of canter, Cheery.”
The youngster bent his head, drew his sleeve across his snivelling nose, and sobbed.
“Why, Blandford! What’s this ado? Shut up, now, shut up and come and have your tea.”
But the boy was inconsolable.
“I tell you we cannot go,” the father angrily expostulated. “We cannot go. Your mother would die of fright not knowing where we were.”
“I must! I must!” raged the unhappy boy.
George Sands came in and stared alternately at father and at son. “Why, what’s he been up to?”
“This infant wants me to take him to the theayter!” Albert explained. “Crying fit to burst! Look at him. Did you ever?”
“Well,” Mr. Sands commented, “what a God’s the harm of it?”
“’Tain’t the harm. Had I known on’t I could ’a’ told Susan this morning, but Susan don’t know; she’d worry herself into her grave afore dark.”
“You know,” Mr. Sands said, “I like to see a bit of good play-acting myself. If you go I’ll come with ye. You can send word to your missus—Jim Easby passes your door within a hundred yards almost. I’ll be seeing him in a few minutes.”
The elder Febery hovered exasperatingly over this simple solution, but at last gave way and consented.
“All right, George. If you do, see Jim and tell him to tell my missus, will you, as Cheery and me have gone to the performance and won’t be home till late. Now dry up!” he exhorted the boy.
“Oh, father!” In a passion of thankfulness the youngster threw his arms around his father’s hips.
“God bless my soul!” Mr. Febery was bewildered.
Father and son then went into the parlour and sat down to a tea served with ham and pickled cabbage, for the Tumble Down Dick was an ancient inn, lacy, leathery, and agreeably musty, famed for its good fare. If you halted there and for a moment doubted, you had but to open the precious album of beanfeast tributes that lay on the parlour table and you could doubt no longer. The very first page recorded the immense gratification of the Dredging Department of the London & So-&-So Railway, and not far off was the eulogy of the policemen from Plaistow: “To satisfy thirty-one policemen is no mean feat. We are confident there is no more comfortable hostel place to put up at than Tumble Down Dick’s. Signed Sergeant Trepelcock. X Div.”
The Feberys ate gustily until George Sands came back after instructing Jim Easby, and then George Sands sat down to eat too. And he told Cheery what a lot of fine things and comic things and terrible things they would be sure to see at the play; murders and daggers and pistols going off bang, and strangulation and poison, and bushels of blood flowing, enough to perish his little bones; but it would not do for him to be frittened, there was no call to be frittened, for it was all false as the devil’s heart. That was what everyone liked—the Lord knew why—it was a corker!
“But I do love a good drama, Albert. A good drama is what I do love.”
“Oh, ah!” said Mr. Febery.
“It’s education.”
“That’s it.”
“And I reckon it ’ull do him a smartish bit of good. There’s ghosts and what all, Cheery. Are you feared of ghosties?”
The boy shook his head, his mouth was full of onion.
“Nor me, neither,” said Mr. Sands. “I likes to see a good ghost or two; it brings the hereafter before you, don’t it?”
Mr. Febery averred that it certainly did that.
They went to the skittle alley at the back of the inn and the two men began to play a match, but Blandford soon tired of watching them heave the clumping cheeses at the fat ninepins and he stole away. When they had finished their game they found him standing in front of the theatre bill, moving his forefinger slowly along the words of the verse, spelling out those difficult lines about the curfew and the lowing herd. What was a curfew, or a knell? And those other words? His untutored mind was bothered, but none the less something had brushed his fancy with magic wings, had touched it indelibly. It set up some astonishing absurdities, and he could not ask his father to explain them.
“Let’s be off,” cried George, “there’s bound to be a crowd if we want a good place.”
Across the square they went to the Market Hall and stood for half a weary hour in a crowd clustered about the door, while everyone said jovial pleasant things until the doors were opened, but when the doors were opened all the men fought like tigers and swore and blasted and shoved and screamed. Somehow everybody got into the hall at last and although breathless and bruised they were jovial and pleasant once more. The hall had a bluewashed indigent interior, but there was a platform at one end hidden by curtains of real red velvet with golden tassels, and in front of that a smiling man with a melodeon, a man with a clarionet, and a boy with a triangle and a drum sat and played agreeable music. The boy was no bigger than Cheery, but he performed—as George Sands declared—remarkable well.
“Now you watch,” Mr. Febery enjoined his son when the music ceased. “You mustn’t say a word, and don’t be scared, ’cause it is not real at all. Watch!”
The curtain rolled up. There was nothing to be scared about. It was a short play, all about a clergyman being lathered for a shave by a black footman with a whitewash brush out of a bucketful of soapy suds. The audience rocked with laughter.
“What d’ye think o’ that?” panted Mr. Sands as the curtain descended.
The boy smiled a little wanly. “When will they do that bit about the curfew?”
“Curfew? Curfew? Oh, the curfew! Yes, that’s the last of all; presently.”
The next piece was all about a poor orphan boy named Frankie, and he was adopted by a rich lady and gentleman who had no children of their own. Frankie was not a bit bigger than Blandford Febery; this rich lady and gentleman treated him very, very kindly, and he was being educated for a higher station in life. One evening this rich lady and gentleman left him alone in the study doing his home lessons and went upstairs to their parlour to have a little music. And while he was studying his home lessons and counting on his fingers, a nasty burglar crept through a window behind Frankie and began crawling on his hands and knees towards the gentleman’s safe where he kept all his gold and silver. This ugly burglar had a horrible knife in his hand and went crawling very quiet like a snake to steal all the gold and silver, but Frankie happened to catch sight of him and said: “Hoi!” The burglar sprang up. “Silence!” he hissed. But Frankie was too brave for him: “I cannot allow you to pass,” he cried. “Silence!” the burglar hissed again, “or I shall cut your head off with my knife.” “No,” replied Frankie, “I shall not keep silent. You are on mischief bent. You are about to rob my benefactor, to whom I owe everything that is dear.” And he called out: “Help! Police!”
Then the burglar jumped on him and stabbed him in the chest. Frankie fell down on the hearthrug, and the burglar felt rather sorry because it was only a child. He bent down and said: “You’re not hurt, are you?” Just then the rich lady rushed in and flung herself on top of Frankie and screamed, and Frankie said he was dying and feeling very cold. So the lady said: “Help!” and her rich husband came hurrying in just as Frankie breathed his last. “Merciful Heaven!” moaned the rich man when he saw that all was over. He turned to the burglar, and pointing to the orphan’s body on the hearthrug, he asked him very haughtily: “Was yours the hand that struck this innocent youth that deadly blow?” The burglar shuffled and snivelled and then he tearfully said: “I couldn’t help it, guvnor; I couldn’t, on my honour.” But that was not good enough for the rich gentleman; he went to the window and shut it down with a bang. Then he latched it. Then, in a terrible voice, he said to the burglar: “You shall expiate your crime upon the scaffold.” And he would have done, too, only, after all, Frankie was not dead, he had only fainted away and was not hurt at all, not the least little bit.
“Damn my heart!” Mr. Sands huskily said. “But that boy acted very remarkable well.”
“Of course,” Mr. Febery intimated, “it wasn’t a boy at all, it was a gal dressed up in boy’s clothes.”
“I felt perhaps it was,” agreed Sands. “No boy could act so noble as that. It ain’t in ’em. Later on, a man if you like, but not a boy, no. Well, that was a marvellous good piece o’ drama, like life itself, very enjoyable. It moved you, Albert.”
“Oh, ah!” said Mr. Febery.
“It did me, anyhow.”
Cheery sat between them, smitten with dumb wonder as the grandeurs of Thespian art unfolded themselves before his eyes. Filled with immensity, with inexplicable emotions, he wanted at once to be the boy with the triangle, to roll his marvellous drum. He wanted to be Frankie, to be stabbed, to lie down, to die for ever, and then rise again to confound the wickedness of man. But the last piece was now preparing. The curtain rolled up, revealing an empty stage with a white sheet, and on the sheet a circle of light shone with dazzling splendour in the paramount darkness.
“Magic lanterns,” whispered Blandford’s father.
A pretty picture appeared on the sheet, of some fields and cattle with a thin moon rising; a bell boomed solemnly far off.
“Curfew,” Febery whispered.
And then Blandford became aware that the great Caesar Truman was on the stage. He emerged mysteriously from darkness, and now a light followed him wherever he moved. Melodiously his great vibrating voice began to thrill the soul of young Febery with the words of the poem he had read upon the bill. And how beautiful they sounded!
“The ploughman homeward plods his weary way.” With what infinite weariness that line was intoned!
“And leaves the world to darkness,” declaimed Caesar Truman. There was a long pause of surprise ere the great tragedian added in a soft whisper: “and to me.”
Then, after the actor had burst forth again into: “Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,” he spread his arms wide, hissing with bated breath: “And all the air a solemn stillness holds.”
Behind him on the screen the pictures were withdrawn and changed. There was an owl, a churchyard, a farm, men ploughing or reaping or chopping down trees, and then the churchyard again. But few were mindful of these, for the great Caesar Truman had cast them all under his spell. Not least the boy, in whom the voice of the old tragedian was arousing strange incommunicable recognitions. To declare that the uncomely Blandford Febery was never the same again would be no more than saying “Heaven is high” or “The sea is wide.” He had not lived till then; the creature we are to know was born in that hour.
The show being over, the two men went across to Tumble Down Dick’s to share a quart of ale. George Sands then mounted his saddle cob and rode away. Febery lit his two gig lamps, led out his harnessed mare, and backed her into the gig, while Cheery brought the little pony and tied its halter to a ring on the tailboard. Silently they drove out of town, but Febery, half-way across the dark heath, bent to his son. “That was a rum come-up, Cheery, eh!”
“We didn’t see any ghosts,” the boy sullenly responded.
“Naw, we didn’t neither! Better luck next time, eh!”
At that moment they saw a green light ahead of them, strangely swaying.
“What’s that, in the name of God!” Mr. Febery sat bolt upright and pulled guardedly at the reins. An old bearded man carrying a lantern and leading a white mule came stalking out of the bracken.
“It’s only old Barnaby; my God, I thought—”
The man with the mule waved his lantern as they drove past him.
“Good night, Ginger!” Mr. Febery yelled, and turned to see if the pony was still securely hitched to the cart tail.
“I’m going to be an actor,” said the boy suddenly.
“Are you?” gurgled his father. “You’ll make a fine actor, upon my soul you will. Oh, ah!”
II
The boy was robust enough, no illness molested him, but he had never displayed any relish for the work of the farm and after his momentous visit to the theatre he manifested a deep dislike. Although he did not care much for school he now became studious, made himself a proficient reader, and was generally found with his head stuck in some book or other, any sort of book, borrowed from anybody. It annoyed his father.
“All that truck will make a fool of him! It’s nonsense. He’ll never be able to turn his hand to any darn thing!”
“Leave him alone,” said Mrs. Febery, “he’s got a headpiece, and that’s what he wants.”
But the father was unconvinced. “Susan, it’s folly, you know that well. Your headpiece is good and all for the sense that may be in it, but your feet must be set firm afield and your hands guiding the plough. What all can he get from this here Pilgrim’s Progress and that Shakespeare?”
“Give him a chance, Albert!” protested Susan. “He’s young yet.”
“At fourteen years of age! Young! Why, my grandfather was married then!”
“Don’t lie so, Albert!”
“Well, he was—very nearly! And I started work myself when I was ten. But him! Oh no, I can’t make anything out of him.”
But at last he made him a corn chandler, and for four or five years Blandford Febery worked in the office of some millers in the market town, lodging during the week with some relations who also dwelt there.
On market days Albert would pop into the office and greet his son, but Blandford derived little pleasure from the visits; he disliked being kissed so childishly in front of his fellow clerks, and was restless until his chattering father said: “Well, so long, Cheery; see you Sunday.” And on Sundays Cheery would trudge over the heath to the farm for the day, to kiss his mother and eat mighty meals and be driven back in the gig by his father at night.
After a year, however, he did not visit the farm so often; he was still madly reading, spending all his leisure on book after book. And what for?—what for? some people would privately ask, and answer themselves with a “God knows!”
By the time he was twenty the morose youth had begun to emerge from his uncouthness into the style of a carefully dressed and not unconfident young man. There were rather sullen eyes in his palish face, his lips were unpleasantly thick, and despite his contact with a variety of people he seemed unable to cotton on to any acquaintance, male or female, of more than passing note. But on a sudden—it was during the Boer War—he resigned his post at the millers’ office, wrote to his mother saying that he was off to seek his fortune—and disappeared! His mother took the news with fortitude, his brother and sister grew up, his father went on ploughing and sowing and reaping.
Cheery never saw any of them again, he never went back. They thought he had gone off to fight the Boers, but it was not so; he was journeying around the north country with a circus! Knowing something of horses and forage, he was given a job, but he developed an unsuspected talent for announcing the performances of the circus, and so his scope was enlarged. He was not the ring master, he was the gentleman in a tall silk hat who with whip in hand strutted on the platform outside the great tent and harangued the hesitating mob in a picturesque rodomontade that was impressive, and therefore convincing. His perorations commonly produced a rush to the pay-box. This phase did not last a year, for he found an opportunity to join a travelling theatre company and Blandford Febery became an actor, an actor in plays of the kind that the great Caesar Truman himself had once adorned. His rise was rapid indeed; in a year or two he became a line on the bills of the play; soon he became the top line. Then a whole bill was given up to him until you might have thought the play itself was Febery, and nothing but him. Good God, what impossible changes this world does contrive—as if a toad could turn into a giraffe! That taciturn exterior had been harbouring a muffled but burning magniloquence, whose liberation made Blandford Febery.
“A youth to fortune and to fame unknown,” the idol of provincial audiences. And the man himself changed with his fortunes. No longer merely a dumb observer and reader, eloquence flowed from his person in gestures as in speech; he was the eccentric, the admired, the envied comrade of his fellow players.
Though not exactly witty, he was stimulating, and often there was a gush of mystical inspiration from him that awed them. Pity it was that he could not retain their pleased regard, but envy accrued against him, and all too soon, conscious of their misjudgment, he grew overbearing, dictatorial, a passionate cantankerous fellow who could flay the rest of the company with contemptuous criticisms. And the company had to suffer him; they thought him a poseur—but a genius none the less; he was a spoiled ass, but a golden one at that. Yet in truth it was not merely success that had turned Blandford Febery’s head; not that alone. He was a creature freed who had once been caged, and he was intoxicated by this realization. Having found a talent long buried in a napkin, he imagined that all had talents that they kept secretly hidden, or were too stupid to seek for, still creeping in their cages, wilfully unfree. He wanted something of them, but they could not understand what he wanted, any more than he could understand their want of understanding.
Perhaps he wanted them to be better than they were, better as actors and better as men, for he swore that only by becoming good actors could they become good men. Hoots! Toots! they would answer; they were all as good as good could be! Once Febery felt a violent urge, a quite burning desire, to call them the miserable drunkards, cowards, gamblers, and fornicators he supposed them to be, but he modified the extreme indictment: they were merely liars and shameful toadies! Whereat the oldest member of the company, a man with harsh eyes and turbulent lips who oft-times played Polonius, rebuked him:
“That won’t do, Mr. Febery. All the world’s a stage, and we have to play the play. In my time,” said Polonius, “I have played many parts. I don’t mean as an actor but as a citizen of the world, Mr. Febery. Each part gave me an inkling about the truth, and I took my cue from it. My own father used to exhort me when I was a boy at school: ‘Never be ashamed to speak the truth.’ He told me, instructed me, and impressed it upon me, never to be ashamed of truth. But I soon found that it was the one thing that did profoundly shame me! I took my cue from that, I did. D’you understand? To tell lies shamed me to myself perhaps, but that was far, far better than shaming myself to other people, or shaming them. I soon gave it up. Yes, and whatever I said I stuck to as long as it was necessary—it was never very long. So I say what I say now, true or false, devil or no, simply because it suits me best, pleases them, and injures nobody.”
Febery sighed, helpless before such abasement.
Pride goes before a fall, it is said, but you must not blame pride for the disaster; Blandford Febery’s downfall was due to other causes. One night he got a little tipsy at a leave-taking party—someone was off to America—and Febery fell into a dock at Liverpool, damaging one of his feet so hideously that it could not be properly repaired. Febery was an extremely abstemious man, he had never been drunk before; if one believed in omens and signs it was indeed a warning. As it turned out, the leave-taking party might have served him for his own, for in hospital he was soon made to realize that he would never again be able to strut heroically before the footlights; never any more. Hamlet with a club-foot and a walking-stick was unthinkable. Never any more. Farewell to the stage. The company resigned him, with tears, with sincere lamentations, with good wishes, and the company passed on. Febery never encountered his old actor friends again, for his life seemed to divide itself into segments having no relation to anything that had gone before.
After a sorry spell of months in hospital he endured a month or two of crutches; then, with a stick and the fanciful cloak he always wore, he obtained a temporary lodging at the house of a successful nonconformist draper, one Scrowncer, who had a nonconformist mission in life. In heart Mr. Scrowncer was a kind, kind creature, but in the tactics of conversion he was a regular Mahomet for militancy and yearned to put the devil and all his minions to the edge of the battleaxe of song and salvation.
Mr. Scrowncer knew his man, realized his predicament, and found a use for his unimpaired gift of eloquence. Febery was taken by him to some very emotional services and soon became profoundly meditative. Paying scrupulous attention to Mr. Scrowncer’s suggestions—for he was now confronted by a serious monetary dilemma—he appeared at a chapel entertainment and recited Gray’s Elegy with miraculous effect. Oh, what an instrument for holy work! The draper declared his conviction that the Lord had put Blandford Febery into his hands for His peculiar purpose, and when Mr. Scrowncer outlined that purpose to him Blandford Febery began to believe it too, and was soon put to the proof by Mr. Scrowncer.
Febery was one of those to whom the sensations of things, rather than their meanings, were important. Inspired by occasions that yielded his cherished gift to eloquence a grander scope than ever, he exhorted with the sombre fire and fearful passion so necessary to bring sinners to their penitential knees until the draper was no longer merely certain. Miracles and marvels were to be wrought! It was a divine appointment! Blandford Febery was an angel and minister of grace!
“What do you require of me?” asked Febery.
And Mr. Scrowncer cried: “To speak the truth, and shame the devil!”
The devil! Shame the devil! Some features of oblivion must have rolled over Mr. Febery. Thrilled by his own emotions, he could believe that he himself believed.
“When I was a boy,” he said impressively, “my father always exhorted me to speak the truth. He told me, instructed me, and impressed it on me; never to be ashamed of truth. I will, to the best of my power, do what you wish.”
In short, he embarked upon the career of a revivalist preacher under the direction of Abner Scrowncer, whose organizing powers as to gimp, cotton flannel, and hairpins were as nothing compared to his genius in such a tremendous Cause. Not at all unmindful of Febery’s theatrical renown, Mr. Scrowncer caused the circuits to blaze with posters announcing the new evangelist. Febery did his part with a degree of secular skill not less than his admonitory gifts. It was no uncommon thing for him to appear at midday in the square of some market town uttering the weird incantation:
“Ring the bells of heaven! Reuben Ranzo’s gone! Follow me!”
There was plenty to mock at in his appearance, a slightly unshorn, slightly dissolute-looking man. Aided by a stick, he limped along in a curious black cloak. He wore no hat, and his thin sandy hair hung down to his collar. The eyes gleamed and the lips were heavy and thick, there always seemed to be some saliva on them as though some demon possessed him. But there were few that mocked.
“Give way there! By your leave,” he would cry, raising a histrionic hand. Open-mouthed the housewives gazed at his fantastic figure, the children shrank, the cattle-drover paused with uplifted stick as Febery went by, and crowds would follow him to an appointed place in the open air to listen to his denunciation of their godless state:
“Listen to me. Do you suppose for one moment that you are the result of some conscious call into the world? You are not! It is true that you stand here now—in a bowler hat and corduroy trousers, with a cotton shirt and a moustache copied from a comedian—but do you suppose that that was the figure explicit or implicit in the glow of procreative ardour from which you were begotten? It was not! All nature grins at you. Nobody, not one, that knew you when you were born could recognize you now. Nobody could imagine the beginning who sees this curious culmination. We are the result of evil tuition, evil environment, and a faculty for imitation. And now,” he would quote with soft irony, “now on this spot we stand with our robust souls.” With both arms menacingly raised he would cry: “All nature grins at you! Here are we, in the midst of teeming life, clinging to existence like a barnacle on a ship’s bottom, without a care for our divine meaning. All of us doing business; one way and another, business; some chopping suet, others selling beans. But I will tell you this about your business: one man’s meat is another man’s poison, one man’s evil is another man’s good, what profits some is a fraud to many. From its innocent beginning in Eden, our world has turned into a topsy-turvy world. Sometimes it is comically so, but more often it is tragic, and tears arise, and there seems no consolation possible; we feel tender towards our poor silly fellow creatures.”
Febery paused, adjusted his cloak, and shifted his stick from the left hand to the right.
“But you must pardon me, you people, if I seem to treat you as though you were simple little children. For you are not! We are none of us innocent now, not you, not I, none. We are all black-guards, one time or another, and all responsible for the measure of evil we create. What is to be the issue of it? How shall we escape from this damnation? You say you are helpless in the toils, that life uses us in this way; you tell me that the devil tempted you. Bah! I tell you: every heart conceives its own sin.”
“It’s true, it’s true!” murmured some of the elderly hearers, and though the younger were silent and perturbed, they seemed to agree.
“Do not come whining that the devil tempted you. Don’t try to hang your misdeeds on that hook—it is overloaded already! You are merely robbing Peter in order to pay Paul. The gospel of redemption may never find the devil, but it can find you! Let me tell you a story:
“There was once a rich man who had received many favours from the Enemy of Mankind, and when in the fullness of time he was brought to bed of a sickness, he sent for a notary to make him a will. The notary got out his pen and his ink-horn. ‘Sir, what have you got to dispose of?’ The man said he desired to leave his body to corruption, his good works to the devil, and his soul to God. ‘But—er—you can’t make a will like that!’ said the notary. ‘Not! Why not?’ asked the sick man. The notary hummed and haaed, and said it was the first time he had ever heard of such a request. ‘That’s nothing to the point,’ the sick man said, ‘it’s the first time I’ve had to die, isn’t it? Do as I bid you.’ So the notary, not daring to enrage the man in his precarious state, wrote out the will and it was properly attested. The man then bade farewell to all his friends and died soon after, and was buried amid great lamentations. But when the will came to be read—my goodness! The fat was in the fire! His friends exclaimed against it, the family declared against it, and everyone said it was scandalous. Long and bitterly they disputed. They swore it was all a machination of the devil, and determined to bring the devil to book about it, they carried the matter to law. But when the judge and jury took the case in hand it was learnt that the devil was not present in court, and what was more—he never would be! ‘Why, what is this?’ the judge asked very sternly; ‘has he not been cited to appear?’ ‘My lord,’ said the clerk, ‘we have tried to notify him, but it has been found that you can’t serve a writ against the devil.’ The judge took a peep into his register and saw that this was truly the law of the land. ‘So,’ said he, ‘the will must stand as a good and proper will. His soul must go to God—nobody will deny him that. His body must go to corruption—nobody can dispute it—while his good works must go to the devil; I do not see what can prevent it, anyway! Fiat justitia,’ he said, ‘you can’t serve writs against the devil.’”
Although dubiously swayed, the listening crowd was absorbed in him; as the harangue moved on, his denunciations ceased and were exchanged for promises of mystical bliss. “Oh, blessed are the pure in heart.” There came a dying fall, and he spoke with tender urgency of a heaven that opened at the gates of Belief, filled with everlasting beauty, the sports of angels, the delight of kings, and every joy familiar as Eve’s paradise.
The man’s success as a religious orator was as striking as his success as an actor; it spread over an even wider range, curving like a meteor in evangelical orbits from Milford Haven to The Wash, from Carlisle to Canterbury. People flocked to hear him and were straightway smitten with a hysteria in which miracles and marvels indeed were wrought. Nobody was ever cured of a sickness by him—Blandford Febery never attempted that—but he undeniably did influence the lives of thousands of people, ordinary everyday people, those lambs who had no thought of evil until Blandford Febery expounded it, and thereafter no hope of mercy until he came to save them. Even others, some of the notoriously evil, became unnerved, voluntarily confessed their crimes, and went to prison; while a few of the notoriously good, hopeless of attaining any further sanctification, simply went mad and were conveyed to the appropriate asylums. The Scrowncer fraternity revered him as a creature of ultra-human destiny—prophet, saint, perhaps even an archangel! A long period of proselytizing triumphs inspired Mr. Scrowncer with the colossal ambition of founding a new church with a new iconoclastic creed, but Blandford Febery was not so eager.
“No, friend, no; don’t make a church of me!” he cried. “I’d rather go psalm-singing in the tropics. Every church, you know, contains the seeds of its own infamy, snares for its own delusion. The way of the Church is to proselytize, to organize, to subsidize; and then, while it stuffs itself with metaphysical mendacities, it suffers its holy inspiration to sicken and die. Do you not see that? Do you not realize that in a short time the sap perishes and the trunk alone is fostered and cherished? It becomes a valuable property—oh, they must keep it in good repair! It becomes a golden casket indeed, though it has never a gem inside! For that is the fate of all organizations, whether of law, religion, politics, patriotism, or commerce; to play the felon Jacob to its brother Esau, over and over again. The idolaters are worshipping a crown, a cross, a button, or a flag. Bah! No churches for me; I’ll beat the highways and the hedges.”
III
One autumn night, in the Town Hall of a south-coast town where a thousand people had thronged to hear him, he received a new summons. In the forefront of the hall sat an attractive young woman, with another girl beside her not so attractive. Throughout his discourse the pretty girl observed him with a rapt attention that was possibly not entirely devotional, and her appearance, simple, sweet, and perplexed, was just as magnetic to Febery. His eyes constantly encountered her eyes, confronting him with an appeal he had hitherto scarcely allowed himself to recognize. The choir from the local brotherhood broke into his address at designed stages with hymns. At the singing of Rock of Ages a stout widower stumbled weeping from the hall, overcome at the remembrances aroused by the hymn, which had been sung at his late wife’s funeral. The massed sympathy of the audience flamed into massed worship, and Febery called aloud for penitents. With closed eyes he waited, one skirt of his cloak cast over one shoulder, leaning both hands heavily upon his stick in exhaustion. Moment after moment ticked by; the hesitant people sobbed, groaned, and sighed; no one responded to his call.
Suddenly he beckoned with his finger in the direction of the pretty girl: “Come, lady; come!” At once she rose. There was a slight scuffle with her companion, who tried to retain her, but with averted head she walked to the little room set apart for those who desired the preacher’s private intercession. And there, alone, at the close of the meeting Febery found her awaiting him.
Her name was Marie Shutler and her eyes were beautiful. The room was odd as to shape, having the design of a harp, and odd as to its furniture, which was a big table with a red cloth upon it and coconut matting under it. One wall had a brass bracket with a gas lamp, and on the other were old oil paintings of the unknown ancestors of many living sinners. The charming girl stood meekly before him, answering his questions. She was—well—perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two. On one of her clasped fingers was an engagement ring with pearl stones. Febery closed his eyes, the girl did the same, and they stood immobile as though awaiting some pentecostal sign. Yet while still communing the girl peeped at him. At last he asked:
“Do you feel happiness now?”
“No,” said the girl.
Febery asked her if there was anything she didn’t understand, and the girl began to rack her brains, right and left, but could think of nothing to say—she could not!
“Sister,” he entreated, “let—”
At that moment there came a knock upon the door and a stout bonneted, corseted, beaded dame bustled in.
“Marie! What ever is the matter? Everybody has gone home, long ago. You must come now.” And turning to Febery she continued with a wry smile: “I must tell you, sir, that my daughter is already converted—aren’t you, dear? Long ago, ever since childhood, she always has been. And I am, too, and so is my husband—all of us! I can’t think what made her do this. What ever will people think of us, Marie! It is quite a mistake, sir, she is a really good girl, and she is going to be married soon to a sound Christian man. Come along now, Marie, we must go. I’m sorry she has troubled you, sir. Quite unnecessary!”
And seizing the pretty penitent firmly by the arm, Mrs. Shutler led her daughter away. Febery was conscious of something very much like annoyance—not with the girl; even her pusillanimity was charming!—but with the mother. The bugbear! the bugaboo!
The mission was continuing for a week, and on the following day, as Febery was limping along under a sunless sky, he saw the girl sitting on a bench above the sea wall. He was thrilled to meet her there, though not with surprise: love has no surprises commensurate with its anticipations. He sat down with her.
“What made you respond last night?”
She did not reply at first, but he insisted:
“Why? You must tell me why.”
The girl answered: “I do not know what made me do it.”
“But,” he said sternly, “you must know!”
“It was silly of me, I was all wrought up,” she lamely explained. “And I told my friend not to let me go if I felt like that, and I did not think I should want to, but somehow, after all, I did want to, and I really don’t know why. She tried to stop me—”
“I saw that,” he interjected. “You snatched your hand away.”
“It was wrong of me,” said the girl.
“Why wrong?”
“I was all wrought up,” she had no other interpretation, and sat watching the mild little waves splashing on sad little stones, and people throwing sticks for mad little dogs. Her eyes were beautiful. At length she burst out with: “I hate being good!”
It was Febery’s turn to be puzzled.
“Just as much as I hate being bad,” Marie continued.
“Those who hatreds cancel each other!” he exclaimed.
She shook her head decidedly. “No.”
“Then what is it you want to do, or be?”
It appeared she hardly knew, but she thought she would like to go out into the wide, wide world and study art.
“Art!”
She loved art; it all had such immense significance, didn’t he think?
“I have not studied it,” he mused. “I have looked at it, some of it, and some of it I like; but I can’t understand how one can like it because it is art.”
Oh, but she understood that perfectly! And then she plied him with so many questions about his old theatrical career that the morning wore away and she had to hurry home.
They met again, they met daily throughout his stay and talked, recklessly, of things that had no connection with the object of the mission. About her approaching marriage, for instance, to the young flourishing ironmonger.
“I do not really want to marry him,” the girl confessed.
“But you are engaged!” said the preacher.
“Yes, I suppose I must.”
“It is wrong of you.”
“I hate being good.”
“That is no reason for marrying him—marry me!” the preacher said.
For days he had been ruminating angrily about her marriage to the ironmonger, pious though he was said to be, and although he, Febery, was pious too—in fact, all three of them!—his thoughts insidiously dwelt upon marriage, marriage, marriage, and in the company of the girl his mind was conscious of proprieties that his body demurred at. And Marie, too, was tempted, but: “No,” she sadly said. “It would not do, it is too late now, I can’t now; I hate being bad.”
He implored, he wooed, they wrangled. “No, no, no. It is silly of me,” she sighed. But at their final good-bye she kissed him fondly.
Away went Febery on his endless mission, and from the far-off towns he was reviving, still deeply impassioned, he importuned her in numerous letters. But Marie was obdurate, tenderly, even pleadingly, so; her vow to the ironmonger had completely enmeshed her timid soul. Or was it the old disparity of youth and age, Febery being now about thirty-five? Or was it that insubstantial fear which, in the guise of steadfastness, rules so many lives? She hated to be bad, and in a few months she married her ironmonger.
Still, the correspondence continued. Her part was affectionate while his, though more formal now, was deeply flattering to a feminine heart. After a year she grew mysteriously unwell and became a partial invalid. He gave her consoling tittle-tattle of the far-off towns he visited, while she wrote to him of her bathchair. None the less she was still acutely disturbing to him. Alas, there were other disturbances in Blandford Febery now. He had begun to doubt—well, everything: the message he had to preach; the validity of the penitence he could so easily evoke; the minds, wills, and habits of the sheep who so soon relapsed into the old rank pastures; and, saddest reflection of all, he doubted even himself until he was less concerned about ultimate truths, or the truths of other people, than with the black truth about Blandford Febery. It was a figure stuffed into a false heroic semblance! These flashing gleams that stirred the multitudes no longer stirred him. They portended a holy fire, but the fire was never seen, and none knew better than he that it had never flamed in him, but had burned out of vapours that he conjured for a fee—it was but a mirage. Not love, not righteousness, moved them at all—it was fear! Without the fear of annihilation there could be no religion, and the fear had seduced and subdued mankind. What it had seduced them from did not matter the toss of a ha’penny!—it had seduced them. For its own ends religion, that social flunkey, had traded upon man’s fear of extinction and had promised him an eternal reward for a temporary conformity. Not for the sake of being good was goodness wrought, but from fear of everlasting punishment. Faugh! What reality could ever arise from such Thespian fudge!
It was not long before he was at loggerheads with the fraternity in general and with Mr. Scrowncer in particular. Blandford Febery was indisputably the head and front of their great spiritual revival, but Scrowncer was the alloy that shaped it, the hidden plinth of its structure, the provider of the means whereby it throve, and Scrowner had grown uneasy, become alarmed, and at last appalled, at Febery’s recusancy. He pleaded, he protested, he argued, he demonstrated clearly that even an ordinary clergyman could confute these new dogmas with one twist of his cloven tongue. He stormed, he ridiculed, he forbade; but Febery believed, and believed violently, that no one saw things as clearly as himself, or felt so deeply as he. Fortitude, he claimed, was his prime virtue. The truth! The truth alone! He would shame the devil still, though it brought him to the stake!
“The devil!” Mr. Scrowncer said. “You do not shame the devil, my poor man, you only shame us all!”
“Well, if the cap fits,” roared Febery, “wear it!”
“God forgive you, Febery,” then said Mr. Scrowncer, “this is the end. We have come to the parting of the ways.”
They had indeed, and Febery was cast out of the fraternity. Sadly the circuits were notified, meetings were cancelled, and the great mission for the time being came to an end. In the numerous windows of the Scrowncer emporiums, amid their displays of the latest things in linoleum blankets and lingerie, appeared the announcement:
SPECIAL NOTICE
I HAVE NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH
BLANDFORD FEBERY.
(SIGNED) A SCROWNCER
His fall was complete.
Hard upon this debacle there came the saddest news from Marie, still suffering from her long-standing malady. It had been thought that marriage would effect a cure, but it had not done so, and now, after four years of wedlock, she was despairing and begged to see him once again—it might be for the last time. Without an hour’s delay he went off by train to her seaside town. Bright was the day; the summer had been long and dry, yet seemed in no mood to change, mellow breezes were crimping the blue water of the streams, and as he journeyed Febery felt as elated as the pilgrim who had thrown a burden from his back. At times he was ashamed of this joy, but he continued to rejoice. From the station he limped out to the villa where Marie dwelt, with a sardonic smile upon his heavy face, for the long-haired “ginger” preacher was known to many of the passers-by and his cloaked appearance brought caustic comments from others more staidly clothed than he.
Her house had a garden in front with a tennis lawn and a dell under some trees. There was a summer hammock strung up in the dell, but the garden and the hammock were empty. The window blinds were drawn. “She may be away, or gone out,” thought Febery as he gave a gentle knock upon the door.
It opened immediately. Her husband and his brother came out, and the door was shut quietly behind them.
“She is sleeping,” muttered the husband, while his brother groped in a nook under the windows and brought out three folding chairs, which they opened and stood upon the lawn.
“She is very ill,” her husband said moodily, “but she will not take to her bed as she ought now. She is lying down in the room there. Sit down, please, or is it too hot here?”
They sat down and talked of her condition in low tones. Was she so ill! It seemed to Febery that they were disinclined to let him see her again. Of course he had written to her about his loss of faith and his disagreement with Scrowncer, and she had sympathized, she had praised him, but it was clear that her husband deeply disapproved and was antagonistic. Marie had sent for him, a pathetic invitation, and he had flown in response to her. So this was her husband, the successful tradesman! His expensive clothes somehow hung cheaply upon him, and his pale sour face oppressed the visitor. Ten sombre minutes had passed when the door opened quietly and she herself stood there, her soft eyes blinking in the sharp sunlight, her mouth curved in a wry smile. Her dress was creased upon her, for she had been lying down. Malignant Time! How she had changed! Illness had scooped into her beauty, the contours of her face were angular now, and her hair hung in wispy locks. But the prime design was still there, it was beauty in a cloud—Febery’s beauty. She walked slowly up to him as he rose, and they exchanged timid greetings.
Quickly her husband led her out of the sunlight to the dell under the trees, and as she sank down into the hammock she bade Febery bring his chair. He did so. The husband and his brother—partners in ironmongery—did not rejoin them, they went strolling up and down the far side of the lawn as though by intention leaving the two friends together. The dell was screened by its trees, the hammock hidden by them.
“Do you like him?” Marie whispered.
“Who?” he asked doubtfully.
“My husband,” she said.
Febery made a shrugging gesture.
“You do not like him!” She smiled as though it were no matter.
“Because you married him,” he ventured, “and I still love you.”
Marie stared at him. Then she groped for his hand and pressed it fondly. She closed her eyes and turned her face away.
“Ha ha ha!” laughed her husband, and “He he he!” his brother tittered in echo. They were apparently telling each other peculiar stories. With a glance at them through the screen of leaves, Febery bent over Marie and kissed her. She opened her eyes.
“Too late,” she whispered. All her graceful frailness smote him with grief and longing. There was a small spider running across her bosom; it had jade-green legs and a lemon-coloured body with a brown disk upon it. Febery brushed it away and let his hand glide along her hip.
“Too late,” she murmured again. “And I hate being good!”
“Ah, but when you are well?” he said softly, “when you recover—!”
“No use,” she sighed. “I’m done for. Can’t last much longer. They’re only waiting for me to die. Quick, kiss me again—I don’t care!”
They heard her husband chortling across the lawn: “Oh dear! Oh dear!” and his brother replying: “That’s good, very good!”
The stupefied Febery stared over the back of his chair at the scorched grass of the lawn; the tennis net had slackened, the air was full of gnats. Sweat hung upon Febery’s brow. How incredible it was! Of course it could not be true! What vital men those two looked prancing over there, though their clothes seemed to sag upon them and their shoes were dusty! Marie was wearing slippers of blue leather with white fur on the edges; her stockings were of silk to the knee, and a little beyond. It was piteous, it was impossible, she could not be dying—now!
“Tell me,” she said. “What you are going to do now you have broken with old Scrowncer?”
“I have no plans,” he answered, “I can think only of you.”
“And there’ll be no more plans for me, either.” She spoke with a gay rally. “Lord, I have done nothing, been nothing, seen nothing—and there’s Paris, and all those Alps, and the Kremlin, and the Suez Canal!”
He wanted to comfort her with kisses but feared to excite the frail sick woman and sat on despairingly by her side, wondering whether the predicament of Tantalus was not after all said and done more applicable to her than to him.
“You will not go preaching again?”
“Never any more,” he said.
“I am glad of that!”
“I feel no gladness, Marie,” he averred. “Far from it.”
“Ah, don’t fail me now, my dear.” She smiled, but added ruthlessly: “I never believed in you as a preacher!”
“Not?”
“Of course not.”
“I believed in myself.”
“As a preacher of the truth! But you don’t now, do you?”
What was it he did believe, or had once believed, or could ever believe again? How explain to her, dying as she was, that he had found out he had been preaching—oh, vanity of vanities!—to God and not to man! It was too piteous now to disturb her simple faith. Not now, not now.
“You don’t believe in it now?” she iterated urgently, as though a paramount consolation hung upon his expected answer; and moved by her insistence, he conceded:
“I have no—what you call—beliefs, but—”
“Neither have I!” she interjected triumphantly. “Never. I supposed I had—till I met you. Then I knew I had none. They know it too,” she whispered.
“Who?”
She nodded towards the lawn. “I am tired of it all. He worries me. He knows I am fond of you and think just as you think, and he wants me to believe now and be good—good!”
“Then why not, Marie?”
She was startled and half rose from the hammock.
“What! Why do you say that—now?”
Febery hesitated; again she urged him: “Why?”
The miserable man said: “You have nothing to lose—now—if—if—”
“You mean now I am dying?” She turned her face away, murmuring: “Yes, I know that. But it would be mean, now, don’t you think?”
“Pooh!” he exclaimed.
“Ah, don’t fail me now!” she protested with damnable caressing archness. “You have no faith, you never had any at all.”
He could not bring himself to utter a reply, but she understood his silence; it confirmed her.
“Nor have I,” she said. “I can’t have. What is the use of pretending now? I’m just sorry.”
Later in the afternoon Febery went away into the town and took a lodging. Her husband did not ask him to stay with them, and indeed Febery shrank from lingering there. He promised Marie that he would call every day, every day—until—yes, he would come every day.
He called the next day, but she was not to be seen, she was sleeping. Again he called, but she was sleeping, sleeping; her husband almost shooed him away. For three days he hung around the closed house. Then she died.
IV
For months Febery drifted about like a dead leaf at the will of the winds, limping on foot from town to town, doing little or nothing, until he was reduced to beggary and the winter days came on.
“It is time now,” said he, “to take my fate in hand.” And he thought and thought and went on thinking until his brains were woolly and the soles of his boots worn thin. Forlorn and unshaven, he was no longer fitted for business, from acting he was bitterly resigned, and religion had cast him out. “Is there nothing to which I can turn my hand?” he mournfully mused. “Am I only a spouter of hyperbole and fudge?”
Well, on a Sunday morning he tramped into a little town. By the grace of God it was a fine day, with no sharpness wherever the sunlight lay, and where it lay brightest and best was on a small green common with an old gibbet conserved in its centre. There were men idling about there, plenty of men waiting for the taverns to open, so Febery walked up to the gibbet, took a stand upon its knoll, and began calling the men to come listen to him. And when they came he began to preach to them of the virtues of temperance and the sin of indulgence in strong drink. Having sworn vows against it ever since he had broken his foot in the dock at Liverpool, no drop of the evil had again passed his stubborn lips. Inspired now by necessity rather than any moral urge, he harangued so passionately, so despairingly, and yet so amusingly that his hearers were moved to applaud him. It was not his theme that arrested and impressed them so much as his appearance; they were enlivened by his gestures and tickled by his style, so that his appeal for a collection at the close met with a generous response, and he left the common with a new hope in his breast while they left it mostly for the purpose of whetting the whistle with an ironical relish. That was one to Febery; he had preached temperance, and the intemperate had paid him jovially. Well, it was no use preaching to the temperate!
He came to another town at evening and again attracted a large audience for his sermon on the evils of drink, with still more profitable results. There was something hoarsely commanding about the man; wild-eyed and with uplifted hands, he seemed to denounce the whole world in most hearty fashion, and the spittle came spurting from his lips.
Some of his hearers were impressed, others were visibly moved, but all were fascinated. When they flung questions at him his repartee delighted them—oh, they liked to be bullied!—and into a handkerchief he had spread on the ground before him their pence fell like showers of leaves on windy autumn days. It was a long, long time before Febery realized that this largesse was not the reward of virtue communicated or acclaimed, but was bestowed upon him because he was a most impressive amusement. By then, however, he was launched upon his new career and, uncontrolled by any executives, spoke wherever he happened to be, in any fashion he chose, and with a lugubrious philosophy that deepened as the months rolled by. Now and again offers were made to him by wealthy societies who required him to lecture for them, but he declined, roughly, rudely. Disliking organizations, he chose to live in haphazard fashion on his itinerant alms. That made a hard life of it, and to the wandering man it seemed as though winter would never pass away. Yet neither spring nor summer brought any ease to the sorrow that laboured in his heart, a sorrow that was often mingled with a mysterious resentment. Poor Marie! It was sad—poor baffled woman! She was—good Lord above—she was—well—she had been born a romantic, a romantic without wings! She had had the flame in her breast, but not the wit to fly!
It was not alone the loss of Marie that fretted and consumed him: there was something within himself, loneliness and intolerance, that also consumed, that was all of a piece with his strange appearance. The glitter of heaven had dulled, it was no longer desirable; he was of the world, and yet the world disgusted him; he wanted to love it, love it madly, yet he could take no part in it at all. He was cast out, he too was baffled, and his despairing isolation fumed and quavered at his speeches:
“One enters a tavern at night—Stop! Why have you entered here? The mind stammers at the question; it knows there is a subtle answer, but it cannot enunciate it. To drink, to talk, to rest? Bah! Not these alone! One’s journey is long, with an end no man knows, from a beginning that none remembers, and on either hand the Green Dragons and the Black Lions and the Pink Ptarmigans blazon their foolish symbols. One enters a tavern at night—to lounge over a bar counter and be absorbed. Absorbed! What do you mean? Absorbed in what? Well, in a twist of harmonious chaos, minute parochial chaos, torn from immensities of isolation. But what are these figures standing here or sitting there, babbling incessantly in gay tones? There is beer before them on the tables. They have hats on. Their faces are ruddy or sallow. They are arrayed in suits with soiled handkerchiefs in the pockets, matches, tobacco, money, and all the intimate revelations of a gnat. They discourse of work, wenching, and horseracing, or they are immersed in mysteries to which I have no clue. It is a world of shirt-button joys, and griefs that would drown in a single tear. How fatuous! What waste, what profanation! I hear a voice that cries: ‘Begone! You may not enter here!’ Yet the heart pleads for some charity that the soul ever denies, and I long to enter there, to merge myself humbly with these, and be one with its cheap oblivion. ‘Begone! Begone! You may not enter here!’
“The world is my tavern. Am I excluded, or is it I that exclude myself? Are there cherubin at the gate of that paradise from which I have known neither expulsion or exclusion, or is that flaming sword merely my own? I know, I know, for it scorches my hand and heart!”
TWO WINTERS FOLLOWED TWO SUMMERS, AND CARELESS of personal welfare, Febery slept often in barns or among the heather, but in the end his self-consuming flame and the quite needless privations he incurred did their work: he was stricken with a fever and carried helpless into a hospital attached to a convent. A convent! There was no escape for Febery, he was dying. The quiet nuns besought him to take the final consolation. Febery declined. There was bliss in all this restful illness, the small white ward, the immaculate nuns, the comfort, the soft passage of the daylight hours. It was a community of gentle women, sisters of mercy indeed. But the nights were full of mortal anguish and fear of what might lie ahead when there were nights no more. A young monk came to sit by his bedside and spoke earnestly. He too seemed to be lit with gleams of that urgent holy rapture that had once been Febery’s joy, and the mind of the sick man faltered under his persuasions; at the core of his dying heart an ash of warmth began again to flicker. What beauteous visions still hung in that curious creed! And he had only to submit himself, to cast away his human pride, and say simply and humbly—yes! The word sang in his heart and had almost trembled from his lips when the voice of poor dead Marie came murmuring to his ears:
“Ah, do not fail me now!”
And Febery remembered. He had led her from the cross; they had agreed! Despite everlasting hell he could not fail her now. He dared not. With a grim gurgle he recalled an incident at one of the great Scrowncer revivals. A shoemaker on crutches, with both of his legs partially paralysed, had shuffled up to them, a derelict ugly outcast.
“Tell me this,” said the poor wretch to a lady helper. “If I get to heaven at last, shall I have a good pair of legs?”
“Oh yes,” she answered with gay conviction. “You will have a good pair of legs. You will be hale and hearty and clean and you’ll live for ten thousand years.”
“And,” said the poor shoemaker, cogitating wistfully, “will there be any gals up there?”
The devout young monk spoke on, hopefully, consolingly, but Febery’s life was ebbing away in dreams of heaths with windmills on them, and green marshes with blue brooks and old wooden bridges; of a day when a small boy rode on a black pony into market with a basket of plums or something, and his father had taken him to a theatre.
Polly Oliver (1935)